Canoes, kayaks, sailboats and me
Sherbrooke Record · 13 hours ago
by Matthew Mccully · Townships Weekend
After decades of a boating hiatus, I finally got back on the water
By David Winch
Have you ever had an interest that was all-consuming, but that then … disappeared? Maybe you once played chess regularly, or shot hoops, or even walked and groomed dogs and cats?
Then that activity just sorta disappeared. Poof! It wasn’t that you disliked your pastime, just that life moves on and old habits go with it. That’s my story with boating.
Summer and boats went together for me. Never a powerboat, and no motors. I always had a horror of big loud boats sending wake out in all directions. And I did little fishing or racing. It was mostly just paddling down rivers and sailing on Canadian lakes.
But there was a long gap in there. Several decades when I almost never got on the water in any type of small craft, canoe or kayak. Recently, that has all turned around.
Canoeing adventures
Somewhere in the late 1950s my father acquired a bright red, 16-foot cedar-strip canoe. I still recall vividly the smell of its cedar wood and the smooth weave of the wicker seats. We paddled that canoe many summers on Lake Simcoe in southern Ontario.
The Winch family habitually owned smaller European cars that were dwarfed by a rooftop canoe, and we did not always have a suitable roof rack to transport one. So eventually, after not getting much use for decades, our canoe mostly adorned the garage wall.
As a young teen, I somehow accumulated more than $100 once at a summer job. My dream was to immediately purchase a sailboat at Canadian Tire, a thick-Styrofoam hull adorned with a triangular sail, called a Snark. It was absolutely unpretentious but seaworthy. I happily sailed it close to shore in Lake Ontario and on the St Lawrence River near the Thousand Islands. (Recently, I googled the Snark: it still has fans.)
My resourceful mother, sensing this interest, helped me dramatically improve those sailing skills. In the summer of 1970, she signed me up on a sail-training vessel, the brigantine St. Lawrence II, a huge 72-foot two-master docked at Kingston. The young crew quickly learned the ropes, literally, and we sailed off around Lake Ontario.
Trust me, that Great Lake is ocean sized. On one crossing, we endured huge storm waves, whose blue-green valleys sucked the bow steeply downward then channelled rivers of wash and foam across the deck. It is surprising we all got through those storms and big rollers without any kids getting swept off the deck.
Becoming more cautious, I took to small-lake sailing and became a regular skipper on Albacore-class sailboats. Profiles describe them as “a 4.57 m (15 ft) two-person planing dinghy.” Calling them a dinghy seems a bit insulting, but an Albacore could be handled by a small crew of friends and was fun to race occasionally. Albacores are known for their sloop rig, deep centreboard and rudder, making them highly maneuverable.
Skippers have to develop a sense of wind direction and how to trim the sails accordingly. “Helms-a-lee! Ready to come about!” was my naval-sounding refrain at the tiller.
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