“Marriage-Savers”

We bought a pair of these headsets before we left, knowing they would come in handy. Well known among the well-heeled biker set (you’ve seen ’em, the dude driving, his partner sitting behind, cruising down the interstate chatting between themselves over the rumble of their Harley), they have since been marketed to cruising sailors as “Marriage Savers”.

Whoever came up with that phrase was a marketing genius. There is much to do on a sailboat that requires communication between the person driving the boat and the person who is handling the other task, be it letting out and setting the anchor, hoisting the sail, threading your way through a tricky passage, or in the case of sailing in Maine, standing on the pointy front end of the boat (the “bow”), spotting and calling out all those #%$*&!! lobster pot buoys.

Back when I was first bitten with the sailing bug, and studying up on how to do it, there was much written about the importance of developing a system of hand signals to communicate between helm and crew. Things like “Point right for Starboard”, “Point left for Port”, “Cross forearms above head for Full Stop”, “Shake fist vigorously for “I signaled STOP GODDAMMIT!” and the good ol’ “Raise both middle fingers for *&#$*%^!!!”. I’m sure that some couples have mastered the first few of these examples, but I am equally certain that they are very few and very far between. I make this assertion not only from first hand experience, but from witnessing the tribulations of others. For instance:

Spend a Sunday afternoon at the boardwalk in Kemah, Tx, watching the boats coming back in from a day of sailing Galveston Bay. Follow them around the point into the marina, and watch them pull into their slips. For every couple that effortlessly guides their vessel home without a hitch, there will be others (several? many?, depends on which Sunday) who end up screaming at each other, cursing, and crying. There may be no crying in baseball, but in Kemah on a Sunday afternoon, there will be some.

We heard a story from the night watchman at the Kemah Boardwalk Marina about the previous owner of our first boat, “O Be Joyful”- he watched us loading stuff aboard and commented, “Oh, you bought this boat from that lawyer-type fella?”

I didn’t know anything about the previous owner, having handled the whole transaction through a broker, and told the man so.

“Oh, jeez, that guy was an asshole,” he replied. “`He would come down here with his wife and kids to go sailing, and before they got out of the slip, he was screaming at her, and by the time they got out of the slip and headed for the channel, she and the kids would be barricaded down below in the cabin. When they got back in the evening, he was still screaming on deck, and the wife and kids were still down below. Yep, he was a real asshole.”

Well, I have an aversion to having night watchmen anywhere on the planet call me an asshole, so I decided we needed the headsets. And they have worked marvelously. The few times (two, maybe three at most) that we needed them and did not have them on, there were some tense moments, and you could say that harsh words were exchanged between us, the mitigating factor being that over the wind and the chugging of the 50 horsepower diesel engine, those harsh words didn’t have quite the impact- in fact, neither party was privy to what the other had said. All good.

Since then, we have made it a standing rule that ANY task requiring one of us at the helm and another one forward, “PUT ON THE HEADSETS!” And the difference is just amazing- to be in a tense situation, and yet be able to calmly, almost serenely, murmer, “No, sorry, I meant the OTHER starboard!”

Hey, I’m ambidextrous- I’ve always had trouble with directions…