Jake wasn’t kidding when he’d said the weekends were getting busy, because they were. Adam knew there would be no going out on the Pixie III on Saturday as Jake said there were two fishing charters to run, along with other things that had to be done around the Channel Stop. So he took a rare chance to sleep in a little, then wandered over to the snack bar for a little breakfast and maybe the chance to shoot the bull over a cup of coffee.

He didn’t get to. He hadn’t been in the snack bar for five minutes when Rachel came over to him. “Adam, I hate to ask you this, but the kid who was supposed to work today called in sick. Well, not sick exactly, he piled his car up last night and is hurting pretty bad. Do you think you can help out with some odds and ends?”

“Of course,” he replied, thinking that the Lewis family had extended a lot of courtesies to him over the years, and what little he could do to pay them back wouldn’t make up the difference. “What do you need me to do?”

“The biggest thing right now is to help with the dishes. We’re falling behind there and we’re almost out of a few things.”

Before he had enough coffee to get his eyes open, Adam was in front of the sink in the kitchen, facing a huge pile of dirty dishes. Rachel gave him about a two-minute drill in what had to be done, and went back to her waitress duties. Adam wasn’t a stranger to washing dishes – he didn’t have a dishwasher in his apartment, after all – but he generated so few he usually let them stack up for two or three days before getting around to doing them. Rachel could bring in more in one armload than he dirtied in a week. Fortunately, Amanda, who was cooking this morning, wasn’t dirtying many pots and pans so he didn’t have those to slow him down, and slowly he managed to pull ahead of the pile while his coffee got cold.

In the middle of the morning the breakfast rush died down, and Adam was finally able to catch up. “Thanks for helping out,” Rachel told him. “You’re more efficient at it than Jimmy is, that’s for sure. If you’re ever looking for a little side income, I think we could find a place for you.”

“No big deal, it had to be done,” he shrugged. “But you better be careful about saying things like that or I might take you up on it. Anything else?”

“We’ve got about eight motel rooms that need to be made up,” Rachel said. “Maybe Amanda could show you that while I give her a break from the stove. We won’t be so busy that I can’t handle things for a while.”

While Adam didn’t know Amanda very well, he’d known her since she’d been a little kid, and had noticed that she was a hard worker – and not a bad grill cook. She was hardly a typical teenager; he knew she preferred to be out on the charter boats, and often was. A year out of high school now, she still had two more years to go before she could captain one of them and was counting every minute.

Working with Amanda was an education – of course, she’d been making up the motel rooms since she’d been a little kid and had every nuance of what had to be done down to a science, while he tried to keep up. It wasn’t the kind of work he’d done all of his life but it had a satisfaction to it that was hard to find behind a desk: the results of his work that morning were tangible, right there in front of him. Busting suds and making up motel rooms might not have made for a life he would have wanted, but he could see the job had some rewards, too.

He wound up washing dishes during the lunch rush, and that afternoon Rachel gave him the basics of working on the fuel dock, like Matt had done for several summers; all of it gave him a strange sense of following in his son’s footsteps. By the end of the day he was tired, but it was a tiredness of a different nature than what he was used to; while the work hadn’t been intellectually challenging, it had been active, physical work, and overall he’d enjoyed it.

Adam was almost sad to learn that Jimmy showed up the next day, bruised and limping but ready to work. It turned out he’d tried to dodge a deer that ran out in front of him, which usually wasn’t a good idea, according to Jake. It hadn’t been a good one for Jimmy; he’d lost control of the car and piled it into a tree, totaling it in the process. Actually hitting the deer might have only involved a few hundred dollars in damages rather than destroying the vehicle.

Jake told Adam there was no point in his sitting around like a bump on a log all day. “We’ve got a small load on the Chinook today,” he said. “You might as well come along and see what that’s all about.”

Actually Adam had a little knowledge of what that was all about – he’d been out on the previous Chinook a dozen years before, with Matt and Brittany along. It had been the result of the offer by Jake to take Matt fishing for trophy salmon when he got out of the hospital after his first bout with leukemia. Adam’s main memory of the day was how excited Matt had been about the whole experience, and how eager he’d been to grab every memory out of it he could. In a way, it had been sort of a graduation from the harrowing battle with the disease, a milestone putting the experience behind him.

