We drove on up the inlet until the boat touched the sand, then we hopped out. We were still a quarter-mile from the castle. I sent Carol up for the car and trailer while I got the sails down and stood in the water, holding the dinghy. The tide was coming in quite fast now.
Carol arrived with the car and backed the trailer down to the edge of the water, which was still several yards away from the Mini. I unhitched the trailer, pushed it down to the dinghy, and asked Carol to help me lift the boat onto it. This seemed to take no more than a minute or two. I turned to start pulling the trailer toward the car and saw, to my horror, that water was lapping at the hubcaps of the Mini. The tide was moving faster than I had realized.
I dropped the trailer, dived into the car, and started the engine. I breathed a sigh of relief. I put it into gear and tried to drive out of the water. The wheels promptly buried themselves in the sand. The front axles were now resting on the bottom. I sent Carol back to the house for help, while I tried vainly to rock the car out of the sand by shifting alternately into first gear and reverse. The wheels spun happily back and forth but remained in precisely the same position. I got out of the car and looked around for help. Far up the inlet, perhaps half a mile away, I saw a man driving a tractor, towing a trailer-load of seaweed across the sand. I jumped up and down and waved. He seemed not to see me. I blew the horn of the car repeatedly, but clearly the sound would never penetrate the noise of the tractor engine. There was no one else in sight.
I got back into the car and raced the engine; it seemed terribly important, somehow, to keep it going. Then I began to blow a signal on the horn — dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot — SOS, the only Morse code I had ever been able to learn. The water continued to rise, and I continued to honk my signal. I could see Carol; she was not quite halfway to the castle, tired already from her first hike back for the car. The water was now beginning to creep over the door sills. I considered abandoning ship, but continued to honk. Far up the beach a figure was running toward the tractor, pointing my way. The tractor changed direction. Now it was a question of which would arrive first, the tractor or the tide. The tide seemed to be winning. The carpets were now underwater.
The tractor moved faster than I could have believed possible and arrived accompanied by a German guest at the castle, who had been awakened from his nap by the sound of my Morse SOS. Thank God the German Boy Scouts did a better job of teaching its members Morse code than, in my experience, the American branch. Just at the point when I was about to be sailing a Mini instead of a Mirror, the car came free of the sand. It even ran for a couple of miles before dying. The salt water had eaten away the fuel pump and one or two other essentials. If anybody knows of a more graphic way for a budding dinghy sailor to be taught about the tides I don’t want to hear about it.
The next thing I learned about sailing was that some boats, for no readily apparent reason, go faster than others. I learned this in the most embarrassing possible way for an adult, from children.
While I waited for my new Mirror to be built and delivered, a period of ten weeks, I tried racing the club Mirror in the regular Sunday- and Wednesday-afternoon events. In the beginning I had had no interest whatever in racing, but I soon found that cruising in a dinghy was not especially appealing, particularly if the wind died and the bloody thing had to be paddled home. So, having memorized about three of the several dozen International Yacht Racing Union Rules, I grabbed a passing teenager for a crew and thrashed my way around the buoys, losing to everybody except two tiny individuals who had capsized and retired. Fortunately, I had a number of excuses with which to console myself: the club boat leaked like a sieve; the sails were old and worn; the bottom was rough with age, and so forth. I bought a dinghy pump, and this kept my feet drier, but my ego remained damp. My new boat would solve all this, I was sure.
The new boat helped. I collected it, all dark blue and shiny, and named it Fred, in the hope that it would like the water as much as the puppy. It liked the water, and I finished third in my first race, but that was as high as I could scramble for several weeks. I began to investigate all the go-fast fittings and ideas allowed by the measurement rules of the Mirror Class Association. I grew accustomed to being handed small brown-paper bags in yacht chandleries, while a supercilious clerk intoned, “That will be thirty pounds, please.” I began reading the specialist books on racing and poring over the yachting magazines, looking for that elusive instruction which would send me surging to the fore of the fleet. And lo, I began to improve. I began to beat the smaller children. Progress.
A big problem, of course, was that I did not have a regular crew. Most grown men who race in the smaller dinghy classes breed sons and daughters for this purpose, lashing them to the boat as soon as they are old enough to be shouted at. In my bachelor state I was so far behind in this game that it would have taken six or seven years to catch up. So I had to be content to borrow the odd kid when Dad was away or too hungover to make the start. Adults were too heavy, learned too slowly, and had too low a humiliation threshold for crewing a Mirror dinghy. Once, at a two-day meet on Lough Derg, I persuaded a grown-up acquaintance new to sailing to crew for me. In the first race we did miserably, our combined weight destroying us in very light winds. In the second race, after a lunch at which we consoled ourselves with a liter of plonk, a huge wind appeared from nowhere, capsized us, and left us riding to anchor in the half-filled dinghy, drinking still more plonk and waiting for the crash boat to come and take us away. His wife phoned the next day and said he wasn’t well and couldn’t make races three and four.
So for the rest of the season I found crews wherever I could and continued to chase, and occasionally even beat, the leaders, all of whom were in their mid-teens except my archrival Dr. Tom Coll, an alleged adult with an enthusiastic younger brother for a crew. We exchanged good-natured abuse ashore and afloat, and whenever I beat him he would pretend to sulk for a week.
The highlight of the season was the national championships, a weeklong event held at Lough Derg. I arrived crewless, as usual, but found a twelve-year-old Dublin girl named Caroline, who was small for her age. She turned out to be a shrewd and experienced dinghy sailor, and her small weight helped make up for mine. We finished thirty-ninth out of a fleet of sixty. With luck we could have done better, but still, I had never before beaten twenty-one boats.
It ended the season if not on a high note, at least on one which would hum through my mind all through the following winter.
3
Hooked
I was thirty-five years old when I first sailed that Mirror dinghy — in my late youth, one might say. My figure had assumed those slightly more generous proportions so attractive in a person of my age, and just a tiny bit more of my scalp was exposed to the sunshine than had been true a few years before. (Someone once described me, unkindly, as “balding.” This is not strictly true. I am balding only if you are taller than I am and stand behind me.) This is a time of life when a man has a duty to his family, his society, and probably the United Nations to go forth and painfully extract seventy-five or a hundred thousand dollars a year from his nation’s gross national product and then plow back about twenty-five percent more than that into mortgage payments, insurance premiums, school fees for his children, analysts’ fees for his wife, and quadraphonic sound and electrocardiograms for himself. It is a known fact that unless everybody does this there will be another Depression and a Communist Takeover, followed shortly by a Nuclear Holocaust. I know that it was terribly irresponsible of me, but at this critical juncture of my life my existence was ruled by the compulsion to find a way to make a ten-foot ten-inch plywood dinghy go faster than that of the thirteen-year-old kid down the street. I know this is no way for a grown man to behave, but I couldn’t help it. I was hooked.