It’s been 2 years yesterday that my Dad (Robert) is gone. I thought of him often as we sailed up the Jersey coast. He was probably happiest when he was flying, and on summer weekends he’d most likely be found at the Brookhaven glider field or towing banners along the beach shores. We saw several small planes towing banners including a huge Geico insurance gecko.
The sun had set as a huge firey red ball definitively ending the day as it disappeared.
I went up on the bow and had a conversation with my Dad, asked him to visit me sometime, somehow, and set a little bit of his ashes floating off on our bow wave in a little leaf.
Civil twilight passed, dark came as dark as dark can come 3 miles off New Jersey. After some failed attempts at sleep I spelled Bill around 12:30. The wind was light and I had no luck using the wind vane to steer so I hand steered trying to maintain anything near our intended 22` course. My nickname being “snake wake,” this wasn’t an easy task so I kept trying to find something off in the horizon to aim for.
For a good while there was a great bright target to guide me until I realized it was actually an AIS target on our chart plotter. Commercial vessels larger than a certain size must transmit information about themselves such as length, beam, name, speed, etc. So when I clicked on the little triangle on our monitor I found out my bright guide was actually a vessel coming at me at 10.4 kts. What was it’s name? ROBERT. I tried to hail ROBERT a few times with no luck and later realized it was a tug boat by it’s dimensions and when we were closer , by it’s light configuration. Our CPA (closest point of approach) was around half a mile so it wasn’t dire, but as we neared the wind dropped so low I was losing steerage and another sailboat also making the overnight passage was checking in on the radio. I found myself standing in front of the wheel, steering behind me (which often makes me confuse left with right) with one arm, the radio in the other trying to have a half intelligent conversation, watching the chart plotter spin as our boat went severely off course in one direction then the other, and watching ROBERT’s course… way more multitasking than I had in me at 1:30 am. I got off the radio abruptly and tried to right things.
We passed, 2 ships in the night, never making contact. What a bizarre thing, beyond coincidence for me. I’ve never seen another boat named Robert and tugs usually have a first and last name like Robert McAllister, and it was the only ship we passed on my 3 hour watch. Thanks for the visit Dad.