Winston’s Sloop and the Boat Shop at Arbour Bay

Before dawn on the morning of his seventh birthday, Winston’s father crept into his room and whispered, “We’re going on an adventure.”

Groggy and confused, Winston needed help getting dressed and his father placed a muffin into his hands that he could eat as they descended the hill on foot toward the harbour at the edge of town. Waiting by the dock and huddled between the luxury schooners was a small boat with a short mast and a sail and outfitted with oars for rowing. Still drowsy from the early morning wake up call, Winston’s father placed him in the boat and cast them off into the bay. Barely able to keep his eyes open, Winston fell asleep.

“Wake up, Winston,” his father whispered. “Look!

Winston lifted his head and looked out toward the far side of the bay where the sun was rising. It splashed every colour of spring upon the water and into the sky and it was the most beautiful thing Winston had ever seen in his life.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” his father asked rhetorically. “Sunrises are often beautiful just like this the morning after a stormy day. Never forget, Winston, when it rains a resplendent sunrise is right around the corner.”

Winston had travelled to the bay many times but had never seen it from the water and had never seen it at this time of day. It was the first time that he realized that something he once thought was ordinary could be beautiful if he looked at it from a different point of view.

“Look at the water,” his father said.

The water in the bay was perfectly still and aglow with every sparkle of the morning so, as he peered over the side, Winston could see himself reflecting back. “It’s me!” he exclaimed.

His father giggled. “Now don’t look at the water, look beyond the water. Look as deep as you can.”

It took a moment for his eyes to adjust their focus beyond the sight of himself looking back at him but eventually, Winston was able to see all the way to the bottom of the bay. He could see the ripples in the sand at the very bottom, the grass growing on the rocks, and the many colours of the schools of fish. “Fish!” he exclaimed.

“That’s right,” his father said handing Winston a pole. “Drop the hook into the water. You never know, you might catch something.”

Winston had never felt this way before. Every time a gentle breeze would blow across the bay he could feel it on his skin making the small hairs on his arm stand on end and he would watch the small ripples that the winds would create over the water and how they would make the trees over by the harbour sway and dance. He could see his house and the town, his hometown, at the top of the hill above the bay and he knew that that was where he came from. He looked over at his father and recognized him not just as the man who ran the house in which he lived, but as the person who had brought him here, on this day, and given him this wonderful gift. On his seventh birthday, Winston realized that he loved his father, and not because he was a child and he needed his father to care for him, but because he did not doubt that his father loved him.

When Winston and his father returned home, Winston’s mother was there to greet them. “Happy birthday, my love!” she said while smothering Winston with kisses. “Did you boys catch anything?”

Up until then, Winston hadn’t even realized that they had not caught a single fish that day, but when he was asked he started to cry.

“Why are you crying?” his father asked. “You had fun, right? Life isn’t about catching fish every time you go out fishing, it’s about appreciating where you are and what you’re doing, and we did that.”

Winston knew that his father was right, but he was only seven years old and his tears were for nothing and that he still had growing up to do. He wiped away the tears from his eyes and asked, “Can we go on the boat and go fishing for my birthday again next year?”

“Absoloo!” his father replied.

 

Before dawn on the morning of his eighth birthday, Winston crept into his parents’ room and whispered to his father, “Daddy, get your cup of coffee and let’s go.”

Winston hadn’t been able to sleep the entire night because he was so excited to be out on the water for the sunrise. With a smile from ear to ear he hopped down the hill to the harbour, jumped into the boat, and cast off from the docks with his father into the bay. Though it had not rained the day before, it was another perfect sunrise and the air was still and the water was calm.

Winston and his father cast their lines into the water and caught four fish that day. Winston could barely contain his excitement. He showed his mother the fish that they had caught and she was enormously proud of her son. “Dad, dad! Can we go fishing in the bay for my birthday every year?” Winston asked.

“Absoloo!” his father replied.

So the next year and the year after and the year after that, Winston and his father travelled on Winston’s birthday to the harbour and would hop in their boat and cast off into the bay and go fishing and it became Winston’s most cherished tradition. One year it even rained, but that was not enough to deter Winston nor diminish his excitement.

