You know that feeling of control you have when you put your foot on the brake of your car or truck to slow down or stop? Brakes don’t exist on boats. You can use your engines in reverse to slow the boat down, but for control freaks, “stopping” means lots of chewed fingernails when we pull into a new marina or when there’s heavy traffic on a river or near a port.
Aboard Prelude, my husband is the captain (in fact, he holds a professional captains license) and I’m the deckhand. That means it’s my job to get the boat ready to dock. I’m the one who hangs the fenders (a plastic tube inflated with air to keep your boat away from the wooden dock or another boat) and set the ropes. Ropes are the closest thing you get to a brake on a boat. You tie them onto metal pieces called “cleats” and how you tie them depends on whether there’s someone on the docks to catch the rope, or if you have to “catch” another cleat on the docks yourself.
Catching a cleat sounds simple, but it’s actually pretty hard. In fact, I’ve nearly fallen into the water a few times while trying to catch a cleat. On Prelude, catching a cleat on the docks means creating what looks like a lasso (loop) on a rope attached to your boat, then using a telescoping pole to loop the cleat and pull the rope tight (“cleat the rope off”). And all of this needs to be done so your boat doesn’t slam into the docks. Of course that’s never happened to us (*coughs*). I’ve gotten used to not worrying about the scrapes and dents on the sides of our boat. They’re a fact of life. To be fair, my husband is really really good at the wheel and does an amazing job using the two inboard (built-in) engines to keep the boat steady while I’m trying not to pirouette head-first into the water. Did I mention that we back into the slip almost all the time? Yeah.
Undocking is a lot easier, unless you’re wedged into a slip (boat parking space), there’s another boat only a few feet in front of you. We had one slip we used for about a year where we had to make 4-5 maneuvers to undock. Think of a really tight parking spot with only an inch or two on either side and you’ll get the picture.
We’re getting better as a team, my husband and I. Prelude is our 4th sailboat. But she’s also the largest at 38 feet long and a whopping 24 feet wide. I can’t even imagine how we’d have been able to handle her, let alone dock her, when we were first starting out. For Channukah last year, I bought Bob a T-shirt that says, “Sorry for what I said when we were docking the boat.” That shirt says it all, I think.