My dad bought a boat when I was 16. It was a 16-foot outboard, about 16 years old, and it was big enough for him, his wife and two sons. We had it for a few – I never thought of it before, but it was more than a hundred Sunday afternoons on the water, picnicking and skin diving around the island. Some good memories from my youth in Hawai’i.
But I was a teenager and I wanted more. Sails filled my head. Sails were the original power. Sails were beautiful, much more so than a 16-year-old outboard motor. Sails connected all of us, from the beginning of powered boats until now and further into the future than any of us can see. Sails.
We were a typical suburban American family, which is to say we didn’t know our neighbors well. Until he brought home a sailboat. It was a Pacific Catamaran, which he called a P-Cat. Eventually, my parents cleared my brother and I to go sailing with him. He towed the boat over the mountain to the calm waters of Kaneohe Bay. I forgot the car ride to and from, now that I think about it I can’t pull up his name, but we will never forget riding faster than the 25-mile-per-hour wind.
Our neighbor called them rooster tails, the fountains we dragged behind each of the hulls. I watched him as he pulled the sail taut and then when he trimmed the jib I felt the surge of an afterburner. The rooster tails looked taller than the mast. The wind was an animal, tearing at my hair and threatening to close my eyes. But I was invulnerable to threats.
Then he slowed us up and said we could one at a time get on the trapeze. The what? There was a line that draped from the top of the mast with a seat about the size of a schoolyard swing. The trapeze. I put my butt on that, swung out over the ocean, and stood my feet on the edge of the hull. I was flat out over the slow water. He nosed us into a reach and suddenly I was standing almost straight up. The ocean was a blur. The hull I was on had lifted entirely out of the water, the sail was so flat I could see the water beyond the top of the mast, and when I shifted my weight the entire boat moved. I began to see that the only reason the boat was not upside down in the water was because I happened to move the right way.
There’s a part of me, even now, that is still on that trapeze, balancing a twin-hulled boat between the fierce wind in its sail and the calm ocean that reached up to grab us.
So I made a sailboat out of New Mexico mica clay for the sparkling sail, a black raku hull, and a glazed blue-green ocean. I made sails from every part of the world, working sails to bring in dinner for family and friends and trade, pleasure sails, overwhelming sails and sails that look so small they couldn’t possibly be useful.
They’re all ceramic, so they don’t float even in your bathtub, but every single one pulls me over a blue-green sea in a hull of memories with stars in my sail.