 

Before dawn on the morning of his thirteenth birthday, Winston barged into his parent’s room and said to his father, “C’mon, dad, let’s go!”

His father, groggy and tired, rolled over in his bed and said to his son, “You’re getting older now, I thought we could do something different for your birthday this year.”

“Something different? Why would we do something different? C’mon, let’s go!”

Winston’s father reluctantly got dressed and trudged down in the darkness to the harbour and accompanied his wide-eyed son onto the boat as they cast off into the bay. When the sun had risen, Winston handed his father a fishing pole and they sat in the silence of a most pleasant morning on the water.

“You know, Winston,” his father said, “you can take the boat on the water any time you like and you’re old enough now that you don’t need me to come with you.”

Winston was shocked. “You mean that all these years we could have been coming here on Mondays and Sundays and every other day too?”

“Absoloo!” his father replied. “Listen, if you’re really interested we can even save up some money and get you a better boat so that you can sail further out and explore a bit.”

 

A year went by when Winston showed his father the money he had saved and asked about buying a new and bigger boat.

“Good for you!” his father said. “I’m proud of you.”

“But Dad,” Winston said. “I don’t think I want to get a new boat.”

“Why not?” his father asked.

“There is something special about the boat we have. Maybe we can just fix it up a little and make it better?”

“Absoloo!” his father replied.

Winston and his father went down to the boat shop by the bay to ask O’Malley about ways to improve their boat.

When Winston entered the boat shop his eyes lit up with excitement. A man with greying hair and a wide smile approached Winston and asked, “What can I do for you today, son?”

Winston was shy and nervous and didn’t know what to ask for.

“Well go on, Winston,” his father prompted him. “Tell him what you want.”

“I want to make my boat better,” Winston whispered.

“What’s that, son?” O’Malley asked.

“I said I want to make my boat,” Winston muttered shyly, “uh, better.”

“Well, what kinda boatchya got?

“I don’t know. A little white one.”

Winston’s father giggled and pointed out to the bay so that O’Malley could see. “It’s just that small dingy over there with the short mast. It’s got a sail but we never use it. Winston likes to fish.”

“Well okay, then!” O’Malley exclaimed. “At least now we know what we’ve got to work with. Come with me!”

O’Malley led Winston and his father into a big room with all kinds of wheels and rudders and masts and sails. “Let me show you one of our most popular items,” he began. “This is an anchor. If you like to fish and you want to catch bigger fish, you’ll need to go out a ways. When you get to a spot where there will be fish, you drop this down into the water and hold the chain until you feel it hit the bottom. This will make sure that your boat doesn’t go nowhere while you’re fishing.”

Winston’s boat didn’t have an anchor and O’Malley’s pitch made sense to him because he and his father never really ventured out more than a couple hundred metres into the bay.

“Now if I was you,” O’Malley continued, “and you’re really serious about boating.”

“Oh, I am, sir! I really am!” Winston interrupted.

“Well, then you should replace that mast you’ve got there with a taller one, not too tall though. And you should get yourself a boom as well as a proper sail and some ropes and you’ll need to outfit the boat with a few cleats so you’ve got something to tie those ropes to. And lastly, you’re gonna need a rudder to be able to steer her. You do that and you should have yourself a little boat that would be seaworthy enough to properly sail around the bay.”

Within a few days, Winston had the sails up on his boat and was using the winds to carry himself from one side of the bay to the other. Every day he would come home for supper and all he would do was talk about his daily afterschool sailing adventures in the bay. At school, sailing was the only thing Winston could talk about. He found ways to work in some kind of sailing theme into all of his projects and when he could, he would take his friends out in his boat and sail them from one end of the bay to the other.

“What are you going to name her?” Winston’s father asked him one day.

“What do you mean?” Winston asked.

“You should name your boat. Names are a gift and everything that is important in life needs a name.”

Winston gave it a lot of thought and decided to name his boat Sopranino.

