Am I a Sailor?

That’s a very good question…

One that I have been asked a good amount of times over my life.

I should be a sailor with all the sailing I have done. Sailing school at 14yrs old for a summer, dating the national  junior sailing champion for 2 years and sailing pretty much every day with him and his crew for most of those days in those two years hot or cold in Summer, Fall and Spring. Meeting my husband and sailing every trip down south all the turquoise oceans at least twice a day when the winds were good, having access to my brother in law’s sailboat at the old cottage  and now having bought our own catamaran this year for our lake and using it often.

 So one might assume that I know how to sail..very well right?

Well not really. I am what you call a leisure sailor. As in…I lie down with a pillow in the middle of the boat, very low so that when we tack and jibe there is no chance of the boom hitting me across the bed, I close my eyes, slather on the sunscreen and try to tan as much a humanly possible with the chaos that surrounds me each time we set sail.

After all of the years if my husband fell off the boat or something I am not quite sure I could get us home even. My two boys can outsail me at the mere ages of 12 and 14 and could even handle our  2 sail catamaran.  Kind of embarrassing eh?

My husband on the other hand is an incredible sailor with no formal training at all. I love watching him manoeuver these things…it is darn sexy to watch a man so utterly in control and just so darn competent.

Both boys are also extremely skilled with just a couple of summers of sailing lessons behind them. All are naturals when it comes to wind and water.

It must be a girl thing. It started a long time ago.

At camp with my Soul keeper when we were both teenagers we begged our parents to send us to sailing camp for a month. My parents could not afford it but they came up with the amount anyways…and what did I do??? We chased boys all summer, skipped sail camp and played hooky most days and basically sat on a little Opthi in the middle of the lake praying the wind would not pick up. And when it did pick up? We spent a lot of time in the middle of the lake chasing the boat that had tipped over. What a disaster.

What it did teach me however is how much I love boats. And being a sailed.

So now in our family the boys sail us around and my daughter and I both lie in the middle, close our eyes shut tightly, say a prayer and do a whole lot of whining and screaming when the wind picks up. When they trapeze and we get splashed all over the place and have water in our eyes and almost fall off the boat, we open out eyes and scream louder. With each tack, they all move about us, and change the ropes and ask us to please get off of the flippingropes and be more considerate..and so we do until the next tack. It’s a ton of fun though!

And yesterday Chase even fell off the boat it was so rough and I saved him. I pulled him back in, so I was the hero. I was laughing so hard at him, poor guy. Don’t think he thought it was too funny!

So what I love most about sailing and these interactions on the boat is how much it mirrors our lives…I mean that’s just us..all chaotic, and bickering, and laughing and loving. The guys trying to get some serious stuff done and the girls trying their best to relax, until they get fed up of us and drop us off (or make us swim) home to make them lunch. We are good at making corn.

Our ski boat is a lot more predictable and certainly less chaotic, but we live out our loves on both of them rain and shine.” Five at Sea” and now our sailboat” "In the Fall”…..are part of us. Part of our package.Without them both …….we would not be living out our lives the way we have always known them.

So am I a sailor??? The answer is yes I most definitely am.

And just like my real life, my hair blows in the wind while I try to keep balance and figure it all out. I try to relax amongst chaos, and try to turn directions with many obstacles in the way. And just like my real life, I have these great partners and kids around me, each of us doing what we do best and remaining a team and trying to help eachother out here and there while screaming above the wind; yelling often but smiling often too just because it is all so much fun. And precisely where we want to be at that moment.

Yes I am a sailor.