Once Upon a Gypsy Moon by Michael Hurley Page A

stores in the United States are filled to the rafters on most Saturdays with wannabe naval engineers of every stripe, secretly delighted that a faulty macerator pump or corroded water heater will consign them to the deepest recesses of the bilge for the duration of the weekend. I have always made a point of waving at these men in polite encouragement as my little boat sputters out of the marina on the way to go sailing.
    There are economic advantages to a boat not merely simpler but smaller than today’s normative forty-five- or fifty-footer. For every foot of increase in a boat’s length, the expenses associated with maintaining and rigging the vessel become exponentially greater. A longer boat needs a taller mast with bigger sails and heavier rigging—all at a disproportionately greater cost. The thirty-six-footer that cannot fit into her owner’s old thirty-foot slip must take another slip in the marina in the next available size—usually forty or fifty feet, for thousands of dollars more per year. The prices of haul-outs, bottom paint, cleaning, storage, insurance, and hull repairs all rise dramatically with even modest increases in boat length. When J. P. Morgan famously said that anyone who had to ask how much it costs to own a boat couldn’t afford one, he was standing beside his 302-foot steamer Corsair , not a humble vessel the likes of Gypsy Moon .
    There are practical advantages to the sailboat of moderate length, as well. One man can sail her alone or with a wife appointed only to the task of calling for a taxi should he drop dead, whereas the skipper of a well-found fifty-foot beauty is forever trolling the neighborhood for crew, pleading for able-bodied men as the English navy once did in the press-gangs of yore, only without the threat of violence. Those who join him he will entertain lavishly in exchange for their help in tiptoeing his expensive baby, like a nervous elephant, out of her slip. When the afternoon thunderstorm arrives, his startled crew will be sent aloft to attack and wrestle the enormous, flogging tarpaulin of a mainsail onto a slippery, pitching deck. Having thus traumatized his friends, he will try with increasing difficulty to replenish their numbers on later voyages, until at last his well of goodwill runs dry. When that day arrives, his beauty will retire beside her enormous kin at the marina until the barnacles or the boat brokers overtake her and she is delivered happily to some other unwitting would-be Lord Nelson. From this cycle in most sailors’ lives comes the adage that owning a boat is like standing in a raincoat in a cold shower and tearing up hundred-dollar bills. The smart ones get out and dry off when they’re tearing up twenties.
    But I digress. All of this serves only to explain why I bristled when a dockhand at Southport Marina reacted with a whiff of astonishment upon hearing my plan to sail the Gypsy Moon offshore, nonstop, to Nassau. I felt that he was slighting my boat as she lay alongside the rows of enormous stay-at-homes sleeping in their slips, although he likely intended no such thing. In truth, the dockhand’s raised eyebrows were all the more irritating because they reflected my own unspoken doubts.
    I knew, on that fourth of December 2009, when I stood on deck readying sails and running through my checklist to take the Gypsy Moon to sea, that I would make good on my intention to set sail. I knew that with the same certainty that the Little Leaguer knows, when his name is called, that his feet will trudge to the batter’s box, even as he doubts with equal fervor that his swing will ever meet the ball.
    I honestly didn’t think I’d make it all the way to Nassau. For whatever reason, I had allowed Nassau to become in my imagination, with each passing day, a destination of Homeric proportions.
    Before I left, my pastor had given me a book as cargo. The book told the history of the old stone cathedral of Christ Church in Raleigh. I was charged with the