Puzzle Pieces

© Will McLendon / RumBum.com

As we limped back to the marina, our mast perched across the deck and sails crumpled around it, the whole thing lashed to the boat with various bungee cords, I felt my heart sinking into my belly. All the work that we’d put into Annabel Lee, all the hours we’d spent sanding and painting, and the money we’d spent on various repairs, and this was how she rewarded us? I couldn’t help but take it personally, even though I knew such thinking was irrational. 

The dismasting had nothing to do with anything we had or hadn’t done – it was simply a matter of a little bit of salt water getting into a tiny crevice in the bolt that held the forestay to the bow of the boat.  A little bit of salt water that had caused the whole piece to rust out on the inside. It looked fine on the outside.

Oddly, nobody seemed to notice that there was something wrong with our boat as we rounded the tip of M Dock at Camachee Cove. I had imagined droves of people flocking to the end of the dock, all shaking their heads in disbelief as they watched the mastless sailboat come in to dock. Will sat on the bow, ready to jump off and get us tied up.

Once at the dock, we went through the motions of putting the things back together without really talking.  My mind had already been through a whole range of emotions: from happy that nobody got hurt to devastated that the boat we’d spent so much time and money on seemed to be falling apart around us. 

As we removed the sails and folded them on the dock, I thought about how, just over a year ago, we had taken inventory of everything on the boat – spread the sails out in the yard of our house in Fort Lauderdale and gone through the boxes of random pieces and parts that had come with the boat, trying to piece together the puzzle of Annabel Lee. Now, it was as if we were undoing it all.  

“What are you thinking?” Will asked after a while.

“About selling the boat,” I said.

He just looked at me for a few minutes and then continued taking apart the roller-furling gear. “Don’t you think that’s an overreaction?” he finally asked.

“Maybe.” As we worked, I tried to catalogue in my mind what needed to be done next. First, the broken piece needed to be replaced, along with every other piece with a similar function and of a similar age, then the mast step, which was now just a twisted piece of stainless steel that had been ripped out of the deck, needed to be bent back into place and the bolts holding it on re-bedded. The fiberglass, where the mast had crashed into it, would need repair. With our busy work schedules, it would take several weeks before we could get the boat back into working order.

Later that night, over a glass of wine, it was little easier to look at this objectively. Maybe the repairs wouldn’t be so bad. All we had to do was roll our sleeves up and get to work – it wasn’t like we’d hadn’t done the same thing a million times before.