While Adam and Jake waited for the party to show up at the charter boat’s dock up in the harbor proper, Jake explained that he’d handle all the tricky stuff, but would have Adam steering the boat out on the lake. There was an autopilot that could do the job, but the customers were a little more comfortable to look up and know there was someone at the wheel, and Jake admitted that he was, too. “It’s good to have someone looking around, rather than paying all their attention to the fishing.”

“Jake,” Adam protested. “I don’t know anything about that. I’ve never done anything like that.”

“No big deal. Matt was doing it at fourteen, and Amanda and Rachel a lot younger than that. All you have to do is keep steering the boat in the same direction and look around for things we might run into. If you hear me yell ‘Fish on!’ just cut the throttles to an idle and do what I tell you to do. If you need my help with anything, just shout out and I’ll help.”

“Well, if you say so.”

Jake did steer the boat out of the harbor, up the channel and through the breakwater, but once they were out in the open on the big lake, he turned the wheel on the big boat’s flying bridge over to Adam. “Just keep it going on this heading,” Jake told him. “I better get down and start getting rigged.”

All in all, it went pretty well. Jake made it up to the flying bridge every half hour or so to check on him, and a few times had to tell him to change course, either for the sake of fishing or, twice, to maneuver around lake freighters. It was not the prettiest day – relatively flat, but overcast and chilly. Although Adam kept his attention on what was happening around him, he also had plenty of time to think. Mostly he thought about the fact that once again he was following in his son’s footsteps. It had been here – well, symbolically speaking, since much of his experience had been on the previous Chinook – that Matt had started to develop his love for being out on the water, to learn to look at the horizon and wonder what was beyond it. It had been a far different path than Adam had once envisioned his son as taking, but at least Matt had been able to do things, rather than just wish he could do them. The irony of it all was inescapable.

The party actually had a pretty good day fishing; although no one caught their limit, everybody boated fish, and that was what they’d been hoping for. It was late in the afternoon before Jake gave Adam a course to head back to Winchester Harbor; Jake only took over again as they were getting near the breakwater, to run the boat back up the channel to its dock.

After the boat was tied off and the party heading home, Jake asked, “So how did you like it?”

“Not bad,” Adam admitted. “It was interesting. In fact, I’d have to say it was as close to Matt’s memory as I’ve been since he died. Maybe it made me understand a few things about him.”

“I thought that might be the case,” Jake grinned. “I’ll have to check and be sure, but the weather is supposed to be a little more benign tomorrow and unless something unexpected has come up, it might be a good day for the two of us to head out on the Pixie.”

“I’m ready. I’m glad we had the experience today to help me get ready for it, but I’m ready.”

“Good. Assuming we get to do it, it’s not going to be just a case of taking you for a ride. I think we can consider it a sailing lesson.”

“I’m looking forward to it.”

Getting Jake free for a day to take Adam out in the Pixie involved a little juggling. Rachel would be taking the Chinook out – she was in the regular rotation as its captain – and her father, Nate, would be taking out the smaller Coho; he usually took it out, but wasn’t a part of the staff at the Channel Stop unless things really got messed up.

Adam had been looking forward to this day for a long time, ever since he and Jake had talked about it back around Christmas. In that time he’d read a lot about sailing, if for no more reason than to understand his son a little more, but of course he hadn’t done any, had never been away from the dock in a sailboat. This could be an important day to find out if his inklings of plans for the future held any water.

He woke up well before his normal time, and couldn’t get back to sleep. Finally he gave up, got up, got dressed, and headed over to the snack bar, where Amanda was holding down the fort in case any early customers happened to show up. He was sitting there with about his fourth cup of coffee in front of him when Jake showed up from seeing Rachel off with the day’s fishing party in the Chinook. “Wow, you’re up early,” he said.

“Well, I’m getting a little anxious.”

“That’s one of the lessons you learn from sailing. Being anxious doesn’t help. You sort of have to wait for things to come to you. It’s just about dead solid calm out there and I wouldn’t expect the wind to come up for hours, yet. But let me have some breakfast, and we can go down to the Pixie so we can go over a few things.”

While they ate breakfast, Jake told Adam about the three different boats named Pixie he’d owned. The first one had been a twenty-one-foot trailer sailer, a real little lightweight boat. While in some respects it had been nothing much, Jake and Rachel, and later with their infant son Ron, had sailed it all around Florida and the Gulf Coast over several winters when things had been dead slow in Winchester Harbor. Adam thought he remembered Greg pointing it out to him many years before on the trip when he’d met Brittany, but he couldn’t be sure.

