The Cut of Her Jib

Photo credit: Robsalot (that's me!)

This was the first time I’d be spending the holidays at home in five years, but I wasn’t looking forward to it.  It’s not that I didn’t love my family, or enjoy spending time with them (though it may seem that way since I hadn’t seen them in so long, but there was a good reason for that, in fact, that reason is connected to why I wasn’t looking forward to this visit). Okay, so the reason I was not looking forward to the visit is because I would be bringing my new boyfriend home to meet the family for the first time. Again, he wasn’t exactly my new boyfriend, we had actually been dating for three years, but to my family he would be new. And it wasn’t really that I was nervous about my family meeting him, what I feared was the inevitable question that everyone would ask… “so, how did you two meet...” ugh! I know it all sounds confusing, but it will all make sense in a minute.

You see, I have been spending the last five years sailing solo around the world. On August 6, 2015 I threw off the dock lines, I followed the coast down to Mexico where I sailed around for a year, getting my cruising legs. Then, after provisioning and waiting for the right weather window, I took off on the passage to French Polynesia. On my little boat it ended up taking me 28 days, but after about 12 days in the middle of the ocean in the tropical heat, well, I started wearing fewer and fewer clothes. Clothing just seemed silly; after all, it was just me and the fish. Anyway by the time I finally spotted land, I had been sailing fully in the nude.

Now here was the problem, my lack of clothing had become normal to me, I didn’t even think about my nakedness anymore. Unfortunately that meant that I failed to put on clothes when I reemerged in society. Yup, that’s right; I sailed into a very packed anchorage completely in the nude. I set the anchor and was pulling down the sails when I heard a whistling from the boat anchored just off my stern. Still completely unaware of my little, uh, situation, a waved and yelled “Howdy neighbor!” The man on the other boat waved back and shouted something I couldn’t quite hear.

“What was that?” I yelled back.

“I said, nice boat, I really like the cut of your jib!”

I was only confused for a moment, and then I realized exactly what he meant. I must have turned ten shades of red. Quickly I hid myself behind my headsail and slinked down through the front hatch without revealing any more of my assets.

Anyway, that man is now my boyfriend, and after the last few years of buddy-boating through the South Pacific with him, I was pretty sure I was destined to tell that story for the rest of our lives.