Lent and the Long Winter: Easter Monday and Boating

Its Easter Monday and Patriots Day in Boston. While thousands are now reclaiming the roads after explosions threatened to end the long held Boston Marathon last year, the yard is astrewn with cracked plastic eggs cast to the wind after what looks like an egg hunting frenzy past through this weekend. While all this takes place, the docks are being made ready and the smell of mooring paint wafts along the chilly onshore breeze. Spring threatens to come, but winter's chill remains in the waters so that with each lull a warm wave radiates from the ground but is blown to Hartford by a chilly puff of salty air. These are the days of Spring and they come every year.

Something happens the day after Easter. Who knows if its the newly risen savior or the puckish spirtes of Spring, but there is a charge in the air. A hope renewed and a winter vanquished. We made it through the 6 feet of snow and the howling North winds. Now a calmer southerly breeze tends to fill in the afternoons and while the breeze is cool today, tomorrow and the next day it will warm ever so gradually until it can breath life into the squalls of summer and the gales of fall. But the hope of a bright spring ahead is what is on the tide today.

The Harbor is empty right now, but just as I uncovered the boats and hooked up the batteries today, boat owners everywhere awoke with an idea to paint bottoms, wax hulls and put air in the trailer tires because Easter has passed.

Maybe one of the things we are forced to give up in the Lenten season is something we dont realize we giving up at all. Who wants to go boating or sailing when its 20 below and snowing? But when the sun shines and the season of self denial passes, inevitably we begin to think about the return to the Sea. Is it any coincidence that in the time we are to think about our actions and examine our lives, Mother Nature makes it so we can't even dream about boating? And is it any further coincidence that the day after we can start up with our bad habits once again, the sun is warm and the idea of floating along on the outgoing tide seems so tantalizing?

Boating is one of those things for me that is all encompassing and absorbing. You can't just do it a little- but must use your full worth and entire being when on the water. I am asked all the time, "Why Man aren't you married?" and my answer is always the same, "I have boats."

A good woman would never tolerate a man like me disappearing for days on end while I work to rebuild a transom or come home smelling of low tide and bottom paint. But most days this time of year, that is exactly what they might experience if I were hitched. So maybe that's why I am single?

Then again, maybe its not the smell or the time at all that make me so unlovable but instead the money and preoccupation with the notion that I must go to sea that makes me almost impossible to date. My focus on my boat and the sea means I always will have a cleft in my heart for the girl of my dreams to endure, half of me is for her and half will always belong to the Sea.

And this day, Easter Monday, when boating comes back from the recesses of the soul and parks squarely in our line of sight, on this day, nothing on a day a like today matters but being by the Sea and dreaming.

Soon enough we'll step aboard, fire up the belly of the beast and make way for the channel. The bow waves, cold as ever will spray across our faces reminding that it isn't summer yet, and we might be rushing it. But the roll of sea and sound the waves will  in their own right drag us from our drab winter quarters and welcome in another summer on the waters with the boat.