Late September is a lousy time to buy a boat.
The days darken, the weather becomes worrisome and many sun-loving sailors are battening down their boats for the winter.
So it was with some confusion that on a Friday afternoon in late September I found myself clumsily sailing a leaking dinghy across Liberty Bay, a boat that through some cruel twist I had just paid money for.
How this came about is a little tricky to explain.
I could chalk it up to some soggy thinking induced by the stress of back-to-back deadlines and short supply of sleep. But the truth is, when I spotted the ad for a 10-foot fiberglass dinghy on Craigslist, it set in motion a pattern of behavior many boat people know well.
My voice of reason — the one that should have been preaching about my shallow bank account and the worrisome weather — was suddenly silent. Meanwhile, a tiny yacht salesman who had been sleeping somewhere in a back office of my brain was awake and rattling off the boat’s virtues.
“Those are just surface cracks,” the little salesman was saying, “It has a mast and rigging and just look at that price. This boat’s a steal!”
I was the one feeling robbed the next day, as I raised the dinghy’s dingy main sail and pushed off the beach. The boat had been gathering fungus for a decade at the bottom of a steep bank off Lemolo, so steep that I would have to sail the boat to Oyster Plant Park to pick it up with a truck.
The boat had no oars and an almost imperceptible breeze was blowing toward the mouth of the harbor. I would be sailing upwind the whole way.
My colleague Andrew Binion watched nervously from shore for a few minutes as the dinghy and I edged away, then gave my voyage up for doomed and headed for his car.
For a desperate half hour I made no progress at all.
The fickle wind was, if anything, pushing me farther from my intended port. When my sail did catch correctly, my rudder, which was missing a part or two, would cheerfully leap from its brackets. Then the sail would luff as I leaned over the transom and wrestled with the rudder, shoulders deep in the brown water of Liberty Bay.
All of this excitement distracted me from the pool of water that was steadily growing in the bow. Apparently, some of the dirt plugging the cracks in the hull together had loosened up and the boat was now slowly sinking.
The horror of that revelation was replaced with triumph. After a steady hour of drifting I had traveled far enough out into the bay that the dinghy was catching a real breeze. The sail filled proudly and the dinghy began plowing for the head of the bay at a spright knot and a half.
The joy of easy sailing is the same, whether on a big boat or a little boat. I felt weightless, watching the brown water slip noiselessly by, with my bare feet propped on the gunwales and my hand planted firmly on the rudder.
It would take me another two hours to reach Oyster Plant Park, as the breeze rose and fell and the puddle in the bow grew deeper.
But by the time I had finished my final tack and crunched gratefully onto the beach, the stress of deadlines had lifted and I was feeling the giddy pride of a first voyage in a new boat.
Sure, fall was coming. There was already an edge to the breeze. But at least this once, my timing had been dead on.
