I spend a fair amount of time these days at Oak Bay Marina in Victoria, B.C. Our friend Paul has a sailboat moored there, and for the last four years, I’ve been learning about crewing. I’ve even managed to acquire both my small craft operator and VHF radio operators cards. The world of sail is slowly sinking in, so to speak.

When I was 14 years old, a friend of my father’s bought a marina called Brentwood Boat Rentals, in Brentwood Bay, B.C. They needed dock boys to swab and fuel the boats, so I got a job working there. From that point, I was hooked on salmon and later fly fishing. As a consequence, I spent a lot of time on the water when I was young, fishing from powered boats.

One day, Brentwood Boat Rentals acquired an old sailing dinghy, not too different from this one, in an estate sale. It arrived in numerous pieces, and nobody seemed to be interested in it. After several months, I asked for and was given permission to see if I could put it together. I think the marina owners thought it might be a new market for potential rental opportunities. I spent several hours playing with it and, since there was nobody around who knew about sailing, I put it together as I thought it should go, then set out to sea. It took a while, but I eventually got it figured out enough to get where I wanted to go. I remember being proud of myself as I returned it to the dock under full sail. The other dock boys were impressed ... my definition of ultimate success, at the time.

Most of my early experience with sail was based on trial and error rather than education. There were a few dicey times. The worst was a stormy day in the Aegean Sea, off the Greek island of Antipaxos in a rented sailboat. It took hours of tacking, but we were the only rental that made it back that day, half full of water, but under our own steam.

Power and sail share quite a bit of knowledge: a sense of tide, conditions, hazards, weather, steering, etc., but sailing does have its particular idiosyncrasies, especially trimming the sails and steering a sailable course. I’m just now beginning to count myself as a sailor.