There is a certain kind of camaraderie that occurs at the counter of the beer store that I believe happens nowhere else. Quick, upbeat conversations unfold among staff and shoppers that are done almost as soon as they begin but end up saying a lot. I got to thinking about this earlier this week at Sam’s Beverage in East Hampton, when I ran into a high school friend buying lottery tickets.
How had my summer been, Rick asked me. Crazy as hell, I told him, but that I had gotten out on the water when I could to shake off the insanity of it all.
Rick’s eyes got big and round, “I know what you mean, Rat. It’s so peaceful out there.” The tall guy behind the counter agreed. “I was out Sunday. It was perfect,” he said.
Truth is, I had not been on the water all that often this year. But the few times I had had been rejuvenating. “Sunday was incredible. There were no boat wakes,” I said. “There was nobody else out there.”
With my 28-foot Cape Dory sloop, Cerberus, up on blocks for the entire boating season, I have had to take my water time when I can. Over the weekend, I sailed an unnamed Force-5 on Gardiner’s Bay between Devon and Promised Land, alone on the water for miles.
I had been the owner of the Force-5 since the early 1990s, when I bought it at the Orient yacht club to take to New York City to sail on the Hudson River. As busy as the west side of Manhattan was on land, it was the opposite on the river. It was part of a motley fleet of three tiny sailboats that I and two friends kept in a former city Department of Transportation warehouse on a pier.
After tilting the boats one at a time to hand them down from the pier to a floating dock, we would rig up and sail across to the New Jersey side, work our way upstream, then whip around and race back down the river in the direction of the Statue of Liberty. Aside from a few kayakers, we were almost always the only recreational boaters in sight.
New York is funny that way; for all its many miles of waterfront, it is hardly a boating town and was even less so back then. The river was ours, or so we felt. It seems the same way here at times. There are hundreds of boats at any given moment tied up in the marinas or swinging on their moorings, but so few out and about. Get a few feet off the shore, and it is a world of one’s own.
“It’s amazing that it is still so quiet on the water,” I said to my beer store friends. “You’re right,” they agreed, nodding their heads. “See you out there,” one said. “Probably not,” I thought, and headed out the door.