A Sail Away Adventure

I was only 15 years old but adventurous — what 15-year old isn’t?  We were all sailors.  Twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the yacht club would hold races for a fleet of Beetlecats to go round buoys on Waquoit Bay on Cape Cod — a large, 3-by-1 mile bay that lets out through a rocky jetty to Vineyard Sound.  I say “we” because my buddy, Jimmy Johnson, used to crew for me in those races.  We were a team.

That bay, though large, was extremely safe, as there were few locations on the bay that were deep, and all locations were very visible to the surrounding houses, but mostly because it wasn’t the real ocean — which lay just beyond the rocky jetty.  The ocean was where unpredictable and potentially dangerous things happened, but the bay was “safe” or so it seemed.

I got the idea one day…