kateandjohnsail.boats

Our friends Frank and Rosemary have ridden their tandem bicycle together many miles. Once I asked if this activity ever puts a strain on their relationship, and the answer was, Well, let’s just say that whatever direction your relationship was headed before you started this sport, it’s going to move farther in that direction. Surely the same can be said about living together on a boat, but nothing tests those relational strains like docking a sailboat. And docking a vessel in the Mediterranean is that same experience on steroids. In this post I will spare you the details about mooring a boat in these waters, but if you Google “med mooring” you can learn that in around here, where the ratio of waterfront space to the number of boats is very low, they take docking to a whole new level.

Isn’t there a Mission Impossible movie where Tom Cruise hang glides from a mountaintop onto a moving train? Med mooring is something like that. The procedure involves a vehicle with poor reverse steering, flukey winds, mooring lines all over the place begging to be snagged by the propeller, shore help with whom you do not share a common language, and did I mention, no brakes? What could possibly go wrong? And of course, there is rarely lack of an audience, often other boaters literally sitting in their cockpit with a martini, happy for entertainment.

This environment calls for cool heads to prevail. We invested early on in what are commonly called Bluetooth headsets, but we refer to them as Marriage Savers. The boat is 49 feet long, and when we moor, John is at the wheel and I am all over the boat, moving fenders, preparing lines, getting a visual on our position, pointing out hazards, etc. Meanwhile, we are quietly comparing notes on how things are going; asking questions and sharing data points. If we were to yell loud enough to be heard over the distance and other noise, certainly the heat would rise. Sometimes the words we say to each other are not as kind as they could be as things get dicey, but at least we’re not giving the martini crowd any satisfaction on that score (they can see the rodeo for themselves as the wind blows us toward that high-end catamaran and we rev up, retreat, and and begin again)

There’s a reason every kitchy waterfront souvenir shop has little plaques that say

I apologize
For what I said
While we were docking.

Addendum: anchoring is a completely different procedure from docking, but the marriage savers are invaluable there as well. And as we just learned yesterday, they are great during fueling. Did you know that on a boat, you have to calculate (guess) how many hundreds of liters of fuel you need, and then read numbers on a high-speed pump in order to stop it at the right time?