Fact is, Dad, it was the first such ever, in my memory; outside the cities such annoyances are rare. He’d said nothing? Not a syllable, either apologetic, explanatory, or obscene. That in that case our attribution of gender was presumptive didn’t occur to me till the evening, 2200 hours, as I made the day’s final entry in the ship’s log. I was after all a lawyer
Jeannine was a delight: her complexion fresher, eyes brighter, spirits higher than I’d seen them since her first divorce. She took my car to fetch the last of the groceries and the first of the ice while I topped up the water tanks, loaded and stowed, closed the cottage, singled up the dock lines, and started the diesel to kick us out into sailing room. We went over the checklists together — a disingenuous tête-à-tête which Jeannine smartly called me on by blowing her breath in my face. Cigarettes, coffee, and toothpaste, okay? No booze till the hook goes down.
I kissed her forehead; we raised the sails, cast off, and for the sport of it (but with the engine idling in neutral in case the breeze set us too far shoreward), fetched out to deep water under sail alone, close-hauled on a tricky port tack, by lee-bowing the outrunning tide to offset our leeway and lowering the big centerboard inch by inch as we beat out of shoal water. A neat bit of seamanship, landlubberly Father, which brought a cheer from the crew when we cleared our mark — a particular brush-topped stake on the last three-foot spot before good sea-room — by no more than that same three feet. Jeannine bounced happily back to the wheel from her watch at the bowsprit (those breasts bounced too, under that T-shirt, a man could not but notice with pleasure, whatever the possible consanguinity) to hug me (Ah) and take the helm while I cut the engine and made the first log entry:
But even as I went on to log our weather, speed, heading, and trim, I decided to take no further chances that day. Tempting as it was, in that breeze from that quarter, to come about and close-reach straight into the Bay, we crossed the wide river-mouth instead, tacked up Broad Creek, anchored for lunch and a cautious dip off Hambledon Island (sea nettles, like a gross of old condoms, everywhere one looked). Then we ran back down again, banged out past Cooks Point to the Sharps Island Light to get a taste of open Bay and a bit of spray in our faces, and back into the Choptank and up Harris Creek to Dun Cove. The rationale was to get a good anchoring spot for the night before the weekend fleet piled in from the western shore — there’d be 50 boats by nightfall in that first snug anchorage on the Choptank. But we were also, as Jeannine airily observed, only eight nautical miles from home in case I wanted rid of her in the morning.
We could quit that now, I suggested. It had been a good day’s sail, the better for her having been aboard, and I hoped she’d have a drink with me after we swam. The hook was down in eight feet in the western arm of that roomy cove, off which yet another, lagoonlike little cove makes, too shoal for cruising boats to enter but a fine secluded spot for swimming. The breeze had waned from fifteen knots to near calm; the late afternoon had hazed over and stoked up; furling sail and setting the anchor left us both perspiring. With my permission, not to soak her only pair of shorts (they would never dry out in the overnight damp), Jeannine swam this time bare-assed, her T-shirt pulled demurely but sexily over her hips while she used the boarding ladder. That sort of modesty, she acknowledged, was not her long suit. On a sailboat especially, in her view, clothing was for comfort, protection (including against unwarranted attention), and other folks’ proprieties only. In hot weather, alone or with others, she preferred going naked, and never cared who looked so long as
Mm hm. My sentiments exactly, despite my local fame as a coat-and-tie-skipper in the spring and fall. The fact was, I told her, it was Arrow shirts or nothing, and after half a century of watching our rivers get yearly more crowded, I still found swimsuits unnecessary more often than not when at anchor on our side of the Chesapeake. That ice broken, we dinghied through the nettles to what we now christened Skinny-Dip Cove, where, as we’d hoped, we saw fewer of them; and wary as I was of medusa stings on my privates, at her challenge and example I Took a Chance.
