Thursday January 24, 2019 by WannaskaWriter

     I've been in Indiantown, Florida for the past two weeks, while y'all have been bundled up in your woolies. (Today January 19th, the wife said it was -40 at home--we had 69 degrees above). I've stood upon the deck of Jerry & Marion Solom's sailboat, Indian Summer, under two weeks of nothing but blue skies and sunshine with temps into the 80s, the perspiration threading itself through my beard in rivulets, moistening my neck and chest after an hour or so chipping paint and rust from the deck.
   
     I volunteered to help the Soloms with some of the maintenance work needed on their 40-foot steel sailboat Jerry built, 1986-1993. Owning a sailboat, particularly the ocean-going kind, is a life-long commitment to its upkeep, something I've learned, is just as real an addiction for many of the boat owners in this marina, as anyone addicted to drugs or alcohol. Jerry is no exception. Marion, not so much.

    There have been two dozen or so individuals on boats around us, vessels of 30 to 50 feet in length, several with three levels -- the nautical terms escape me presently as I write in the shade of a tarp thrown over the 'boom' and tied taut---all undergoing some form of maintenance or repair. We too, are among the legions of boat owners who've become married to their craft, inflamed by their passion for sailing and boating, many around the world.

     I've become less astonished to hear British, Irish, French, Jamaican or Australian accents in conversations. 'Eric' is from Hull, England. He works on a catamaran on the east of us. (It's for sale, by the way)

North sits a fifty foot power boat whose owner is from Ireland and when asked where, he said
"The place I learned how to bomb busses in da tird grade. "
"Oh, Northern Ireland," I said.
"Yeah," he answered. "But I got out of there in 1967 before The Troubles began. The people, some were crazy."
The guy standing next to him, whose boat is behind us, said he was there in '74,
"... in the middle of it."

     All the people seem friendly and eager to talk 'boat.' I visited at length with a tall slender older man who resembled my uncle Max Reynolds, who in his youth probably stood a straight six-foot three, and now stood stooped at the shoulders. His cap of many splotches of painted colors, looking more like a paint brush rest than something to shield his eyes, and sat atop a suggestion of gray hair and a pair of distinctive ears that stuck out from his head, as did Uncle Max's, (but only so far as you'd notice)..

     The man drove a brilliant red Chevrolet Silverado Texas Edition quad-cab pickup with no rust and a huge chrome grill. He was stalking about the marina looking for the guy who was burning whatever it was that was showering his freshly washed truck and sailboat with black soot. He was not a happy camper. He approached me, but when he saw I was talking on the phone, he turned away.

     I could see he wanted to talk, so I sought him out and o began a lengthy conversation that morphed into a history of the 25 sailboats he owned, the eight he owned all at the same time, and some of the troubles he had insuring some of them in different countries.

     One time, sailing from an independent country off The Bahamas, he learned from a fellow sailor that his insurance probably didn't cover him there, and checking with his agent, the man was right. He had to pay a one thousand dollar rider in addition to what he had paid. Farther on in Puerto Rico, he learned his insurance had been cancelled--and just in time for Hurricane Hugo.

     A photo of his sailboat resting on debris after the hurricane ended up on the cover of a national boating magazine below the words, "Don't Let This Happen To You!!" What bum luck.

     Although the man knows he is hopelessly addicted to sailboats and every last thing they entail, he cannot give them up, even at an age approaching mid-eighties. His children won't be surprised that he'll die on or near a sailboat.

     Hmmmm, I know a guy, ten years younger than that, suffering from the same affliction....