Life Aboard: Pitching Boats, Not Fastballs
My friend Joe’s dad was a sports fanatic, he followed his college football and basketball teams closely, and didn’t miss many of his favorite professional team’s games on TV. Given this influence, it was no surprise that Joe wanted to try out for little league and went on to letter in more than one sport in high school. My father on the other hand was an outdoorsman, so growing up, I had no exposure to competitive ball sports. These differences, however, didn’t keep Joe and me from being best friends. Growing up, we probably spent as many nights at each other’s houses as we did our own.
Joe’s dad would spend hours teaching him how to track a fly-ball and time his swing, while my dad was teaching me how to accurately cast a hula-popper right next to the lily pad a large-mouth bass was probably hiding under. Joe would stay up late organizing his baseball cards, while I was on my hands and knees in the backyard with a flashlight putting night crawlers in an old coffee can.
We lived just a half block from a river, with a boat ramp a short distance from our house. It took only minutes to launch our boat. During the summer, my dad would launch the boat for me early in the morning, and give me a time to meet him back at the ramp in the afternoon. From the age of 11 or 12, I was free to take that boat wherever I wanted, as long as I didn’t get too close to the dam downstream. On days when Joe didn’t have a game, he loved to come along. I don’t know that he envied the freedom my dad gave me to take our boat out as often as he did, but I know I didn’t envy the strict schedule his ball games kept him on.
One day we were miles upriver exploring one of our favorite islands, when I hit something in the water and broke the prop’s shear pin. Cell phones didn’t exist, and we were a long way from that boat ramp where one of us could walk home for help. Joe asked, “What are we going to do?” I said we’re going to replace the shear pin, he asked if I had ever done that before, I said no, but I’ve watched my dad do it and I know he keeps spare shear pins in the boat’s toolbox. Joe said he wasn’t sure his dad had a toolbox, and he couldn’t think of a time he ever saw his dad fix anything.
When Joe would come to the lake with us, we would take a Sunfish out sailing until we were both sunburned. Early on Joe would scratch his head when I would say, look, there’s a nice puff of wind over there, let’s go get it. He would ask, “How can you see the wind?” I said you can’t, but if you look carefully, you can see the ripples on the water where the wind is and we can sail right into it. Handling a boat of any sort was something I took for granted. When we were a little older, Joe started playing travel baseball, and I rode my bike to the YMCA near our house to get my first scuba diving certification. I would do anything to be on, in or under the water. I couldn’t quote win/loss records, I didn’t have players stats memorized, or know how to calculate an earned-run average, but learning the parts of a ship, the difference between a gaff rigged schooner and a Marconi rigged sloop, memorizing Boyles Law on gas pressures and decompression tables, these were things I could remember.
It was years before I realized how growing up the way I did affected me. As a young man beginning a career in marketing, Monday morning sales calls were tough. College and professional sports are so ingrained in our culture, you are expected to know something about them. Customers looked at me funny when I said I didn’t have a favorite team in any sport and had never attended a professional ball game. It took me a while to stop being embarrassed by my lack of sports knowledge and start embracing what I knew.
My competitors could talk to my customers about football and take them away on golf outings, which was the expected thing to do in my business, but I was the only one who was also a scuba instructor who could teach them how to dive. My competition couldn’t take clients sailing or fishing the way I could. All of a sudden, they discovered the scuba and sailing trips were a lot more fun than golf trips. I was the only salesman in my business who volunteered as a diver at the National Aquarium and could take them on a behind-the-scenes tour over the top of the shark tank.
I don’t believe my upbringing made me any better than someone who played competitive team sports. Joe and I have stayed in touch and I’m happy to say he’s living a good life with children of his own. But I wouldn’t trade the experiences I had for anything. The challenges children face growing up outdoors, in nature, on the water, are different. I believe they teach a form of independence and problem-solving, and help a child build a sense of confidence that team sports can’t always teach.
Maybe this is more rationalization than realization, but giving a child exposure to the water, to help them understand the natural world better than the average person and opens doors nothing else can. I believe learning to sail helps a child be more aware of the world in a larger sense. I believe it shifts their worldview, not about politics, but about people and places. It can encourage a curiosity about science and maybe even a desire to find solutions for problems they see.
I make no apologies for not being able to throw a curveball. Here, I’m proudly pitching boating, and the world we get to see from our life aboard on the water.
This article originally appeared in the August/September 2024 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.
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