ABOVE— The Force 5 partially unloaded.


the KOA made me feel welcome and took an interest in my boat. The phone close to the Trans Canada highway worked, and above the rattle of the traffic rolling through, I could barely make out the voice of my aging mother. Sailing home towards Little Current


over the next three days, I parsed the trip into discrete technical cruxes that proved to be exciting but not unreasonably dif- ficult. After spending my third night at Spanish Marina, I naively thought that I would easily pass again through the gut of Little Detroit, but a strong current pushed by an easterly wind quickly dispelled any such notion. I held my breathe as I squeaked through the channel on a series of riffling tacks. Te narrowing complexity of Oak Bay, hidden behind Hotham and Lee Islands, and garnished with many barely concealed rocks, was as beautiful and technical a sail as I have yet expe- rienced. Traversing around Strawberry Island, beyond the far side of the swing bridge, necessitated tying the spars of the mast to the deck and paddling through the aptly named Little Current. Eventually the favorable winds died, and along with it, my ambition to sail to Killarney. Almost lost to me in middle-age now,


is a fragment of memory involving sail- ing and my mother. We are at the family cottage and I am perhaps 11 or 12. At this point I can sail, but have not taken


SMALL CRAFT ADVISOR


a sailboat out on my own. It seems the next logical step, but all I have access to is a ridiculous inflatable raſt with clumsy plastic oars. I know that one of the oars can be positioned over the back to act as a rudder, but a sail? How does a boy fashion a sail, and a mast, so that he can run down- wind, unfettered perhaps for the first time from the care of his parents? My mother proposes to help, and I agree, as long as she doesn’t tell anyone of my simple plan. She rigs something that resembles a mast I can liſt into place aſter having rowed upwind across the lake, and she fashions a tarp or tablecloth cover into something that will catch a summer breeze. My mother has become my confederate in this over- whelming need to sail alone this day. Everything is arranged. I shove off the


shoreline, my sail neatly hidden away from the curious eyes of other boys on the lake, unkind youths who will laugh and mock me, boys who will give chase in row or mo- tor boats and spoil this beautiful moment. Across the lake I go. Into a quiet cove I


row and liſt the makeshiſt rig, transform- ing the raft into something straining to be a sailboat. A puff of wind and we are going. Wildly happy, I am ruddering with a plastic oar rammed under my arm. Te cottage, and all the safety that it implies, feels miles and miles across the lake. In many ways, it is the first time I have truly


15


sailed: I am free to run with the wind, land on shore, swim, build a fire, and fall asleep if I wish. Life is odd. Almost forty years later,


in doing the same thing on Lake Huron’s North Channel, I sense acutely that I am trying to driſt back to that memory, to that first moment, under the sun and a sail and alone. Alone, with the wind. A wind that can move stones. •SCA•


Te author works for the Madison, Wiscon- sin School District when he is not paddling rivers, sailing canoes, or wandering through the woods on snowshoes.


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