“We got the second Pixie along about the time Amanda was born,” Jake told him. “The first one was way too small for just the two of us and it would have been impossible with two kids. Greg didn’t have a lot of access to his father’s boat after he got married and he wanted something to screw around with, and since Rachel and I couldn’t use it very much, we decided to go into it together. It was bigger than the original Pixie, but you still couldn’t stand upright inside the cabin. It was all right for a couple with a couple small kids, but less so when they got bigger, and it was real difficult for adult friends. So about ten or twelve years ago the four of us decided to trade it off for this Pixie, which is a thirty-one footer and quite a bit bigger, and quite a bit bigger than the Mary Sue for that matter. It’s a lot more comfortable, but we still barely use it enough to justify having it.”

“I saw it when it was up on the cradle and covered with tarps last winter, but I didn’t pay any attention to it.”

“It’s not a bad boat by any means. It’s not the seaboat the Mary Sue is. That one was designed to be comfortable in heavy weather I’d be scared shitless to have the Pixie out in. And I think you have to be young for two people to live on a boat that small and enjoy it.”

“You know, it seems strange that you have it at all when you’re out on the fishing boats all the time.”

“It might be something of a busman’s holiday, but we enjoy it enough to keep it around. Being out on a sailboat is considerably different from taking one of the charter boats out. We’re not concerned about fish, for one thing, and we don’t have customers to keep happy.”

The Pixie proved to be tied up to one of the finger piers near where the Chinook and the Coho were kept; Adam hadn’t really noticed it the day before. It was a bigger boat than the Mary Sue, but he really wasn’t tuned into the differences in boats enough to tell much more than that. “It’s still pretty flat,” Jake announced after half an hour of showing Adam around the boat, explaining how things worked. “But we can at least motor out and be out there when the breeze comes up.”

Jake took some time readying the boat, still explaining things comprehensively. Eventually he fired up the engine and let it warm up, making a low rumble under the cockpit. While it idled, he took in the lines to the dock, coiled them up and put them away, then backed the boat out into the harbor. “When we’re heading out this early, I try to keep it pretty quiet,” he explained. “There are usually some people sleeping aboard at this hour. We’ve got people up here already who will be living on their boats all summer. They might get out on the water once a week, or maybe not even that often.”

“I know people can live on boats smaller than this, because I know Matt and Mary did it. But it seems cramped to me.”

“It does to me, too,” Jake agreed. “But then, like I said, it helps to be young. There are couples considerably older than us who live all summer on boats this size. Granted, it’s a little cramped, and you have to be careful to keep the crap accumulation to a minimum. But it’s not a bad way to live if you can stand to live that way at all.”

With the engine still near an idle, Jake steered the boat across the harbor. “When Rachel and I were still young, we tended to be pretty purist about not using the motor unless we absolutely had to,” he explained. “Of course, we had the original Pixie back then, and it could ghost along in light air where this thing would be stopped absolutely dead. We have sailed down the channel, but the wind has to be right, and I just about have to have someone with me who knows what they’re doing.”

Once they were toward the lake side of the harbor, Jake opened the engine up and the speed increased. It still probably wasn’t the speed of a good brisk walk, but it was only a few minutes until they were into the channel, past the Channel Stop, and heading out between the jetties into the open lake. “Seems placid compared to yesterday,” Adam commented.

“It should pick up. We’re probably not going to have a real strong day, but it’ll be a good day to show you how things work.”

A mile or so offshore Jake cut the engine; it now seemed nearly silent out there, especially silent compared to the motor noise Adam had experienced yesterday on the Chinook. There really wasn’t much to do at that point; Jake offered to make some coffee, and did so on the tiny galley stove. The two of them sat in the cockpit sipping at it for a while, talking about one thing and another, but mostly Matt and Mary and Matty.

Eventually a light breeze came up. “I suppose we might as well get started,” Jake said. “There’s not enough wind to move us well, but enough for you to get the feel of things while we don’t have a lot of pressure.” While Adam steered the boat, Jake got the main and the jib up, explaining every move, then showed how the sails had to be set for sailing on different points of the wind. He demonstrated the first few times, then let Adam make the adjustments while Jake just sat back and commented. Pretty soon, Adam felt like he was getting the hang of it, and said so.

