Sailing Lake Erie through a Storm

In another lifetime I was a very young girl whose father had just bought an old mast-heavy sailboat because he needed to find his peace on the waters of Lake Eire.

The decision followed one unfulfilled many years earlier when he had decided to buy a motorcycle. Responding to an ad in The Cleveland Plain Dealer, he went to the owner's house where he was met at the front door by that gentleman unsteady on crutches and full leg cast. He said his hellos and a rapid goodby.

Buying the boat was easier but not without problems. He bought the boat and then learned that he had to move it immediately from its current berth because the seller needed the slip for his newer, sleeker boat in a matter of days.

My father located dock space at a yacht club a few miles away. Convenient for him to sail after work because it was so close. The next day - the last day - he took his 11 year old daughter with him to sail out of one harbor over the lake and into another.

It was not a day like this one. The Lake Erie waters were neither calm nor serene. It began as overcast but not stormy. We set the sails, cast off the moorings and left the security of the marina harbor.

As we sailed through the late afternoon, the skies darkened, the troughs became ever deeper. I could look up and make out the sky between the tops of the waved high above us.

We pitched onward, we had no port behind us. The seas became rougher and I wondered if the skipper was a madman.
"Dad, I'm scared."
"So am I" he replied.

All was right with the world at that moment. My father was not crazy. He knew as I felt that this was a dangerous passage but we were together in this crashing sea and we woult either ride it out or not. The fear disappated and we made out way through the interminable late afternoon storm.

Years later when my father sailed with the men and boys in the family, my husband, who once raced hydroplanes on the Miami River, returned from a sail with Dad to tell me a small detail of that stormy day if my childhood.

After they had tied off the boat, not the huge, top-heavy one but the Dragonfly, a norse racing boat which cut easily through Lake Erie , they went for a beer at the clubhouse. This is where the oldtimes sit in their chairs watching the skies, the lake and the boats navigating in and out of the harbor. These are the same old timers who sit at every yacht club and indeed were the very same ones who had seen us sailing in more than ten years earlier.

They told the guys to look at the sky. The same storm sky they had witnessed ten years before when dad had sailed in for the first time with his young daughter.

And they looked at the sky and at each other and headed back to the boat to take her out again so that first hand they could see the waterspouts.