Once Upon a Gypsy Moon by Michael Hurley

A recalcitrant opposing counsel, renewing for a fourth and unsuccessful time a motion to compel the production of some privileged and impertinent document, had scheduled a hearing with the minimum of notice, requiring a postponement of the voyage. I arrived at the courthouse to argue the point, then continued to the nearest telephone booth for a costume change from corporate lawyer to vagabond sailor. Once matters were finally in order, I came by rented car to Southport with plans to leave aboard the Gypsy Moon , bound for Nassau.

Chapter 17
A Simple Vessel
    There is a by-now familiar dynamic in my conversations with strangers onshore while preparing to leave on a voyage. A sailor planning to go somewhere beyond the outer channel marker is easy to spot amid the general lethargy of life in a marina, so questions inevitably arise about where he is bound. When the answer entails a long voyage on the open ocean, in the listener’s eyes I see quick flashes of worry as images of disaster flicker in the imagination. Such concerns are often obliquely expressed for fear of giving offense. To my stated intention to take the Gypsy Moon to sea on her first voyage to the Bahamas, in 2007, one dockmaster’s only reply was, “In that boat?”
    To be fair, the Gypsy Moon ’s length, at 32 feet 4 inches overall, has become something of an anomaly among oceangoing vessels in the same way that the 5-foot 10-inch, 165-pound halfback has become an anomaly in professional football. It’s not that the average man can’t play the game well. It’s just that fans are more entertained by seeing the game played by men twice his size.
    It was not always so. In an old photo album I have the picture of an old girlfriend standing at the rail of the harbor ferry in Annapolis in 1975. Behind her one can clearly see an assortment of boats in the harbor. The girl having long been forgotten, the first thing I notice in looking at that picture is the wide array of sailboats moored in the same place where today you would find a great predominance of powerboats—further proof, as if any were needed, of the continued general trundling along of things to hell in a handbasket. The second thing I notice is that the largest of the sailboats in the picture appears to be about twenty-eight feet long, among many smaller vessels. Today, most boatbuilders don’t make a sailboat smaller than forty feet long. Americans’ taste in boats has changed in ways no different than their taste in homes, which have tripled in average size since the 1950s, just as the size of the average American family has shrunk by similar proportions.
    Yet there are naysayers to every trend, and I am happily among those who still sing the virtues of the simpler, smaller boat. Two of my heroes are Lin and Larry Pardey, famous for their many round-the-world voyages aboard engineless sailboats smaller than thirty feet long overall. I had occasion to step aboard their twenty-eight-foot cutter, Serrafyn , when she was on display one year at the Annapolis boat show. Her head (toilet) was a simple manual system that the Pardeys indelicately described as “bucket and chuck it.” With no engine, she had sailed around the world—twice. In tight harbors where sailing was impractical or when winds were light, the Pardeys used a single long oar passed through chocks on the stern railing to scull the boat forward.
    Like Serrafyn , the Gypsy Moon will never spend a day in port waiting for the arrival of a new watermaker pump, radar scanner, single-sideband transceiver, generator valve spring, electric-winch motor, or new ideas on how to make a refrigeration system three degrees cooler than lukewarm. She is outfitted with none of these extravagances. She is free not only from their cost and complication, but also from slavery to their insatiable demand for fuel and engine-driven battery power. She is a simple boat, commanded by a simple (if not simpleminded) captain.
    The boatyards and marine supply