Sailing with friends

In 1999 my friend John and I took a week-long sailing course to qualify for bareboat chartering, renting a boat without hired captain and crew. The course took place in the waters of the San Juan Islands, an archipelago just off the northwest edge of Washington state and just east of the bottom of Vancouver Island in British Columbia.  We learned how to navigate without GPS, rescue men overboard, dock in any conceivable condition. Most of us on the course already knew how to sail.  One had been a helmsman on a US destroyer during the Viet Nam War. But we all found that we had a lot to learn.

Since then, John and I and our friend Henry have chartered a boat each year to sail in the San Juan Islands and sometimes in the neighboring Canadian Gulf Islands. The only summer we missed was in 2020 due to Covid. We had gotten to know each other in the 1990s as parents of kids in the same grade school, and we have remained good friends ever since.

We have a favorite sailboat that we like to charter if it is available, a 36 ft sloop with three bedrooms, unusual for a boat this small. That allows all three of us some privacy when needed. We all share in the chores and cooking, although Henry being the best cook among us always prepares the dinners. The winds were light this year with only one really good day of sailing in 15-plus knot winds.  Motoring around the islands is still great, dropping anchor for lunch and a hike or spending the night.  Our 22-year-old boat was starting to show its age, but as things broke down, we accepted the challenge of solving the problems, actually part of the fun of boating if you approach the issues with the right attitude. An annoying alarm started sounding intermittently on the first day.  We finally tracked it to a battery charging problem probably due to a faulty voltage-regulator and kept a close eye on it. The pump handle on the head broke on the last morning, but we managed a work around.  It helps that John is a retired engineer.

Even though we have been sailing these waters annually for over 20 years, we always see something new, like the huge Douglas-fir growing out of the remains of its predecessors on Jones Island, or the 6-mile round trip hike to the light house on Stuart Island. It’s all good. But the best part is reuniting with old friends, now aging into our 70s, sharing stories, giving updates on children and grandchildren, playing hearts badly after dinner and a glass or two of wine, and generally having one heck of a wonderful time.