Negotiations

Upon our return to Canada, Willie set about an orgy of information gathering. Stacks of printouts about a variety of boats burdened his desk and his kitchen table. He would show them to me and I would nod sagely and say, “Yes, dear.”

He gave me a radio operator’s training manual and the Canadian boating guide. I dutiful set about learning such fundamental rules as “red, right, return” (which refers to which side a buoy is to be on when one is sailing a marked channel). If my mind wandered, it was usually to try to come up with something thrilling like “green, gauche, go”.

We had serious talks about serious things. Was I sure I could really do this? I had a hard time imagining the feeling of being on a small floating object surrounded by nothing but mile after mile of salt water. I confessed to being fearful. He said that was normal and handed me one of the sailing bibles, Beth Leonard’s The Voyagers Handbook: the essential guide to blue water cruising. She deals handily with the topic of female terror—one of the key reasons more men aren’t afloat. I became more comfortable with the notion as I read her reassuring words.

We thought a sailing course might be a good idea. A week on a boat off the Bahamas or Belize sounded nice, but was prohibitively expensive. We talked about renting a boat and spending a week or two cruising in the Bahamas while I got a handle on the sea life. That, too, was going to be a great deal of money.

Finally, we decided simply to buy a boat and, bless him, Willie said, “If you really can’t do it, we’ll just sell her again.”

We were looking for a catamaran. The two hulls give a great deal more space and stability than single hulls or monohulls. Monohulls heel (lean) in the wind; catamarans stay flat, an assertion I was later to test in a quiet way. He gave me more books, some of them rather alarming. I read Ottawa resident Diane Steumer’s Voyage of the Northern Magic (a recommendation of my dentist’s), which tells of her four years at sea with her husband and three young sons. At the end of all this reading, I reckoned if those people could survive that, I could manage.

We talked about sailing to Bermuda, the Azores, the Med, the Canaries. I talked about the Galapagos; Willie said no. Eventually, we pulled our globe-trotting thoughts into the realm of reality and decided to noodle around the Caribbean to begin with, keeping to calmer waters and warmer climes before taking on the challenge of the Atlantic. I needed to tuck a few skills under my belt before I took on real weather.

Because of family and real-life commitments, we needed to be able to come back for a week roughly once a month. Apart from those return trips, we planned to sail in warm places from November to May, and spend June to October at home in Montreal and the Laurentians.

Now, all we needed was a boat.