His friends could never quite understand what Winston loved so much about being in his boat and being on the water. Occasionally they would accompany him to the docks and go sailing, but after the initial thrill wore off, they started to turn down his invitations and found other things to do on weekends and after school. Winston’s mother and father couldn’t quite understand the obsession either but encouraged Winston to pursue his passion and supported him so that he could take sailing lessons and by the time he was graduating from high school Winston had become an accomplished sailor. He had even competed in local sailing and fishing competitions and won medals at both. But competition did not thrill Winston. He was happiest just being on the water, especially at sunrise, feeling the wind and watching the sparkles of light dance on the waves.

 

By his twenties, Winston was sailing far beyond the bay where he lived and would sail out for days and even weeks at a time. He mastered navigation and how to read charts and find his position by using the stars. Semaphore became like a second language and he also learned how to sail in all kinds of waters and in all kinds of conditions. But Sopranino had become his real project. Over the years he had used his money to make small incremental improvements to that little dinghy that he and his father had first cast off into the bay in on his seventh birthday. He had enlarged the hull and the keel, heightened the mast, and added a jib. He had made renovations to the hull so that it could hold his fishing equipment and he even installed a toilet with proper plumbing. Using nothing but his fishing pole, a desalination device to turn seawater into drinking water, and his understanding of the tides, Winston was discovering that he could live at sea.

 

“I think I’m going to go away,” he told his parents one day.

“What do you mean?” they asked.

“I think I am going to take Sopranino and live on the sea.”

The idea seemed preposterous to his parents when they first heard it and they laughed thinking that he couldn’t possibly be serious.

Winston brought his father aboard Sopranino and took him out sailing into the bay where they had fished together when he was young.

“Dad,” Winston began, “I was serious when I said I was going to live out on the sea.”

“I don’t understand it, Winston,” his father replied. “You and this boat have been all over the world together why would you want to just live out here on the water? You don’t have to live in the town where you were born, that’s not what I’m saying, but live somewhere that your mother and I can at least visit.”

“I don’t know what it is, Dad. I love you and mom and I love this place and all of the places in the world that I have visited. But I really only feel like myself when I’m sailing Sopranino.”

“I may not understand why it is sailing, but I only feel like my own self when I am your father and that means giving you everything you need so you can feel like your own self.”

Winston’s father hugged him stronger than he had ever hugged him in his life and said, “Come on, let’s go to O’Malley’s and make sure you have everything that you need.”

“You mean it, Dad? You’re Okay?” Winston asked.

“Absoloo!” his father replied.

That was the last time the two of them would ever sail together.

Winston and his father walked into O’Malley’s boat shop and Winston explained his plans. O’Malley led them into the big hall filled with masts and sails and walked over to a shelf and grabbed an item and said, “Let me show you one of our most popular items. This is an anchor.”

“No, no, no,” Winston interrupted, “The anchor I have is just fine. What I need is to upgrade the masts from aluminum to a carbon composite and my sails to PBO fibres. My bilge needs a redesign because I will need to fit more things in there which means we will need to extend the hull a bit. I will need some solar panels and a larger battery to collect power while I am out at sea and I will need to upgrade my communications equipment so my dash will also need a new CPU.”

O’Malley giggled, “Alright, son, it sounds like you know exactly what you will need.”

“I do,” Winston replied. “And I will come around daily to oversee and help with all of the modifications.”

It took a few months, but by the time O’Malley could boast of having completed Sopranino’s overhaul, Winston reckoned that she was one of the finest seagoing vessels on the planet.

Winston broke a bottle of champagne on the hull and hugged his parents and sailed off into the bay and into the sea beyond.

Years passed and Winston and Sopranino sailed all over the world together never settling in any harbour for more than a few days and rarely returning to the same place twice. Together they had many adventures and crisscrossed the globe more times than Winston could count. No one understood why this type of life appealed to Winston so much, but it was during these years at sea away from his childhood home and the bay where he grew up that were the happiest of his life. Not every day was perfect and some days a storm would roll in but Winston and Sopranino were steadfast and durable and prepared to weather just about anything the seas could throw at them. And every morning Winston would emerge from below the decks and stand out upon the bow to see the radiant sunrise of a new day in the wonderful life he had designed for himself. To walk Sopranino’s decks with a trailing wind and a glass of water in his hand, seeing the clouds gather and break apart each day and never in the same way twice, was for Winston a tremendous source of pride and joy. It was in those silent moments alone at sea that were his most unique and cherished experiences. When he would shave his face or brush his teeth he would look in the mirror and take a moment and a deep breath. ‘Who are you?’ his mind would speak out in meditation. ‘I am Sopranino and Sopranino is me. We are one together alone and alone together as one. We see in the sea what the sea sees in me – a home far from where we come from, for we belong far from home.’

