The sounds of a Saturday night on land followed Cerberus and me as we sailed northwest in Gardiner’s Bay. I had not expected it to be as loud as it was; even over the wind, the noise from Montauk Highway came clearly. Getting away from the week’s distractions would not be as easy as I had expected.
Cerberus is a Cape Dory sloop built in 1979. During the pandemic, an acquaintance had urged me to act on my long-held wish to return to my roots as a sailor and become the owner of a boat large enough to sleep on, yet small enough to sail alone. Singlehanders, myself among them, are perhaps happiest when they are alone on the sea. As I told a dear friend after buying the boat and sailing it most of the way from Massachusetts to Long Island by myself, for me, on the water is where everything makes the most sense.
It is my belief that sailboats exist in a liminal space between animate and inanimate. This may come from the way they transform wind into motion while being acted upon by the currents grasping at their keels and centerboards. The sailor becomes a part of this, steering, pulling lines then letting them go again, choosing a course, watching for subtle changes in the wind. There is a very physical nature to sailing that is not present aboard a powerboat on which mechanized systems stand in for the sailor’s touch and intuition.
As a young man, I built boats both professionally and for fun, and I would tell people that, to me, they were like a cross between a house and a musical instrument, something with strings, a cello, perhaps. And yet they never stuck me as gendered in the way many sailors speak of boats as “she.” I really don’t know why I felt that way — and still do — it simply seemed obvious that sailboats were something else altogether.
Cerberus and I lost the sound of the highway somewhere around Cartwright Island. The tide and wind both coming in what was to us an unfavorable direction, we jibed back and forth to get past a shoal that narrows the passage between Cartwright and Louse Point, as night crept up around us.
At dark and at anchor in Cherry Harbor, the good-night calls of great black-backed gulls were answered by the distant rumbling of fireworks. This carried on until well after I had finished my sandwich dinner, taken a small draught of whiskey that another friend had given me, and gotten into my sleeping bag. Sleep approached fast and deep, and, as the last of the sounds of land died away, came the silence I had been looking for.