I leaned casually against the airline ticket counter, trying to look nonchalant. I hoped the ticket agent wouldn’t notice that, in addition to my two suitcases, I was trying to slip in a cardboard box filled with tortillas, cheddar cheese and zip-top bags for my expatriate sister-in-law in Italy.
The clerk looked down at the box, bemused, as if to say, “How dumb do you think I am?”
He then smiled and asked, “What kind of boat do you have?”
Always quick on the uptake, I managed to reply, “Huh?”
He looked down at the taped and roped box and said: “Well, I see a bowline on the top, and there’s a clove hitch on the side, but I’m surprised you’re giving up a good piece of Dacron braid.”
We grinned at each other as if we’d just shared a secret handshake, and he admitted to having owned a lot of boats. “It’s easy to spot boaters because they’re so seamanlike when they tie up a box or even a suitcase closed with a piece of line,” he said. “Everyone else makes a complete mess of knots, none of which will hold to the end of the baggage conveyor belt.”
Long after I’d boarded my flight, I realized it doesn’t take a pair of worn boat shoes or a deep tan to give us away. More than 150 years ago, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle knew it when, in The Adventure of the Abbey Grange, he had Sherlock Holmes say, “No one but an acrobat or a sailor could have got up to that bell-rope from the bracket, and no one but a sailor could have made the knots with which the cord was fastened to the chair.” That clue didn’t solve the mystery, but Sherlock clearly knew his stuff when it came to knots.
It doesn’t matter whether I’m tying a piece of plywood to the roof rack or lashing down a tarp over the woodpile. A lifetime of knots always comes into play.
But that’s not the only skill that a boat owner brings to bear on life ashore. Having spent far too many hours disassembling complex marine heads, I can tell you that any household toilet repair is child’s play. A marine head has far more droppable and losable bits, such as washers and springs, than its shoreside counterpart, where the parts are almost laughably large and simple to understand. The same applies to faucets, garbage disposals and sink plumbing.
Crime writer Dorothy Sayers once commented, “A sailor’s wonderfully handy about the house.” It’s true. We are.
When it comes to painting a kitchen cabinet, a lifetime of varnishing puts the paint on smooth and glossy, although it’ll be a cold day before I use my favorite varnish brushes on house enamel. And, after uncounted
bottom-paint jobs, it’s almost a relief to paint eaves that don’t have the remains of barnacles on them.
Garage door openers? Easy peasy. Engines? You’ll understand everything your car mechanic says. Home stereos? You’ve mastered GPS, right?
Ralph Waldo Emerson had it right when he said, “We study the sailor, the man of his hands, man of all work; all eye, all finger, muscle, skill and endurance; a tailor, a carpenter, cooper, stevedore, and clerk and astronomer besides.”
Since that day at the airline ticket counter, it’s become sort of a game to find the ways a boat owner’s hidden talents affect my everyday life. I was talking to a roofer about our new roof. Glancing at the sky, I asked if he was worried that it might rain. “Nah,” he said with absolute certainty. Even though it was my naked roof getting soaked the next afternoon, I had a certain satisfaction that a lifetime of weather instincts had been spot-on.
The seams on the cushion of my favorite backyard lounger finally gave up the ghost, and it was the long curved needles, the waxed marline thread and the sailmaker’s palm from my canvas-repair kit that came to my rescue. Those items, plus a lot of hours spent patching Bimini tops and canvas window covers, meant I could produce a fix that wasn’t perfect or pretty, but that would get me through another summer.
These abilities are something to savor and enjoy. There’s much more, of course, and British novelist Nicholas Monsarrat summed it up when he wrote, “Sailors, with their built-in sense of order, service and discipline, should really be running the world.”
How true.
This article was originally published in the October 2023 issue.
