Sailing in circles, the way we live life

FOR THE FIRST TIME in 34 years, the largest sailboat I own is less than 10 feet long.

Last week, I ventured to Seattle to meet with my new friend Lux Sloane Kirkham, and we drove to the credit union to meet with a notary and sign a bill of sale, which I mailed off to the Coast Guard’s National Vessel Documentation Center in Falling Waters, West Virginia.

With that, Sogni d’Oro, the dear old Westsail 32 that was home to all or some of my family for 30 of those aforementioned years, the boat that took us cruising the San Juan Islands every summer for decades, and on one of our lives’ great adventures, to Mexico’s Baja peninsula and the Sea of Cortez, has someone new to love her.

Just as we did, Lux has the ambitions, the dreams and the gumption to give Sogni d’Oro new adventures. For that, daughter Lillian and I feel content.

It was to that boat’s Columbia River moorage that Lil came home from the Portland hospital of her birth in 1991. On the bowsprit, a pink flamingo — not a stork — held the “It’s a girl!” sign above a swaddled bundle in its beak.

It was from that boat’s helm that I first navigated the Columbia River bar, the famed “Graveyard of the Pacific,” which we crossed back over in inky night after a day of traversing fearsome 20-foot-swells that our stout boat criss-crossed like a skilled skier.

It was on that boat’s radio that I called a Mayday distress call in the face of a piracy threat from an unrelentingly aggressive, silent, mystery vessel on another inky night, 20 miles off Ensenada. As soon as I called the Mayday, the other boat turned away. (Nobody ever responded on the radio.)

It was from that boat that my family and I watched a gray whale teaching her calf to breach, again and again and again, just off our beam in the Sea of Cortez. It was from that boat that we thrilled at the sight of hundreds of dolphins leaping all around us another day. And it was from that boat that, with a sense of awe and a trifle bit of anxiety, we identified two cetaceans spouting just off our stern as blue whales, the largest animals on earth.

After the recent final days of clearing our many possessions, logbooks and charts off Sogni d’Oro, I brought home a box full of memories. Sifting through, I discovered a log entry from our first San Juan Islands voyage in the boat that was new to us just two weeks earlier. Reflecting our greenhorn abilities and newbies’ knowledge, and featuring a longtime friend and my late wife and parents, it makes for a nice bit of symmetry on this occasion:

Log of the Sogni d’Oro

August 2, 1989

This was the first day Barbara and I sailed our boat alone, without [our sailing friend] Ken or my parents aboard. It was a momentous day, dawning with gusty breezes coming from the Strait of Juan de Fuca, to the southwest.

Our moorage at lovely little Turn Island State Park was the perfect choice — a 15-minute motor from Friday Harbor, where we had left my mom and dad after a perfect afternoon of sailing up to Yellow Island to see the old driftwood house where the island’s former owner, a San Juans hermit of wide renown, lived until 1960. The island now belongs to the Nature Conservancy.

We set out at about 10 a.m. Barbara was a little anxious about the winds and our first “solo,” so she didn’t eat much of the tasty fresh strawberries, yogurt and granola we had with coffee for breakfast.

Putting up sail off little Brown Island went smoothly. Barbara has become an old pro at it, helping and working with Ken Brinkley, so she needed my help only to get the mainsail to the top of the mast. I lashed the tiller with bungee cords, a moderately satisfactory solution, though a little wobbly.

Wind settled down to about 5 knots. Fighting the ebb tide in San Juan Channel (our customary habit by now), we sat and looked real pretty but didn’t go very far. Looked at Friday Harbor for an hour or so as Barbara handled the tiller. She asked for some sailing tips, so we played “20 Questions” about points of sail, boating right-of-way, etc. A good way to learn. Watched the little interisland ferry, the Hiyu (seems like a folksy, appropriate name for this little open-air bathtub) chug up the channel ahead of us. Comfortingly, it didn’t do much better.

Finally, as we came up even with Wasp Channel, the current seemed to change in our favor and the wind freshened, putting us on a broad reach for several miles, when the boat didn’t alternately decide (skipper be damned) to go wing on wing. Winds fluky, but we were moving comfortably.

Still not fast enough for the skipper. So I finally convinced Barbara (who has suffered foresail anxiety ever since a Barlow winch disintegrated in her hands as we raised the genoa at the wrong time in Saratoga Passage) to let me hoist the dinner-napkin-sized tri-sail. Not much extra horsepower, but it made us look good, as a cutter rig should.

Back to present day: The remaining sailboat in the Cantwell fleet is the little Black Pearl, a plywood sailing dinghy that Lillian and I built under the tutelage of a Center for Wooden Boats instructor at a long-ago Lake Union Wooden Boat Festival. The Pearl is docked most of the year, snugly wrapped in a tarp, beneath the front porch of Nuthatch Cabin.

Another bit of symmetry: While we got much better over the years at reading and predicting San Juan currents in the big sailboat (and had a powerful diesel to crank up if all else failed), a sail outing these days in the little gaff-rigged Black Pearl is totally at the mercy of currents. As much as any point of sail, she’s perfectly happy going backwards, occasionally in circles.

Lil and I’ve learned to bring oars.

Happy days, friends.