The Lure of the Dock

After a raucous few days at sea one yearns for a stable platform from which to cook, sleep, cipher, shit and work on projects.  The boat has been jumping around for days, never a dull moment, never a still moment.  We are shedding pounds and exercising those abdominal muscles even in our sleep.  One hand for the ship and one hand for yourself is the watch phrase of the day as cups jump off tables, pencils slide off the navigation station, and everything loose seeks the lowest part of the boat till there is a jumble of flotsam surging around the cabin sole.  What can bring order to this chaos?  Where can we find stillness?  Why the marina, of course, the dock.

Marina Mazatlan

Happily we sail towards the harbor, early morning grins on our faces, thinking about future showers, internet access, a seaside bistro, and long walks on hard land.  We negotiate the rocky breakwater, the lurking dredge and find ourselves in a Disneyland of moored boats.  All sizes and styles.  Big white motor cruisers towering overhead, little pontoon water taxis full of tourists, sport fishermen carving wakes as they try to keep their boat speed down, and sailing vessels of all sizes taking their time negotiating the docks without the benefit of bow thrusters or adequate horsepower.  

We radio ahead for the slip number, find it in the myriad of white fiberglass boats, and toss our bow lines to the executioners waiting.  They snug us in and we are caught in the web of the marina, lured in by the siren song of the dock.  All smiles, everyone is so darn pleasant.  They’ve got smiles on their faces as they stick in the knife and drag you down, down into the life at the dock.  

An euphoria of sorts settles in as you shed your fatigue from built up days at sea.  Crack a beer, grab a towel and get that long hot shower.  Take the relatively happy and healthy sea going craft that is your boat and put it on life support at the dock.  Plug in the power, connect the water, crank up the internet, tie lines stern, bow, beam, and spring.  Let down your guard by bringing in the jack lines and opening up the lifeline gates. Open all the hatches and settle into dock side life.

Well meaning dock dwellers invite you to happy hour.  Friends coach you as to how to get to Mega Mart, Costco, Sams, the evil Walmart, and the most dreaded money pit, the marine store.  Take the bus, it’s only 10 pesos, grab a taxi, it’s only 200 pesos.  Look at this sale on booze, and don’t you want this tee shirt?   Out comes the list of projects put on hold and before you know it you are knee deep in expensive boat projects involving stainless steel, hard to find electronics, and new tools, always new tools.  

Advice is in plenty supply.  Dock folks love to talk about projects and they can be a wealth of knowledge so it is only prudent to ask, comment, and listen.  However after a few days turn into a few weeks and the projects only grow larger you realize that you have been the victim of what we used to call back in the office, “mission creep”.  While we are cleaning out the cockpit locker we might as well tie those wires together, and while we are at it, let’s pull out that old wiring and we’ll find a vent hose needing replacement and that will take a couple of trips to Home Depot and the marine store.  Meanwhile, we’ve got to provision so we’d better go to various big box stores to see who has the best deal on red wine.  

Around and around it goes and you realize that many of these people at the dock don’t have plans to actually ever leave the dock.  They have cars now, and cell phones, and favorite Wednesday afternoon happy hours, and every Friday night English language movies at the Cineplex.  Their boats start to accumulate things on the deck until getting from stem to stern entails getting off the boat, onto the dock, then back on the boat.   Many boats, when they get to the dock, take much of the carefully stowed sails, bikes, fuel cans, tarpaulins, inflatable kayaks, and project related stuff and put in on the cabin top or the side decks so they can have more room inside.  As time goes by it becomes more difficult to imagine where all this stuff will go inside the boat when it comes time to leave again. So leaving gets postponed until the project is done or the junk is sold at the next swap meet.  

Swap meets:  another insidious slow-me-down-and-keep-us-at-the-dock ploy.  You tear your boat apart to get at that old radio or awning or rusty tool out from under the floor where you stashed it last season.  Then you drag your crap to the swap meet ashore and try to peddle it off to one of your friends.  But then you see all this perfectly good stuff that you could use on your next project and you end up spending more than you made and bring back more cubic feet of stuff that you liberated from your bilge that morning.  Just put it on the deck and deal with it later.  Isn’t it happy hour yet?

At the dock, you can tell the serious cruisers, the ones who will be leaving in just a few days.  Their boats don’t get much deck clutter and the crew seems to busily buzz around the decks fixing things and loading fuel, water, and supplies.  Sure they will do some socializing and make some trips to the store but the focus stays on the vessel and with luck, they can soon visit the marina office and pay the master a ransom fee to free the boat from the dock.  When that day comes, be it a few days or a few weeks, it is a happy day.  You crank up the diesel engine, and remove the life support lines, tubes, and cables.  Take off the sail covers and get the ship in fighting order, ready to face wind and waves.  Once you are free from the dock and the boat starts jumping around (like she is supposed to) you can take comfort knowing that money has stopped flowing from your wallet and you are again an independent entity on the high seas.  

The dock, we love her so, but we can’t wait to get away from her grasp.