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Second Wind: A Sunfish Sailor, an Island, and the Voyage That Brought a Family Together - Softcover

Philbrick, Nathaniel

 
9780143132097: Second Wind: A Sunfish Sailor, an Island, and the Voyage That Brought a Family Together
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0143132091 ISBN 13: 9780143132097
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

A charming memoir of midlife by the bestselling author of Mayflower and In the Hurricane's Eye, recounting his attempt to recapture a national sailing championship he'd won at twenty-two.

“There had been something elemental and all consuming about a Sunfish. Nothing could compare to the exhilaration of a close race in a real blow—the wind howling and spray flying as my Sunfish and I punched through the waves to the finish.”

In the spring of 1992, Nat Philbrick was in his late thirties, living with his family on Nantucket, feeling stranded and longing for that thrill of victory he once felt after winning a national sailing championship in his youth. Was it a midlife crisis? It was certainly a watershed for the journalist-turned-stay-at-home dad, who impulsively decided to throw his hat into the ring, or water, again.

With the bemused approval of his wife and children, Philbrick used the off-season on the island as his solitary training ground, sailing his tiny Sunfish to its remotest corners, experiencing the haunting beauty of its tidal creeks, inlets, and wave-battered sandbars. On ponds, bays, rivers, and finally at the championship on a lake in the heartland of America, he sailed through storms and memories, racing for the prize, but finding something unexpected about himself instead.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nathaniel Philbrick is the author of In the Heart of the Sea, winner of the National Book Award; Mayflower, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Bunker Hill, winner of the New England Book Award; Sea of Glory; The Last Stand; Why Read Moby Dick?; Valiant Ambition; and Away Off Shore.

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The Race

I should have known better. You can't just "get" a life.

Six years earlier Melissa and I had tried to do exactly that by moving to the island of Nantucket, twenty-four miles off the New England coast. We had grown tired of living and working around big cities; we wanted more time with our children and with each other; and besides, back then we had both hoped to sail again. Perhaps on Nantucket, once the mother ship of American whaling, we could create an environment for our children in which we were all, figuratively, if not literally, in the same boat.

But it didn't start out the way we had planned. Melissa soon found that life as an attorney on a real-estate obsessed island was as demanding as it had been in the city. For my part, being a housebound writer and parent on relatively tiny Nantucket was even more claustrophobic than it had been in the suburb we had previously called home. An island is a tough place to be landlocked.

But there was more to it than that. Something dark and disturbing would occasionally punch through the surface, reveal just a hint of its massive, lugubrious bulk, then vanish again, only to reappear at the strangest of times. I began to sense that something weird, huge, and scary was, well, out there. And then one February afternoon I saw it-a whale.

It had been back in the days when Ethan still fit comfortably on my shoulders. We were on one of our daily walks along the south shore of the island when the kids and I found ourselves on a bluff overlooking a winter beach and a crowd of people clustered around the black lifeless shape of a young humpback, less than twenty feet long. In her death spasms she'd vomited her stomach lining, and the placenta-like mess floated in the waves beside her. Two men with clipboards and waders measured the carcass and took notes. Children clambered over the whale's smooth, rubbery body, bouncing on her upturned belly as if she were a trampoline. That February afternoon, with my daughter beside me and my son perched on my shoulders, I first realized that it was time for a change. Like that youthful whale, I was stranded. At some point, I would have to return to the sea.

By the spring of 1992, I was working on a history of Nantucket that gave me a renewed appreciation for the island's maritime traditions. And even before I'd made that America's Cup-induced resolution to get back into serious racing, I found myself making another sailing-related commitment: I had agreed to run the sailing program at the Nantucket Yacht Club. I'd always assumed my days as a sailing instructor were behind me. But Jennie and Ethan were growing up, and as a seasonal position, the job dovetailed nicely with my life as a writer.

