Monthly Archives: November 2015

Through the Magic Window: Sailing As Meditation

14 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by in Why Go Sailing

≈ 22 Comments

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A funny thing happens, off sailing for days, or in the intensity of one long day with an assortment of conditions. For a while I thought that this was all about fatigue, that odd experience of being much, much less connected to the necessities of daily routines. Small mistakes, or details overlooked, and a focus that feels dreamy, rather than the usual, grounded, routines of the day. After those long two or three day passages – of which there have now been four, this year – it happened again that it was the day after, even after having had a good night’s sleep, that I was prone to those odd mistakes. This year I became especially aware of the feeling of dreamy, altered reality that went with it all. As the year has gone on, I’ve found this happening even after long single days of major effort, with no overnight sailing at all.

Often, those extended, hard-push days come because of a schedule that involves trying to visit with somebody, who will not be available a day or three later, after the amount of time that would be involved if the sailing schedule were more relaxed. So after having sailed hard, on what would normally be a rest day, I find myself in to a dock, and visiting. Oddly again, by part way through the day of activity and interaction at the dock, rather than being more tired, and more affected by fatigue, instead I am back into that “normal” place. No more unobservant mistakes, no more sense of dreamy unreality to the tasks of the day. If it’s time to sail away later, to someplace for the night, that goes forward with the usual grounded routines solidly in place.

Meanwhile, there is this: sailing, for me, and single-handing, particularly, have that quality of “I just have to do this.” A pull, that when honored feels exactly right. When neglected, there is the feeling that I am missing something vitally important. All these years, I could not have told anybody more than this: that I simply am drawn to doing this, with a sense of both urgency and deep desire.
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Along the way, time in the boat has contributed to increasing strength, well-being, and overall health. Through the long winters ashore these have often slipped, but have returned again with a good long dose of boat time. Once again oddly, if I hang around on the boat for too long in one place, with friends, enjoying the fun of life near town, that magic shift begins to lose traction. I’ve begun to think that oh well, just being on the boat is not the magic cure.

Then for whatever reason, it’s time to be off to sea again. Sitting with exhaustion, and those long, long days that unfold themselves when the weather is just right to sail, and just right the next day, and the one after that. With a destination in mind, it makes no sense to decline a good wind; doing so can mean an extra week, and/or long slogs upwind, or worse, without wind at all, floating in place for half a day or more, if one has the poor judgment to raise the anchor in the first place (nevermind that the weather report said that there would be a breeze). So in those times that are just right, it’s off to sea again, communing with the wind, and the tide, and the long, long days, sometimes into nights.
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Surprisingly, in those long runs strength returns. Along with that dreamy feeling, somehow interwoven with fatigue, but I am learning that although they are interwoven, that dreamy feeling and fatigue are not the same thing. The dreamy feeling has complications: it can feel like loss of cognitive ability – and in some ways, it is. Although mistakes are not catastrophic, they can be pesky.

In a conversation about all this a few weeks ago, I talked about concerns of losing mental capabilities, and fears of something along the lines of dementia. But I got an interesting response back (thank you, Lori): that when one is doing deep inner work, in a big way, sometimes one ends up in an altered state that is something like meditation, and in that place, the normal everyday stuff can slip away. I heard this and thought, yes, that feels right, somehow true to my experience. This was relaxing – I mostly stopped worrying about dementia – and it was illuminating, especially in relation to sailing, and that dreamy state. As in, sailing off for days or weeks at a time is an entry into a different kind of awareness. Sailing requires focus, and at the same time, that very focus can be the pathway to disengaging from the concerns and cares of one’s land-bound life. Rather like meditation.

This connection between sailing and a meditation-like state, and the experience of healing, goes together with the material that is taught by the brain retraining folks, particularly in the work by Ashok Gupta. Gupta focuses quite a bit on stillness meditation as a primary tool for recovery from chronic illness that is related to limbic system issues. (See previous posts, linked below, for more on this.) Myself, I don’t ordinarily consider myself somebody who is good at meditation. In brain retraining, I have been more drawn to the techniques offered by Annie Hopper (also referenced in those same links), which do not particularly emphasize stillness meditation. And yet, here is sailing, and this meditative-like state, and my experience of improved well-being, if I spend enough time in that place. It’s not just being on the boat; the kind of sailing matters. Off, and alone, with enough time to be totally immersed.

