Docking

Just recently, I've been re-reading a Canadian boating classic called The Curve of Time by M. Wylie Blanchet. Known to her friends as "Capi," Blanchet was a widow with five children, all of whom spent summer after summer cruising on their 25 ft wooden boat. The book was written in the 1920s, and details their adventures from their home in Sidney all the way to the Queen Charlottes. Blanchet was a fiercely independent woman who did her own engine repairs, and each of her "crew" had jobs they had to do on a daily basis. Sometimes the family's survival depended on those jobs, like putting a child up on the bow to "sound the bottom" in an unknown pass or when fog set in.

This is all very intriguing to me, because despite 70-plus years of feminism since Capi was afloat, there are very few women out on the water running their own boats, and perhaps none with children along for the ride. And in spite of my obvious love for our boating lifestyle, I cannot count myself among them. Although I am very comfortable in my role as co-captain and principle navigator, God forbid I should ever have to dock the thing! This limits my independence a whole lot, given that it would be impossible to take the boat off the dock without having to eventually put it back. If I could just master the fine art of docking, everything else might fall into place...

Every summer I intend to practice. Sure enough, the day I think I'll give it a try, there's a south-easter blowing that could knock your socks off, and it takes the strength of both of us and an obliging fellow on the dock just to keep us from wearing some other boat's bow. Or Fisheries has declared an opening just as I'm about to enter the Marina, and the resulting traffic jam has me running for cover, abandoning the wheel in favor of the Experienced Guy. Or the only spot open on the dock is next to the shiny new two-storey fiberglass sixty-footer with the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club flag. Complete with the couple in their whites sipping martinis on the back deck, who will see my every maneuver.

So I resign myself, inevitably, to another year as chief navigator, and dependence on my co-captain. At least I do know how to read the charts, and navigate. And the Experienced Guy doesn't. A Capi Blanchet I may never be, but I can console myself with one thing - he may be able to dock the boat with the best of them, but the Experienced Guy wouldn't know a chart symbol from a sea mile.