Wee B.B. Calmed

If the Good Lord allows, one day you will meet Mickey Cribb. Mickey is, if not a rare breed, an unsung breed. He is a kind person. You've met one, no doubt. Kind people either invite you into their homes, invite you to church, bring you a dinner, or perform some similar act that leaves you totally, breathlessly included. Mickey did that for me.

Today was the 2004 Outback Regatta on Lake Murray. Along with two other people, Mickey invited me to crew on his boat during a six-mile race. He had no idea what he was getting. He thought I was from Baltimore, with a proud sailing tradition going back hundreds of years.The truth is, not so much. Actually, I'm trying to think of any sort of proud tradition I'm a part of that goes back many years. I don't hunt. I rarely fish. When I left my home town, the local golf course still had only nine holes, so that's not it. They agricultural tradition is about as close as I come.

Raising cattle and sheep for 4-H truly is a proud tradition. I'm glad my parents allowed me a glimpse of that heritage. If you recall the train of thought thus far, you'll agree that my tradition left me woefully short of transferrable skills that apply to a boat. Tipping, I suppose, but I've never tipped a cow, so even there I came to the task with little to offer. It didn't matter. Mickey accepted me anyway. That's cool.

We sailed a 31-foot Cal named Southern Cross. It is in the cruising class. Each boat in the class was assigned a weighting based on its probable performance. Mickey and Southern Cross were rated 156. The only faster rated boat was a beautiful Seabird catamaran that was rated 99. That meant that we started after everybody else. In our case, 16:42 minutes after. The Seabird started 7 minutes after us. Despite a slow start--we crossed the line 20-30 later than we should have--we soon began passing boats. The wind was our friend. Never much of it, but enough to get the job done.

What we're trying to figure out is this: is Mickey that good? He hadn't sailed much in a couple of years and this boat is still new to him. He's only sailed her a handful of times. Or, is the boat that good? Mickey would humbly pass the praise to the boat. Whatever, going up the course we did fairly well. Then we learned how fickle friends can be.

You know that story where Jesus commands the seas to be calm? I now know what that is like. It's peaceful. Serene. Placid. Stultifyingly boring. Hot. Humid. Enervating. Thirst-inducing. And time seems to stand still. Sailing races seem to mirror sociology. If you're becalmed, you invest a lot of energy in looking for people who have what you don't have. Wind. You wish for wind. You long for wind. You lust for wind. And if you can't have it, you wish for it to desert those around you as well. If the wind starts to lift, you want to have it first. And last. And most. Especially most.

The trick to sailing seems to be getting the most out of the least, plotting a course that keeps the wind in your sails, and tacking (changing direction to get more wind in your sails) at the proper moment to lose the least momentum. Darned if everybody out there didn't seem to know the trick to sailing, too. That dulled our edge right there.

At the end of the upwind trek and especially during the downwind trek, we had ample time for contemplation. When the breeze gets you pretty juiced about shattering the 1mph barrier, you can really get down to some serious thinking. Mostly we thought, "This sucks." The exciting imagery you've seen of sailing races with crew members bravely holding the lines and leaning off the side of the boat like rappellers preparing to descend a cliff doesn't happen that often when wind speeds top out at less than 5mph. I think the most the boat tipped over was when two of us boarded simultaneously at the dock. That was scary. Whew.

I took my new Gore-Tex jacket along. Based on today's experience it does an incredible job of keeping water away from my body. It apparently kept water away from Lake Murray and two adjoining counties as well. We could have used that water. We'd have been cooler and we'd have had a breeze. By the end of the race the notion of sniffing black pepper and sneezing into the sails seemed like a really good idea. It could have been the heat. Who knows?

What I didn't realize (until after the race passed the 4-hour time limit and we were allowed to motor back to the sailing club property) was that we placed second in our class. Mickey is now the proud owner of a medallion on a red ribbon and a lovely stuffed koala bear (Outback WAS a sponsor, after all), Nor did I realize that I was being treated to the full-on racing participant experience. Access to the free beer trailer (those Bud Light guys get around), a meal catered by Outback (THICK steaks. Mmmmmmm.), and a live band were all part of the experience. We left before the band because the sun just wiped us out, but this was big doings. Despite my inexperience, Mickey let me be a part of it all. Kindness is cool.