This is the kind of sailing, and boat time overall, that lets one press into that place of somewhat altered reality. Partly fatigue, but partly something else. It’s liberating to go to sea, any way around. That it has this aspect that is something like meditation is not something that I’ve thought about before. I’ve just known that whatever that feeling is, I want it. And it feels deeply important, far beyond the glitter of an interesting toy. Come to find out, the mechanics of this healing are becoming perceptible.

So this is what I’ve learned: the motion of the boat is good, and I’ve known for a long time that it works rather like passive range of motion exercises. Muscles, joints, and everything else, that are over-tight, or strained, loosen in the process of relaxing into the gentle shifts of a small boat. Not so much in snappy, uncomfortable waves, but with attention and some luck one can mostly avoid those. The less obvious benefits of the sailboat process come from that state of meditation, that arrives without fanfare, often completely invisible as it interweaves with fatigue. As I’m learning to recognize that meditative feeling, I’m hoping to become more fluent in working with it. I am told that as it becomes more familiar, it’s easier to move in and out of a place of meditation, shifting between that dreamy state, and the requirements of everyday life, with more fluidity and ease. It’s the jarring of the transitions that I think contributes to the odd mistakes, especially when one has no idea what’s happening in the first place. Recognizing the process should go a long way toward helping with that.

The other obvious question, having come this far, is whether once recognizing and becoming familiar with that state of meditation, it can then become possible to move into it regardless of outside surroundings. As in, do I have to go sailing to find that place? I like sailing anyway, for all the many reasons: the water, the motion, the intriguing challenges of rigging, wind, and current. The absolute, extraordinary beauty of light on water, clouds and sky, and wild shorelines of all varieties. But sailing having shown the way, having opened the window, perhaps it is also possible to enter the feeling of that place, from anywhere at all. And by entering the feeling of that place, to have access to the healing that comes of residing within it. It’s a long way around, compared to basic brain retraining protocols. Heaven knows that making this boat project happen has been a vast undertaking. But sometimes the long way around, with all its depth and richness, is just the perfect thing. So I’m paying attention, feeling the perfect gift of the opportunity to watch how the entire process unfolds.

In the meantime, there is more sailing this fall, with a plan to haul the boat in a few weeks in Gouldsboro, and to settle in for the winter there in the new house. Presently I’m in Smith Cove, outside of Castine, watching the rain. It’s a snug place to be, with gale warnings on the radio, and time to sit still, and write.

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[mostly written in September, 2015]

Previous posts on brain retraining:
http://sailingauklet.com/2014/07/28/brain-retraining/ (skip to bottom for resource links)
http://sailingauklet.com/2014/10/26/brain-retraining-on-board/

Ashore for the Winter

03 Tuesday Nov 2015

Posted by in How Does This Work, the boat

≈ 2 Comments

Just over a week ago both the boat and I came off the water for the winter. The timing was good – a few days later a storm came by that blew at about 40 knots, not all that far out to sea from here. It was lovely to watch the rain, and the wind in the trees, from the snug side of a cozy window on land.

The boat was also snug,IMGP3271
happily inside the mostly-completed boat shed, entirely out of the weather for the first time since it left the shipyard where it was built, in 2008. It’s feeling very luxurious to not have to worry about the PVC frame and tarp process. It’s feeling even more luxurious to be able to climb into the boat without wriggling around under the driveway winter arrangement just to make a foray into the cabin.

Hauling the boat out of the water was interesting, in this new and different location. The ramp that was nicely out of the wind and waves, just a mile by water from the new house, is not as steep as the ones we’ve used before (steep is good, when it comes to ramps for boats with keels). There aren’t photos of how this went, as every single person was completely involved in trying to make things work, but we’ll try for that next time. For years a webbing tow strap has been part of the boat towing kit that has ridden around in the van, with all the other boat hauling paraphernalia, from hitch balls to tiedowns and wheel chocks. The tow strap was still in its wrapper, up until this past week. Finally it got put to use.

