We don't know about your boat, but Revision is a world-class reading spot. To port are some of our favorites, mostly sailing, and we would love to hear what good books you have read. Please email them to us or leave a comment. Thanks!
Here's a book-related story from the boat, written by Skipper Mary in July '06 and published in Mainsheet the following year.
REVISION, BOUND
This column has nothing to do with sailing Revision. It’s about our boat tied up; hamstrung; docked; shackled; fettered; restrained; not going anywhere.
We were bound. My husband and C26 association Mainsheet editor, Jeff, had left to check on things at home. That left our sheltie, Keksi, and me on board, and we had all kinds of fun strolling around Marinette’s lushly planted and well-tended Stephenson Island Park, just the other side of the US 41 bridge from our dock at Nestegg Marine.
Revision's stern hangs in the Menominee River. Great blue herons nest on the island behind her.
Located just under a mile upstream from the waters of Green Bay and 15 miles across the bay from Wisconsin’s famously quaint Door Peninsula, Nestegg is private and small and mostly quiet. The “RVs,” as one boater calls the big powerboats, are moored mostly on the south dock. We’re docked on the north, the mostly sailboat side with our stern hanging in the Menominee River, that wet demarcation flush with musky, trout, bass and bluegill between Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and northern Wisconsin and their sister cities of Menominee and Marinette.
We don’t have a TV on board, just a combination AM-FM radio and I-Pod dock, so I had the luxury of getting lost in music, books, writing, crosswords, and daydreaming. On this afternoon, Keksi lay in the cockpit while I relaxed on blue cushions in the cabin, feet up, reading Christopher Dewdney’s Acquainted With The Night: Excursions Through The World After Dark.
The companionway was open and through it I could see sharp-edged cotton clouds floating in a process-blue sky, the end of the boom wrapped in its royal blue sail cover and, from time to time, the tawny triangle of a pricked ear. I heard the slippery slaps of waves on the stern, and the business-like slap of the halyard on the mast, both punctuated every so often by a huge splash as a muskie took a snack at the surface. Ducks were gabbling, as were the gulls, and a great blue heron stood motionless in the rookery on the downstream island, awaiting the partner that would spell it when time came to fly upstream to hunt.
There was the occasional putt-putt-putt of a trolling motor and the sound of men’s voices would fade in, then out before the motor did. Sometimes I could smell the blue 2-cycle smoke. I could smell the river, too, earthy, as some long green weeds congregated near the dock and languidly rotted in the mix of warm air and warm river water. It all flowed through the boat. It flowed through the dog shouldered against the companionway, drifting in and out of sleep. It flowed through me as I slipped through the day, immersed in a poet’s long essay about night.
US 41 runs from Copper Harbor, Michigan to Miami, Florida
Like Dewdney, I am a fan of night’s allure, particularly of its sky. Although there is the hum of traffic from the bridge, along with the occasional peal of a teenager’s muscle car or wail of an emergency vehicle, and the gentle rolling of railroad cars beyond it, our place on this river is mostly quiet. I sat in the cockpit after dark and watched the great wheel of known and nameless stars blink on. The Big Dipper, framed by the boom and topping lift, emerged from the dusky sky as the planets rose and fell and the Milky Way shimmered.
The next afternoon brought another thrill when I joined Rick’s Team Eagle for a weekly Menominee Yacht Club race. Eagle, a Catalina 30 with some dandy improvements, is tuned for speed, and Rick is a captain who finds that speed and knows how to hold on to it. I got so caught up in pre-race positioning I didn’t even realize the gun had sounded and we were underway. It was great being rail meat, sitting abeam looking astern at white sails in glorious wing-and-wing, all back-dropped by towering stacks of soft gray clouds. Eagle is equipped with a stereo and Rick likes rock turned up, as do the crews on the other boats, judging by the smiles.
With Jeff gone another time,
another thrill was in store when dock neighbors Tom and Bob offered a
“moonlight cruise.” I was intrigued and more than a little flattered to accept.
The brothers sail a Cape Dory 28, Hazelnut, and we motored down river, saluted the lift bridge attendant, and headed into Green Bay to wait for celestial movement. The water was
so dark below us as the moon’s unblinking face rose full and pale in the east while the pulsing membrane of sun infused the western sky with red energy. We
sailed with the heavens balanced on our shoulders in a moment as pure and
elemental as I have ever experienced.
As I lay in my berth that
night, drifting on the rising current of sleep, I thought about learning to
sail Revision solo because coupled with the pleasure of being
snugly tied up is, of course, the longing to cast off lines. 