Читать книгу Here on the Coast - Howard White - Страница 15

I am standing on my head covered in a greasy substance that smells like the innards of a very old hockey bag, so it must be spring.

Aw, the boating life!

I am located in the bilge of our family pride and joy, a thirty-year-old modified fishboat, with one leg kinked painfully around the battery box and the other hyperextended over the exhaust manifold fumbling in icy cold water trying to figure out why the automatic water pump has ceased being automatic.

As seems unavoidable at such times, I begin calculating the number of boat-hours I spend doing things like this, adding it to the time I will spend crawling underneath the hull on the beaching grid with my gumboots full of mud and copper paint running into my armpit, adding it to the time spent making midnight excursions in the midst of winter storms to check tie-up ropes, and dividing the sum total of all this misery into the hours actually spent out on the water enjoying summer sunshine. I know better than to start along this line of figuring because for years now, the answer has been a negative number that just gets more negative each year as the boat and I both get older.

Oddly, and I guess this is what marks me as a true pleasure boater, I never allow the cruel facts to in any way undermine my dedication to the notion of owning a boat.

I don’t have to, because my wife Mary takes care of this for me. She is fond of pointing out that—just in terms of annual cash outlay spent hauling and painting, replacing corroded wiring, R-and-R’ing alternators, new and bigger inverters, two-way fridges and occasionally new, more powerful engines the boys justify in terms of reduced exhaust emissions—it would be far more cost-effective to charter a brand new fifty-foot SonShip for two weeks each July. There would probably even be money left over to hire a couple paid crew and a professional chef. She might even deign to come along if I did that. Best of all, we would actually be forced to take two weeks off and use a rental while we had it, instead of the usual “not this week, maybe next” that fritters away our summers under the owned-boat system.

In my defence I must point out I am not by any means alone in my folly. Think of those seventy-foot, four-storey jobs you see at the Seattle Yacht Club outstation in Garden Bay. Those babies not only cost millions to buy in the first place, their fuel consumption is on par with that of a Boeing 737. I find it difficult to conceive of the income you’d need to be able to have spare room in it for one of those floating pleasure domes. Our boat may be a hole in the water into which we dribble our few hard-earned dollars; those things are veritable fortune-sucking maelstroms. How damn rich must these people be? And look how many of them there are! You can go down to the Reed Point Marina in Port Moody or the Sidney Marina on Vancouver Island and cast your gaze over a vast prairie of gleaming fibreglass and chrome. The value of pleasure craft tied up at dock on any given day of the year in BC must be in the billions. And those favoured folks don’t seem to get much more use out of their dreamboats than I do out of my old fishboat. You can go down to the Vancouver Yacht Club wharf (well, you can’t really get past the razor wire, but you can study it from Canada Place with field glasses) and even in the prime cruising days of August you will see most of that multi-billion-dollar fleet still tied up, depreciating a million dollars a minute waiting for the owners to spare a few days from their frenzied getting and spending.

Pleasure-boat owning has to be the hands-down worst investment in the world.

I know this.

Last year I didn’t get out on the Lisa Diane for more than one longish weekend. We set sail from Bargain Harbour on Friday intending to go to Desolation Sound to visit a friend who was writing a book there (it takes a work tie-in to pry us loose these days) but a southeaster came up and blew us into Blind Bay. Anna tried to jig up a cod for supper without success and the anchor dragged so I didn’t sleep. On Saturday the wind let up enough for us to sneak over into Hotham Sound where we poked around eating salmonberries, worrying about grizzly bears and wading in that pretty but frigid tidal pool up by the head. It rained a lot. On Sunday we returned to port a day early and that was it for the year.

But you know what? Those three days were such a tonic I have been daydreaming about them all winter. Eight months later it is still a favourite lunchroom topic among those who made the trip. It was one of the high points of the entire year.

Something sharp is jabbing my left thigh, causing me to writhe in the grips of a muscle cramp. But I don’t care how miserable I feel down here in this cold bilge. Even for one more truncated trip like last year’s, I will consider myself well repaid.