“It’s a lot more complicated than that,” Jake told him. “Remember that the wind is very light right now. When it gets blowing harder, it’s both easier in some ways and harder in others. This is one of those things where the basics are pretty easy, but you never know it all and should never stop learning. There are always ways to do it better and more efficiently, but like in anything, safety is the key. Most people learn to sail on smaller boats, but except for the details the principles are pretty much the same.”

As Jake expected, after a while the wind slowly picked up. They were often sailing with some heel on the boat. Mostly they just sailed this way and that all morning, so Adam could get the feel of sailing. About noon, Jake had him get on an easy downwind course, and headed below to make them some lunch – nothing particularly special, just sandwiches and chips, but they tasted good indeed on the chilly but clear spring day. In the afternoon they did some more sailing, sometimes far enough offshore that the land was only a thin green line on the horizon. Finally, as the afternoon was getting along, Jake said, “Well, I suppose we might as well get back to the harbor or Rachel is going to be wondering what happened to us.”

“How do we find our way back?”

“As much as I’ve been out here, I can pretty well point my way back without thinking about it,” Jake told him. “But there’s a GPS chart plotter right inside the hatch that can take us right back to the dock and do everything but throw the lines over the dock posts. I don’t use it much on a relatively nice day like today, but if the visibility gets bad or it gets dark, it’s an absolute blessing to have aboard. I won’t show you how to use it right now, because I think I’ve probably thrown enough at you for one day, but it’s not hard to learn how it works. For now, just turn us to a compass course of about 240, trim the sails for it, and I’ll have you refine the course as we get closer.”

The wind was dying down a little as the jetties in front of the Winchester Harbor channel came clearly into view. In spite of the wind coming from one side, the boat was barely heeled over, just moving along slowly. “So how are you liking it?” Jake asked in the quiet.

“Not bad,” Adam smiled. “I think I could get to really enjoying this. I can see there’s a lot to learn, though.”

“Like I told you earlier, you never quit learning it all.”

“How long do you think it would be before I could sail a boat like this myself?”

“That’s not an easy question to answer. You got a good start on it today, but there are a lot of things you have to learn, from more of the details of how to handle the boat, navigation, weather, rules of the road, lots of things. There are classes to pick up some of it, and books, but nothing beats actual practical experience. Technically speaking, there’s nothing to stop you from buying a boat like this right now and sailing it away, but you’d be a fool to do it. But, if you can get out with me or Rachel or Amanda few more times and pick up some of those things, you could be in a position to buy a boat like this, oh, maybe next fall or in the spring.”

“Unfortunately, I’m not sure how much I’m going to be able to get up here, and I know you get damn busy on summer weekends.”

“Yeah, no fooling. Some weekends we just can’t get everything done, period. Sometimes weekdays are a little slower, like today, and maybe one of us could get free. Like, I really shouldn’t try to break away tomorrow, but maybe I could rig it around so Amanda could go with you.”

“I’d like that if you can arrange it, but don’t stretch yourself too thin.”

“Can’t answer till we get back in, but I can check it out,” Jake said. “Look, I might as well tell you right now. If you’re thinking about buying a boat right away, don’t do it. You don’t know what you’re looking for and the pitfalls to avoid. When you’re ready to do it, get with me, and I’ll work with you on it. I can probably save you some money and give you a better boat in the process.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it without asking you. Frankly, with all the hassles going on around me right now I don’t need to be taking that one on, too. But I kind of like the idea of maybe having a boat down on Lake Erie or something where I could just go get away for the weekend, and maybe not even go out on the lake.”

“It’s not all that far to come up here, and things are usually a lot less crowded, both in the harbor and out on the lake.”

“There’s that to consider, too. In any case, it’s something to think about. I doubt I’d ever want to take off to sail the Atlantic like Matt did, but I could see puttering around for a few days.”

“Tell you what,” Jake suggested. “Try to get up here when you can this summer, and we’ll try to improve your experience a little. Then, when things slow down a little in the fall but before the weather gets too bad, maybe you and I can take the Pixie and go cruising for a few days. That’ll hook you if anything will.”

“Jake, you’ve got a deal. I don’t know how busy I’m going to be in early September and things could go goofy what with everything that’s going on, but I’ll take you up on it and try to get up here.”

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