J. EDMUND BARNES

I prefer boxing to sailing. I also prefer baseball to tennis. That doesn’t stop me from taking an interest in, or occasionally participating in either of those sports. Though usually with comic results. Take this fourth of July holiday. I went out to the coast to drink beer and watch fireworks. I also hoped to do some sailing. Which is to say, fumble about in a small boat in less than six feet of water so as that I don’t do any harm to myself, or to the boat, that doesn’t belong to me. Lifejackets, even in water that shallow, are an absolute necessity when I’m at the conn. I was on a Sunfish, a sort of basic sailboat that has one sail, a small rudder, and a retractable keel for when the water is less than a foot deep. Onboard were me, my cousin, and my brother. The wind was blowing onto the shore, which presented some early problems. Like how to tack. Tacking is how you move a boat about that relies upon wind to power it. You can’t sail directly into the wind, you have to wheel it about and make a lot of zig-zags instead of one long straight line. We weren’t even underway when the crew began its mutinous grumblings. Questions of competency were raised and were only silenced by the ugly suggestion that certain members of the crew were going to be marooned on Cat Island with only a volleyball to keep them company if they didn’t shut up. How I was to get them to Cat Island didn’t come up, thankfully. I had one basic goal: not to sink the ship. Included in the bilge of the boat, among the empty beer cans and a large jug(to be used, quite often, for bailing the boat out) was a paddle. If worst came to worst, I was fully prepared to accept the humiliation of rowing back ashore. But thankfully it didn’t come to that. Instead, thanks to our larger sail we were (eventually) able to spin to boat around in shallow bay playing catch with a considerably faster and more maneuverable Optimist. Never mind that an Optimist more resembles a bathtub with a sail than any kind of Christian boat, nor the fact that given even a fraction of a percent of knowledge and skill with a boat we should been able to overtake the tub. It was still fun. Of course, the best part was making my brother walk the plank as an example to the crew. J. EDMUND BARNES can be contacted at L’Observateur (P.O. Box 1010, Laplace, La, 70069, 652-9545) or by email at josephusbarnes@hotmail.com.