“Ready about. We’ll have to tack again to make our offing.”
McWhirr grasps a weather shroud, his gaunt profile etched against the red sky. Indeed, the wind backing to northward threatens to set us on Skiff Point.
“Helm’s alee”

In a garage sale, in a dream, I found my old copy of the Aeneid among carved wooden heads that droned prophesies from a laurel shaded altar.  On the cover was Baskin’s drawing of Anchises, hoisted on the shoulders of his fated son, fleeing the streets of burning Troy.
In his wheelchair, dad held vigil from South Laguna’s hills, searching the horizon for whales.  His heart now lies stashed with clan relics amid skeletons and old hats, where shelves of brown lore lay darkening in the suburbs, dusted off for our perusal, only in dreams.

*****
“We are becalmed, mate.” McWhirr’s voice seems far away.
The boom swings and the mainsail flogs to the sound of pans clattering below. To the North, an abomination of a container ship rounds Jefferson Head, pushing a bow wave as it rounds the Sierra Foxtrot buoy.
McWhirr offers:
“How about we crank up old Phyllis, motor over to Indianola Marsh and drop the hook?”
I duck below to start the motor.  Old Hand passes sodden fishermen bent over gunwales, bereft of hope for even an anemic cod.
“ Let go here mate!”
“ Aye Captain!” I drop anchor and pay out twelve fathoms of chain.
Old Hand slowly turns to face northeast.
“The flood has set in already.” observes McWhirr while he takes bearings off Point Monroe.
The clouds have lifted to the East where the sky turns violet before falling off to slate gray above the snow covered Cascade Range.
“ Have I ever told you about the wave I caught in Laguna?”
“I seem to recall the one you didn’t”
Let it go then. That was another lifetime. Another has signed on as swab this voyage. I was but a nipper who beheld the hollow countenance of Saturn in the form of a towering breaker long spent on a Southern California shore. Just as now, he faces down from the Northern black clouds; a stern, inverted profile mirrored on the sea. He’s rough-hewn on the rocky peak yonder, stumping his sluggish round.  He circumscribes this adventure like the laurel tree’s shadow circling the household gods, ever counter to the golden sun.

“Guess I’ll turn in. Goodnight.”
“And pleasant dreams to you Captain.”
McWhirr goes below.  The stillness is broken only by his regular snore.
A rush of air startles me.  A fine mist shoots up and slowly falls over a whales back as it sounds off the starboard bow.
It’s a spirit spout beckoning our ship toward far shores where a dark isle enfolds my father’s wrack. The whale left a memento this gentle night, calling us to the eminence beyond the Eastern shore.  What salvation can we hope for from that quarter? What windy advent heralds horizons reborn? I see the Seraphim’s mansions, an Orient that looms all the more lucid for its absolute inscrutability.

I drift off with Old Hand rocking on waves abeam.
The night is a vast inter-tidal zone, where I lie afloat in dreams until a remembrance intoned-as if from a wooden head inside my own sings: Wake from the dream of life and see.

Grebes paddle across the bows as Phyllis, my Sabb, two cylinder diesel engine, provides the steady pace. Old Hand steams into the channel, giving the south shore sands of Eagle Harbor a wide berth. Once past the red nun marking the southern extent of Tyee shoal, I head up into the wind and raise jib and staysail before falling off on a port tack, close-hauled into a twelve knot northerly breeze.

Something in us is endlessly departing into the rarefied air of spiritual quest,  forever receding into mythic seas on courses, set in youth, upon imaginal meridians.

“Ready to come about, Mister Spencer, and try to keep us off the beach at Yeomalt point.”
“Ready about.”
I have a habit of addressing myself like this when alone at sea. But sometimes, in my inner dialogue between captain and first mate, there are mutinies which needs be put down with a firm hand.
Call him/me, Captain McWhirr.
Turning to port, I reach through the wheel house door to let go the the starboard jib sheet and secure the flogging jib.  We settle on a starboard tack with Yeomalt point looming off the bow.
“Steady up.”
“Steady it is, Captain.”

Every casting off, no matter how modest the voyage, holds the promise of high adventure.
Grand embarkations, like Watteau’s Voyage to Cytheria, show frolicsome gentry waltzing down to a moored lugger awaiting passage to Aphrodite’s fair isle.
Epic Adieus call through the ages. There’s Agamemnon’s dramatic farewell and blood kin offered to the gods for a fair breeze toward the final act on Windy Troy. Oaths hurled into the wind’s teeth bring down the curtain. Soliloquies are delivered in drawn out scenes at the taffrail, and swords are brandished against a blood red sky.

