A couple good friends of mine who own boats are putting them up for the winter now, the cost of operation for what would be left of the season not worth it.

One has an old wood sailboat, I can’t tell you if it’s a sloop or a ketch but it’s sleek and pretty, and I’ve been on it a few times. He has to unship the mast to get it to it’s winter storage area, or else wait in line for the drawbridges to open to let him in. I have helped him socket the mast and he puts a british gold sovereign under it. I assume this is some sailing tradition. Another has a sweet Lyman lapstrake that is as sound and sweet as the day it was made, years before my birth.

I love boats. I love to look at boats. I love to see them, would love to build one, would love to work on them, especially old wood ones. But keep me the fuck out of them.

I’m not particularly fond of any body of water that doesn’t have a filtration pump and a plug. I tend not to swim in anything over my chest, and never anywhere that doesn’t have a clean, sandy bottom. I once rode out onto the middle of Georgian Bay on a family friend’s little aluminum fishing boat, and though I have fallen from great height, stood on 4″ wide beams some distance in the air, crawled undermillions of tons of rock in passages barely large enough to accomodate me, been up close and personal to animals that could easily have killed me, held deadly poisonous snakes in my hands, been shot, knifed, and beaten to within inches of my life, the only thing that ever really terrified me was being on that little damned aluminum boat out in the middle of the bay.

My brotherinlaw, who was also aboard, later was surprised to find I hadn’t enjoyed the trip. “You seemed to be having a good time” he said.

Well, what the hell was I going to do? Jump out? freak out?

I have been on enough boats to understand this is an illogical and unreasoning fear, but that’s what a phoboa is, is unreasoning.

beats being afraid of something else stupid, I guess. At least this fear is easily avoidable.