#15 - Sailing With the Moon
We went for a sail in the moonlight recently. It was the best night of summer it turned out - a chance combination of circumstances, unplanned and not likely to be duplicated - just one of those things that happen.
An invitation to dinner was how it started, very casually. How would we have known? "Aboard Noeta" it was suggested, a beautiful old and newly restored ketch tied up on the shore of the Sheepscot river, a good, old river. "Potluck?" “Sounds fine," we said. Evening was settling and we offered to bring some river grown oysters.
Happy for the invite, we walked down the hill to the dock and arrived. The sails had been hoisted and all was ready. We had only to climb aboard. We had two eight-year-old deckhands that night, and they untied and push Noeta away from the dock with the skills learned from their so many years of experience at sea.
The afternoon breeze lulled to a whisper as the shadows from shore grew longer. A fish jumped with a light splash, so a line was let out. The stage was set.
“Some rum?” sounded good. We glided past a cove by that name, and the conversation wandered happily from cove to cove as we ate oysters along with fine cheeses and assorted crackers and salted nuts. Lemons and limes and ice-tinkling glasses, varnished spars and warm teak set a mood that hardly noticed a glass knocked over by a deckhand’s foot. The captain tied a monkey’s fist on the end of an idle line.
Before a gentle air, lights went on down below, china dishes clinking in the quiet as locker doors opened and closed, and up through the hatch passed south-of-the-border cuisine with beans. Then a big yellow moon rose through the trees alongshore.
We happily savored our warm meal and sailed on, admiring the scene, the river, the moon and the land on both sides, and donning sweatshirts against the cool evening, we came about to ride on the ebbing tide. The breeze was just enough to sail by, the moon just enough to see by, and the silvery water was perfectly framed by the darkly silhouetted treelined shore as we coursed down to the sea.
The Big Dipper, we thought, was looking especially fine that night, clearly showing off Alcor beside Mizar. And the Archer and Cassiopeia too. How could we have known in the bright of day how it was to be that ink-blue night? A dog heard our murmured voices and barked.
Farther on, the sea sparkled an invitation to continue on forever - something we could easily have done. Home was somewhere else though, beyond that world, a memory, and we sailed away to find it. Both our deckhands were asleep.