 

Winston woke one morning with a grey mist hovering over the sea and frantic calls pouring in over the radio. A storm of incomprehensible size and ferocity was swirling through the news and threatening to cover all of the world’s oceans and every village in every hemisphere with wind and rain and hail and thunder. Warnings and distress signals were sent out in every direction to seek a safe harbour and prepare for the unimaginable. Winston thrust his gaze to the heavens and put his ear to the water and watched as every boat suddenly altered course and returned to port. A light breeze blew across the water sending small rivulets of seawater careening upon Sopranino’s hull as clouds billowed up from the sea and a jagged bolt of lightning shot across the sky. Waves began to form gently rocking Sopranino from side to side and thunder growled in the distance. Alone at sea, Winston reefed his sails and prepared for the oncoming storm.

Winston recalled his father’s words to him when he was seven: “When it rains a resplendent sunrise is right around the corner”. But for days and weeks, the wind howled and the rain swept in across the water. The whole world was covered in darkness because the sun could never break through the clouds and the storm would not abate. It took all of his strength and energy to keep his boat from capsizing and for the first time in his life, Winston was afraid of the sea. And, also for the first time, he doubted his father. Shivering and soaked through, and with a broken heart, Winston adjusted his heading back to the bay where he grew up. It was time to bring Sopranino back to port and wait upon terra firma, where there was surer footing, for the storm to wane.

Winston returned to the bay where he had grown up and dropped his anchor and fastened Sopranino to the docks. The trees along the water’s edge had been felled by the relentless winds and mud was slipping from the surrounding hills through the streets of the town that had gone silent. Everyone was afraid to go outside. Winston opened the door to his childhood home and saw his mother sitting quietly by the fire as she mustered a half-hearted smile. In the years since he had gone, his father had passed away, the house now seemed too small for him, and the joy in his mother’s soul seemed a distant memory. The storm had beaten all of them. His childhood friends had long since moved away, all of the old cafés and restaurants had been boarded up or had gone out of business, and the contrast of the green grass and the crystal blue water that had illuminated his childhood memories had all bled into an indistinguishable shade of grey. Within a single day of returning to port, Winston realized that there was no comfort to be found there.

For weeks and months, Winston sat by the fire with his mother in their lonely repetitive existence listening to the raindrops fall upon the rooftop and clatter upon the windows. Months passed and the storm raged on rarely showing signs of ever stopping and the ache inside of him grew with every passing day. At least once a day, Winston would brave the storm outside and travel down to the pier to check on Sopranino. Many of the boats by the docks had either sunk or been so damaged by the rains and the winds that they would never sail again. Sopranino was still afloat but she was beginning to show signs of wear and tear from bouncing up against the docks. Her decks were drenched and looking weather-beaten and her sails were soaked and heavy. She, just like Winston, wanted their old life back and to be out at sea.

One day, Winston went creeping around to O’Malley’s looking for the old man who had built Sopranino. The old boat shop by the bay was mostly boarded up but there were faint signs of life so Winston went knocking on the shutters calling out for O’Malley. A man unfastened the latch on the door and opened it enough to see through. Winston had to hold onto the side of the shop in order to not be blown away. “Can I help you?” the man asked.

“Hi, I’m looking for O’Malley,” Winston said.

“I’m O’Malley,” the man replied.

“I’m sorry,” Winston went on, “but you’re not the O’Malley I remember. The O’Malley I remember, the O’Malley that I’m looking for, was older.

“You must mean my father,” the man replied. “Sadly, he passed away a few years ago. I run the boat shop now. Not exactly the best business to be in at the moment as you can imagine.”

