Sailing by motor memory

Every summer for the last 25 years, one or two of my friends and I charter a sailboat for four to six days to sail around the San Juan and Gulf Islands that straddle the border between Washington State and British Columbia. We got started on this annual odyssey in 1999 when John Harland and I took a week-long, on-the-water class that qualified us to bare-boat charter. Over the years, I have been in charge. I sign the papers taking responsibility for the boat. But now, my memory for words and names is rapidly deteriorating. John is a retired environmental engineer, and he has always been able to problem-solve when unrecognized alarms go off or the anchor chain gets jammed in the windlass.  I can’t problem-solve very well anymore. But I can still sail the boat, keeping the trim tight, and maximizing our speed through the water. This motor memory for how to sail is automatic, like riding a bike. One doesn’t have to think about how to do it once neural networks deep in the brain in the cerebellum and basal ganglia have been trained. Muscle memory is more technically called procedural memory, the memory for how to perform complex motor actions.  It is usually maintained until the late stages of dementia whereas the declarative memory for words and ideas located in the temporal lobes is typically the first to go.

Last week, John and I had our yearly trip. We were scheduled for the same boat we had had the year before. It is a smaller sailboat, 32 ft overall, and it was docked in a very tight part of the marina with little room to maneuver. Last year I noticed that the prop walked to port rather than starboard as I expected, making it very difficult for me to get the boat turned in the proper direction to leave the marina. This year I was worried that I would have the same trouble again.  I needn’t have worried. I started backing out of the slip applying a single, sharp blast of the engine in reverse to get the boat moving.  Then I shifted to neutral and turned the wheel hard to starboard so the stern drifted to the right as the boat began moving backward. By the time we left the slip, the bow was headed in the right direction.  The prop walk had been avoided. I can honestly say that I did not think this through.  It just happened due to muscle memory.

Unfortunately, muscle memory cannot be relied on for everything. On our last evening of the trip, we dropped anchor at Spencer Spit, one of my favorite places to visit. The wind had died about 30 minutes before arrived, so we had furled the jib but left the mainsail up while we motored. After dropping the anchor, we got in the dinghy and started rowing to the nearby sandy spit. Looking back, I could see that some dummy had left his mainsail up while anchored.  It took only a second or two to realize that was us. We rowed back and dropped the mainsail trying to look nonchalant, while knowing that most of the people in the anchorage were having a good chuckle at our expense!