“Prepare to come about. We’ll never make our offing at Yeomalt Point if you don’t stop dreaming and skip lively, mate.” McWhirr is testy this morning.
“Ready about it is, sir.”
Under her gracefully curving genoa, the brilliant white hull of a classic yawl glides over green water dappled with cobalt blue refltions of sky as she runs before the freshening breeze back toward Tyee Light.
Now we point toward the shipping lanes and Magnolia Bluffs beyond, to gain Easting before the long board past Skiff point, but the wind is backing to northward and we may not make it with out Phyllis’ assistance.
The wind continues to freshen, and after another tack, Old Hand is pounding into seas made steep by the wild contention of wind and tide.  McWhirr is  hell bent on making our offing clear of the rapidly drying shingle on Skiff Point. Through the port shrouds, gulls and herons gather on the mudflats of Murden Cove, only now showing with the fast ebbing tide.

Why must we hurl ourselves into the spume at Neptune’s mercy, when we might be placidly lounging, beer in hand, before the latest remake of the same old sea story, far from the remotest chance of drowning? There’s something that calls like the siren’s lydian melodies from behind this storm, to set brave hearts through Gabriel’s northern gate toward phantom landfalls in the dream time.

The first scent of Fall was carried on the blustery wind as Old Hand rolled in the waves built in the long fetch up San Juan Channel.
“The wind seems to be piping up out of the Southeast,” observed the first mate as she steered past the rocky headland onto a north west heading.  We’d just spent a peaceful night moored to a park buoy in Jones Islands North Cove and were eager to take advantage of a fair breeze to Stuart Island.
The mate scanned the horizon- “Which one is Flattop?”
“There,” I said pointing toward the rounded shape in the distance.  This aptly named island always reminds me of the bizarre, cartoonish images painted during Philip Guston’s late style, with its dark form rising from the water like the frowning forehead of a submerged giant.
“Where?” says the mate irritably, “can’t you be more specific?”
The excellent first mate dislikes vagueness when it comes to navigation.
“Three points off the starboard bow.”
This pronouncement reduced the erstwhile Moppit to a brooding silence.
From below came a cacophony of crashes and thumps.
“I say, Moppit love, would you be so good as to stow gear below?”
“I thought you were going to do that while I cooked breakfast.”
“Yes, well I was planning our passage…”
Such is the drama of a sailing couple. But, I’m happy to say, after a few voyages we’ve learned to be patient with each others quirks.
A steep sea off the quarter caused Old Hand, with her Norwegian stern, to roll frightfully on a broad reach, and having recently removed the port fuel tank to gain better access to the engine, she now had a list to starboard. Jugs of water stowed below the galley helps somewhat.
We’d gone to a self-steering workshop at the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Show before crossing the Straits and I was eager to try sheet-to-tiller steering.  I busied myself on deck with straps and blocks, rigging lines aft to the cockpit.  While I struggled to hold the tiller amidships and tie it off with the correct number of wraps of surgical tubing, Moppit called through the pilot house door:
“Wouldn’t it be better to try that in calmer conditions?”
That’s what bugs me about Moppit, always the voice of reason just when I’m warming to my roll as some kind of inland sea Bernard Moitessier.  But she is right of course.
On passages like this my mind often turns to Moitessier, that perennial Puer and most artistic of sailors who threw overboard all inessential ballast mid-ocean that he might free himself of lubberly society and circumnavigate the endless globe like some blissful Flying Dutchman.  But in, the end, his ecstatic flight brought him back to where he began, only able to jettison his restless mind in death.
I see his ketch Joshua aground during a Cabo San Lucas Chubasco with Moitessier fighting to save his legendary ship side by side with none other than Klaus Kinski, Wrath of God. Now there is a scene to rival the most fevered visions of Werner Herzog.
Listen, Old Hand, to the rigging’s tremulous vibrato.  Hear the symphony of sky and sea, the elemental vortex rushing into the void.
I eyed the frayed seams of the jib as the wind continued to rise to 20 knots.  At my back, the wind rushed through the wheelhouse door.  Through binoculars, I scanned the emerald slope of Green Point on the south east end of Spieden Island where antelope allegedly roam, brought there by a Disney executive in some hare-brained scheme to provide sport for great white hunters on vacation from Orange County’s Fantasy Land.
This is the same infernal, suburban land from which I made my own escape. Still, I return to it often in dreams, as if to remind myself that achieving necessary escape velocity requires something less defined than funds and nautical skill.