MORE SMALL BOAT TALK

I REMEMBER a daysail with the Traditional Small Craft Association up in the Sacramento Delta. I had an idyllic morning and afternoon aboard a Redwing 18, a home-built plywood skiff with a big cockpit and a cuddy. WoodenBoat sells the plans for about $100, and I'm wondering how many Redwings there are, carrying couples and families over small waters.

I'm accustomed to big, powerful sloops and ketches in the 36' to 65' range – OPB's, other people's boats – but that odd little outboard in the complex little sloughs of the Delta offered a scaled-down, wholly delightful adventure.

The four-stroke, ten horsepower engine was quiet at the pokey rate of travel the slough mandated, perhaps 5.5 knots. Conversation was easy, the banks were lovely and the birds were plentiful and varied – egrets, green herons, great blue herons, redwing blackbirds, crows (my favorites), wrens, robins, mockingbirds . . . Some spoke of seeing otters in less-traveled sloughs. The cooler with sodas and lunch was in the shade of the cuddy cabin. The day was fine though I could see that a canvas Bimini cockpit cover would be a blessing in the depth of summer.

An oddly pleasing part of the voyage was the wheel, itself. It was a small galvanized workboat wheel, with its six teak hand-spokes extending the cast galvanized spokes, mounted on the starboard face of the coach house. The little engine swung to it, and the engine controls were mounted to the right of the wheel. Perhaps the comfortingly elderly wheel made it feel more like a sea boat. We're all suggestible, subject to delusions, me more than most. I remember it as one of my favorite little passages.

I love big boats, long may they wave, but I'm speculating that the marine industry must expand the base of small boaters. Small experiences may lead to big-boat purchases in time. Even an 18-footer consumes an appreciable amount of marine equipment, year by year.

I could be way wrong about this. If I were a businessperson I wouldn't be a writer. For boatbuilders already set up to produce grand vessels the only course is to winkle out high-ticket owners from the Fortune 500. One thinks of steep oil price increases, however, and wonders what big breweries were thinking just before Prohibition. Some actually went into the root beer business.

Welcoming a wider public to life on the water is good sense and good seed. By and by most dinghy sailors want a bigger boat for longer voyages, and for learning new things. Young people who play on the water with their families are more likely to invest in a big boat when they have families of their own. Should boatbuilders and chandleries be thinking about what Stewart Brand calls "the Long Now?"

I find such peace and a settling of the soul on the water. I can't imagine not getting onto the water – on a big boat, a Redwing 18, or an innertube. Water is the only magic I know. So I'm an advocate, and were I the Pied Piper the trail of my tiny-footed band would lead to the shore. I want kids to see the grace of the water, and to see the shore from the ocean perspective – both useful visions.

Adkins

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

It's true that Himself is calmer and more lucid, less flighty and anxious, when he returns from a trip around the Bay. Perhaps other men center themselves in the woodshop or on their bicycles or hunting moose. Himself is a Water Healer; get him off the shore for a few hours and he's nearly tolerable. He says that the problems of the land diminish in proportion to the height of the trees as he sails away from the dock. Is it merely one form of temporary nepenthe, or is it like the old Norton Utilities program that rearranged your hard drive storage into logical, faster segments? Either way it's better than vodka.



Adkins