Roots of a Voyage
Part Two: Reflection

by Dave and Jaja

On a Sunday in June, 1996, we drove we our car slowly through a North Carolina boatyard, lurching over whale-sized pot holes. Was there a boat here for us? Boats of every description sat firmly on their keels, propped up by metal stands. Their hulls sparkled like sunlit icebergs. We leaned over the dashboard to see the bulk of their towering forms through the windscreen: too big, too small, ungainly, impractical, too expensive, and too much work. A four month search to find the "right boat" had honed our skills of observation.

I stopped the car and turned off the engine. Propped up in the back of the boatyard was a sailboat worth getting out of the car for. It wasn't a very attractive vessel, but looks aren't everything. We had already scrutinized dozens of false hopes, so we were not too excited, but this boat had a quality that appealed to us. It was 33 feet long, built of steel, sloop rigged, and it had an aft cockpit with a low, streamlined cabin house that would not be vulnerable to dangerous breaking seas. The boat possessed an aura of robustness, and the exposed welds which ran down the topsides, like beads of ice, gave the boat an aura of affordability.

I scrounged a ladder, leaned it against the hull, then climbed aboard with Jaja. We examined the sparse deck layout and we peered into the cabin through dirty windows. Not bad, not bad at all. Our hearts began pounding.

"Maybe this is it..."

A broker came to show us the inside a few days later. I found the same ladder and steadied it so that Jaja (who was holding our five-month-old daughter Teiga on her hip) could go up first. Close on Jaja's heals was our son Chris, and his sister Holly.

"No way," the broker grumbled. "I don't want those kids up on deck. Might slip and kill themselves. And I especially don't want that baby up there."

I was calm. " 'That' baby lives on my wife's hip. No baby, no wife."

"OK. But I want those two kids to stay on the ground."

We'd discovered, after asking around, that the boat we were about to look at had been on the market for over a year. I wondered how desperate the broker was to make a sale.

"The kids are going up too," I said.

"OK, OK. Only, don't blame me if they get hurt."

On deck, the broker struggled with a rusting lock, then pounded on the seized, sliding wooden hatch to force it open. The smell of mildew wafted out, and hung like an old blanket in the still air. It was the dour odor of disuse. Earlier that week, when we'd looked through the dirty plexiglass cabin windows, the interior of the boat had looked plain but well appointed. Seeing it now proved it was just disappointing.

We went through the motions of looking. The odds that we would buy the boat, after the first glance at the interior, were a million to one. The boat was a border line, "super cheap fixer-upper".

"What a nightmare," I said. The broker quietly disappeared.

The more we looked, however, the more we began to ignore what boldly stared us in the face. We soon saw only the possibilities. But "possibilities" take time and money.

I was succinct. "There is too much work here, Jaja. We'd be fools to buy this boat, regardless of how cheap we can get it for."

Like putting my hand prints in wet cement, I had unknowingly solidiified our fate.

Next week: The Interior.