“Can you help me with my boat then?” Winston asked.

“What? Are you thinking of sailing or something?”

“Yes.”

“In this? Are you mad?”

“What would it take to make a sailing boat so indestructible it could weather any storm?”

“Well, do you have a boat already?”

“I do.”

“Which one?”

Winston pointed out to the dock and picked out Sopranino and said, “That one!”

The man invited Winston in from out of the rain and brought him into the great hall with all of the boating equipment and said: “Listen, I know your boat. That is one fine seagoing vessel and, to be honest, there aren’t that many ways she can be improved upon. But let me show you one of our most popular items. This is an anchor”.

Winston listened to O’Malley’s son as he went through just about every knick-knack and spare part in the whole shop. And when O’Malley’s son got through the last of the items in the shop he mentioned one last thing: “Once you make all of those upgrades then the last thing you need is an experienced captain with absolutely no fear.”

Winston gave his situation a moment’s thought and determined that there was very little he could do at this point to improve Sopranino. He bought the anchor, thanked O’Malley for his and his father’s years of service, and walked back up the hill to the home where he grew up.

“Mom,” Winston began. “I think I need to return to the sea.”

“I know,” she said.

“You understand that I can’t just sit here and wait for this storm to end because it looks like it never will.”

“I know.”

“I don’t see a sunrise coming and I fear that I might have lost all hope. I just don’t want to be afraid anymore.”

“I know.”

“I could die out there.”

“My boy! The one thing that I have learned after all of these years, the one thing of which I feel absolutely certain, is that whether any of us chooses to live on the sea or upon the land, no matter what we are all destined to become driftwood.”

“I love you, mom.”

“Promise me you’ll write.”

“Absoloo!”

 

When he was ready, Winston made the journey down the hill through the rain and mud to the docks by the bay and outfitted his boat as best he could in the inclement weather. He unhitched his boat from the pier and set out into the bay. As Sopranino began to sail away inch by inch from the shore, the wind suddenly began to die down and for a moment the rain stopped. The sky was still dark and threatening but, for a moment, it was calm over the bay – the calmest it had been in months – and Winston’s heart began to fill with hope. But Winston was still reluctant to unfurl his sails for the storm could pick up again at any moment.

Sopranino went gliding out of the bay and into the open sea. The dark clouds swirled and danced overhead and Winston could feel the wind picking up again and the waves beginning to rise. The waves became so large that they would send Sopranino’s nose rising into the air and then crashing straight back down into the sea. The storm was upon him again, but Winston and Sopranino had braved angrier seas than this and Winston still, for at least a short while, felt in control.

Suddenly a streak of lightning went blazing across the sky lighting the whole world on fire. Such a roar of thunder came upon the sea that Winston swore his heart must have skipped a beat from shock. And then the heavens opened bringing the rain spraying down in heavy sheets. The full fury of the Earth’s great storm was raging on and Winston and Sopranino were in the middle of it.

Winston didn’t care about manning his sails or steadying the rudder. He and Sopranino were now at the mercy of the sea. Instead, Winston bent down to unfasten the cleats that secured his anchor to the boat. Grabbing the whole of the anchor and the chains in his arms Winston steadied himself and marched out to the front of the bow. With Sopranino swaying in every direction, Winston mustered all of his strength and heaved the anchor overboard as the whole of it, chain and all, swiftly sank to the bottom to be forever lost at sea. And wiping the relentless rain from his eyes, with the winds so cold it turned to sleet and hail, Winston strode out to the pulpit without a shred of fear in his heart. He puffed out his chest in defiance of the terror and anguish that this mighty storm had wrought upon every living soul – it could rob him of fair winds and pleasant sailing; it could wipe the smile from the face of every living person; it could steal away joy and take the lives of those he loved; but Winston was not about to let the storm also have his hope. Winston loved his father too much to believe his words a lie and, if a resplendent sunrise were to come, Winston would be at sea or at the bottom of it. He stared out into the sky which flashed another furious bolt of lightning. And in the wailing mists of that unending storm he stretched his arms out to the sky in surrender and cried out, “Come on thunder!”