This tow strap procedure was quite theoretical, being something that I had read about and thought through, but never tried. When a ramp is too gradual to allow the trailer into water deep enough to float the boat without dousing the tow vehicle, it’s possible to unhitch the trailer from the vehicle (with the little jack wheel on the trailer tongue in its down, load-bearing position), attach the tow strap to the trailer hitch, and let the trailer farther down into the water. It helps to take a turn with the tow strap around the hitch ball on the vehicle, so the trailer doesn’t just pull the person holding the tow strap right into the drink along with the trailer. Once the trailer is in far enough for the boat to float onto it, the wheels are chocked; somebody has to do some rather serious wading to manage this. Melissa brought her wetsuit, which was a good thing because there was frost on everything the morning of the day we did this maneuver, and we were out there at about 8 AM to catch the tide.IMGP9575IMGP9580

(Getting back to the story… )
Once the trailer is securely chocked and the boat pulled into place and secured on the trailer, then the tow strap can be hooked onto the tow vehicle, and up you come, out of the water. We had some suspense about the plastic chocks, and what would happen to them next when the trailer wasn’t there anymore, but they floated neatly up to the surface and were easily retrieved. Once out of the water, the trailer is chocked again, and then reattached to the tow vehicle.

In a more orderly world, meaning one in which you had not first tried to get the boat onto the trailer without this process, with various complications related to falling tide and a boat half on the trailer, it would make more sense to chock the trailer before it’s in the water. Then you could unhitch, hook the tow strap onto the trailer, move the tow vehicle farther up the ramp, hook the other end of the tow strap to the vehicle, and let the vehicle ease the trailer into the deeper water, where it would be chocked again. Next time! That could’ve been done this time also, if we had thought it up, but as it was things worked out okay regardless, thanks largely to the seriously-strong member of our boat-hauling team, Richard (seen this past spring). IMGP8339

The AUKLET trailer also has a telescoping tongue extension, and at steeper ramps that’s enough to do the trick for floating the boat on or off, even with the long shallow keel that requires somewhat deeper water. It’s nice to know that the tow strap arrangement actually works, for when the tongue extension is not enough to keep the tow vehicle’s wheels out of the water. Tires in the water are okay, but nobody wanted to see the hubs and brakes of a good truck down there in the salt.

The concrete ramp that we used, at the head of Joy Bay in Steuben, has narrow horizontal grooves for traction. The small trailer jack wheel rolled over these grooves easily. Some concrete ramps, such as the nice new one on the Connecticut River in Holyoke, Mass, are made of individual concrete slabs with a more substantial horizontal gap between the concrete sections. I would have concern in trying this tow strap arrangement on that ramp, probably wanting something to put under that small tongue-jack wheel as a runway across those gaps. Otherwise, if the wheel were to turn sideways and fall in a gap while the tow vehicle and trailer were still moving, that could be the end of the tongue jack, with much breaking, falling and scraping and difficulty getting the tongue both up the ramp and lifted back onto the tow hitch. It was with great relief that I first saw our concrete ramp on Joy Bay with its narrow indented traction grooves, when I went to look a couple of days ahead of time. I’m not perfectly sure what I would use, on the other kind of concrete ramp. A simple board, plywood or one by something, would want to float rather than stay in place. A couple of convenient pieces of stiff sheet metal, leapfrogging one in front of the other, might be nice, or perhaps a weighted board… If anybody has experience with this and would like to comment, I’d love to hear.

As it was, the trailer cooperated nicely, the boat came out of the water, the rig came down (okay, that took a little while), and off we went. It was a treat to go only 3 miles or so by road from the ramp to the house, rather than the long drive from somewhere near the ocean back to Holyoke. Moving to Maine is lovely on so many levels.IMGP3243

Many thanks to everybody who made this haul-out work: Melissa and Richard, again with their truck, Suzanne, who does so much to organize the land side of this whole operation, and our new neighbor in Gouldsboro, Chubba, who came out so early in the morning to help.

This all took place on Saturday, October 24, somewhat more than 5 1/2 months after the spring launch, on May 2, in the Connecticut River. During these months I was on shore in the new house for a total of nine nights, over three different visits; all those other nights, and most of those days, I was aboard AUKLET. It’s a special thing to live on the boat for so many months, and it’s special again to move back onto land. Many thanks, once more, to everybody who helped to make all of this possible.