That summer Melissa and the kids were given the opportunity to race a borrowed Beetle Cat (known as a Rainbow on Nantucket), the same kind of boat in which Melissa and I had had our first date. Although I was happy for them, it was also frustrating. As they won an impressive number of blue first-place flags, my yacht club duties required that I remain rooted to an NYC support boat. I felt left out of my children's introduction to the sport that had been so important to my own coming of age. And what about me?

As the summer passed, the conversation around the dinner table was becoming unendurable.

Jennie: "How many flags have we won so far?"

Ethan: "Four."

Jennie: "But they're all blue."

Ethan: "I know. I'd like a red one."

Jennie: "Or how about a yellow one?"

Ethan: "Mommy, can we come in third next weekend, please?"

It was clearly time for someone to put my wife and especially my children in their place. By the end of July, I'd come up with Plan Gordon.

Gordon was new to the sport. A marathon runner and bike racer, he had purchased a Beetle Cat only the year before. Although he was obviously in tip-top shape, he lacked the experience to race competitively and was becoming frustrated. He needed some tactical advice and instruction. What he needed, I decided, was me. One Saturday morning I happened to run into Gordon on the yacht club lawn. It was soon agreed that I would crew for him in the first race after I had assisted my staff in setting up the race course.

Part of the beauty of Plan Gordon was the element of surprise. Melissa and the kids would have no idea what they were up against until the last possible moment. And, as luck would have it, they were over on the other side of the harbor when I jumped from the yacht club's mark boat into Gordon's Beetle Cat.

With only a few minutes before the start, I fiddled with the various adjustments to the sail in an attempt to optimize its shape. As I stared up at the flapping panels of Dacron cloth and tugged on some lines, Gordon questioned me about what I was doing. Although I tried to answer as best I could, I found myself irresistibly looking out for the competition: a white Beetle Cat with a green sail and three members of my family on board.

An air horn sounded, indicating that we had three minutes before the start. With a familiar rush of adrenaline, I reached involuntarily for the tiller, but there was Gordon-and he needed some pointers. I told Gordon to sail over toward the committee boat. That's where Melissa and the kids were hanging out, their sail luffing lazily as Ethan dangled his hand in the blue, sun-glinting water. These guys wouldn't know what hit them.

On my cue Gordon tacked, turning us so that we crossed into the wind and ended up beside Melissa, our sail also luffing. The rest of the fleet of about five other boats was behind us, which was good-as long as we didn't cross the line too early.

"Hey, Daddy!" Jennie shouted. "What are you doing out here?"

I chose to ignore her. I did notice, however, that her mother was looking straight at me. Melissa knew exactly what I was up to.

We were down to the last thirty seconds, the most critical time, with that green-sailed Beetle beside us. Ethan, the collar of his yellow lifejacket pressed up against his chin, looked under the boat's sail.

"Hi, Daddy!" he called out.

Once again, I chose to ignore him.

"Daddy!"

"What?" I finally said.

"How ya doin'?"

"I'm doing-"

The starting horn blew, and in a blink of an eye Melissa and company were off. Okay, so I was a little late pulling in the sail, and maybe that's why they were able to surge ahead of us, but if Ethan had just not distracted me . . .

Since sails flutter uselessly like flags when pointed directly into the wind, a sailboat must approach the first "upwind" mark indirectly, tacking back and forth across the course. And where a Nantucket whaleman thought in terms of weather systems and continental currents as he navigated the oceans of the world, a modern small boat racer approaches each momentary change in the wind as if it were a storm front, each point of land as if it were Cape Horn. This hypersensitivity to the elements means that the first leg of a typical race becomes a panicky, zigzag quest for the fastest path to the windward mark.

And as it so happened, halfway up the first leg we caught a nice wind shift on the right-hand side of the course and were suddenly back in contention. Gordon was doing an excellent job of steering the boat, and yet I found it impossible not to be a micromanager,...

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0143132091
ISBN 13 
9780143132097
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
240
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@phaidon.com
gpsr@phaidon.com

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Berlin
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