Sailing was always a guilty pleasure for my father. He loved it more than motorboating, but nobody in the family, especially my mother, shared his interest. As kids we just thought it was kind of boring. He tried to harvest some enthusiasm by teaching us how to sail his Sunfish and by making us learn all the nautical terms associated with sailing, but we were just incorrigible. And my dad loved spending time with his family so much that he would always end up trading in a sailboat every few summers to buy a motorboat that the family would get excited about.
     He would smile at us over his shoulder as we would hoot and holler from whatever vessel was attached to the towline, but he was a sailor at heart and we all knew it.
     So when he came to the point in his career where he could afford both a sailboat and a motorboat everybody was thrilled for him. Even my mom, who swims in the ocean three times per summer and never gets her hair wet, was happy for my father. 
     There was a wooden plaque in our Cape Cod house growing up that said the two happiest days in a sailor’s life were the day that he buys the boat and the day that he sells it.
     I had witnessed verification of this half a dozen times through the years, and I was with my dad on the most recent of happiest days when he attached a trailer to the car carrying a nameless 12-foot Beetle Cat. We had driven up from the Cape to Duxbury to pick it up from a guy who was selling it to buy a Boston Whaler. My dad told him he knew how he felt.
     On the ride back I could sense my dad’s silent determination to take the boat out that afternoon, but he was well aware of the chromosome of sailing disinterest that I had inherited from my mother. I was happy to see him happy though and I made up my mind that I would go with him.
     “So are we gonna take it out today,” I encouraged.
     He briefly took a break from his rearview mirror admiration of the craft and asked, “ya think?”
     “Sure, why not,” I suggested
     “Well if we get home in time,” he said, making it seem like I was the one who was really looking forward to a maiden voyage.
     When we pulled into the harbor nearest our house the afternoon sun vanished suddenly. It was surrounded by a crowd of dark gray cumulus clouds like it was about to be bullied. My dad paid no heed to the brewing commotion hundreds of feet overhead, as any weather at all was sailor’s delight to him. But as his First Mate, I was now a little reluctant to take the gaff-rigged wooden boat for even a jaunt down the Centerville River.
     Getting the boat in the water was surprisingly uneventful and with a push off the docks we were good to go.
     Her sails were tight with the taunting wind that propelled us upriver to the mouth of the Atlantic. I remember noticing how aged the sails looked, lovingly faded like a favorite pair of jeans. Holes were patched with patches that already had holes themselves. My dad assured me that all would be fine.
     “Aye, ay Captain,” I responded, as we rounded the red buoy on the port side and headed past the merchant fisherman on the jetty. 
     “Go back,” warned the fishermen. “Storm’s a-comin’.”
     “Phooey,” exclaimed my dad as he instructed me to prepare to come about. 
     There was something gallant about the way that he eschewed cuss words. His language was an appropriate scale of his anger. When he did swear, it meant something stirred his emotions to the point where he was out of control.
     The nameless Beetle Cat headed into the wind and quickly became invisible as the spray from crashing waves shielded the small boat completely. 
     The drops of saltwater that fired off the bow were blinding us, and the rocking crashes of the boat breaking each wave felt like thunder. The confusion could even call for a cuss, but with that silent determination of his, the Captain kept the tiller steady on our course.
     We sailed this way for about ten minutes before I suggested we come about to decrease the amount of spray attacking our eyes.
     “You wanna head back,” he asked.
     That wasn’t what I had said, but it didn’t seem like a bad idea. Maybe in his asking, he was saying that going back was what he wanted to do.
     “Well, it is pretty cold,” I said, committing neither way.
     “Ready about,” he replied. 
     Apparently he had been thinking about turning around, himself, but was probably proud to not have been the one who suggested it.
     As we headed back into the harbor the sun returned to the sky temporarily, but did nothing to relieve the cold, soaked fabric of our sweatshirts on our skin. We passed the jetty where all the fishermen shook their heads at us in a “told you so” motion. 
     The wind had picked up again and was propelling the boat too fast to the edges of the harbor.
     “We’ve got to put the sails down,” my dad yelled above the wind.
     “Let’s dock at one of these buoys and put it down,” I suggested.
     “Okay, but you’re gonna have to lie flat on the bow to grab it,” he warned.
     I assumed the position, and dangled my arm overboard to grab the buoy. 
     “We’re gonna have to come about,” cautioned the Captain. “Can you grab it?”
     “I’ve got it,” I exclaimed.
     As the craft came about, my dad realized his foot was caught on the line. The sail was taut, and the tiller got away from him. 
     As I held fast to the buoy I plunged into the deep muck of the Centerville River. 
     My dad was still trying to free his foot from the rope and in doing so pulled the sail even tighter. The wind struck with opportunity
     Before the boat blew over I heard him swear.
     This was serious. But the way the sailboat just tipped over so quickly was like a cartoon. These boats aren’t supposed to just tip over like that, are they?
     I hadn’t time to laugh though, my Captain was trapped underneath the heavy canvas of the sail.
     In his mid-sixties, he is anything but a feeble man, but I still worried about having to tell my mom that my dad had drowned. She would have the ultimate “told you so.” 
     I freed myself from the shackles of muck and swam to the spherical bulge in the sail that was my dad’s head. The bulge submerged and resurfaced again in a different place once before I saw his gasping face come out of the water.
     “You alright,” he asked, his paternal instinct still intact.
     “I was just gonna ask you that,” I said.
     “Oh I’m fine,” he returned as if nothing could possibly ever happen to him. He was the Captain.
     I watched his expression change from relief to grief. He was done celebrating the fact that he was alive, and was now faced with the defeated posture of his brand new used boat with all of our flotsam in his periphery, 
     I imagined his heart as a dumbwaiter, going down two floors to embarrassment as he took it all in. 
     After a few tries we righted the boat, and with its cockpit still underwater we pushed it to the shore, varying between swimming and walking in the muck, trying to figure out which would be faster. Both were very slow.
     When we got to the shore my dad started pumping out the water with the portable pump. Seeing no immediate progress I swam and muck-walked to where our salvageable cargo had drifted and retrieved it.
     Some guys in a pickup truck drove by and stopped to see what had happened. They let us use their beer cooler to help the bailing go more quickly. While I worked on cooler bailing my dad took the pump over to the boat’s small outboard motor and shook his head. The pump wouldn’t be able to fix the waterlogged motor.
     We finished the bailing process in about an hour and a half and crossed our fingers that the motor wasn’t ruined. We certainly didn’t want to sail back down the river. 
     The motor started. 
     We figured it must have been God apologizing for flicking us over earlier.
     “You’re probably not too eager to go out in this thing again,” my dad said after many silent minutes into our voyage home.
     “With the possibility of an adventure like this,” I responded, considering the unfinished sentence dangling before us, “of course I am.”