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By Bob Payne
It is late at night in the harbor at Jost Van Dyke in the British Virgin Islands. You are lying in your bunk in a chartered bareboat--a boat you and friends are sailing yourselves--and you are contemplating how badly you need to answer the call of nature. The belowdecks of a boat is such a confined space, though, that in the quiet of a harbor, every sound you make is shared by all. So, not wanting to share this particular sound, you slip out of your bunk and, even though you are sleeping in the buff, you tiptoe up onto the deck.
Topsides, the film of moisture that has settled onto the deck feels the slightest bit chilled to your bare toes, but not enough to distract from the show of stars overhead. Anchored all around you are other boats, most of them on charter, too; most are either dark, silent silhouettes or, like yours, showing a soft glow through their portholes. All in all, it is a perfect Caribbean night.
Standing by the stern, you attend to your business. As you are finishing up, you notice that whoever last tied up the dinghy used a knot that demonstrated how much they still had to learn about sailing. You reach down to retie it and, fate being what it is, the line slips from your fingers and drops into the water. The dingy is now adrift, heading toward Florida. Standing there in your birthday suit, you contemplate this for a moment, coming to the inevitable conclusion that you are going to have to go after it immediately, and that considering the circumstances, you would rather that this not be a high-profile operation.
You know going overboard without informing someone else on the boat is the most unseamanlike of practices, but you ease yourself down the stern ladder and, with just the slightest splash, head out after the errant dinghy. It is farther away than you anticipated, drifting faster than you thought, but eventually you catch up to it and get yourself aboard without swamping it.
By now, you've drifted some distance, putting a dozen or more boats between you and yours. Your hope is that with a few pulls on the starting cord of the dinghy engine, you will be on your way to putting this now quite annoying incident right. But, of course, it is in the nature of dinghy engines to fail you at just such moments. So after a fruitless 15 minutes of cranking--by which time you have drifted past many more boats and are almost in the open sea--you realize there is nothing to do but to get out the oars and start the long row back.
An hour later, after heading in the wrong direction and adjusting course several times, you have really polished the lecture you plan to give to whoever used the dinghy last. Perhaps it is your focus on that, and because the stern ladder doesn't seem to be in quite the position you remember, that you take a misstep while boarding and fall back into water. After finally getting on deck again, you stomp, dripping wet, down the companionway ladder, making considerably more noise than you did on the way out. This produces the desired effect of rolling the entire crew out of bed to see what the commotion is. Only you realize, standing there naked, that it is a crew you have never seen before.
The most difficult aspect of bareboating, you can now say with great authority, is not maneuvering around a dock under power. Nor is it anchoring in a strange harbor for the first time, or trying to convince the charter base manager that the big gash down the starboard side of the hull was already there. It is, unquestionably, finding your way back aboard in the dark of night when so many charter boats look so alike.
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Illustration by Jason Schneider
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