Mid-September. Eight o’clock in the morning. Temperature 49°F. I peel off my sailing shirt and drop it on the jetty, the sun’s warmth on my back a balm in the brisk air. In only my swimming trunks and old sneakers, I squish over the seaweed piled up by the recent 30-knot sou’wester.
Sunbeams release an iodine funk and skitters of flies.
How cold will the water feel?
I step into the sun-squiggled shallows, gasp at the chill. Seventy degrees? Feels like 50.
I scan Megansett Harbor and Buzzards Bay beyond, my gaze lighting on our 12-foot catboat, Finn, frisking on her mooring 60 yards out. I feel a pull—and a repulsion.
I hold myself duty-bound to tend to our boat. Conditions have kept us from sailing for four days. This is my last chance to care for her—to commune with her—for two weeks. Low tide means I can wade out and back from Finn without undertaking the Sisyphean task of wrestling the dinghy down from the pathway in the dunes and tugging it back up afterwards.
But I hesitate. Am I too old for water this cold?
E.B. White wrote in The Sea and the Wind that Blows that, “Now, in my seventies, I still own a boat, still raise my sail in fear in answer to the summons of the unforgiving sea.” I, too, have come to view the sea as muse and menace.
Lawrence Cheek argues in a 2018 SAIL magazine piece called “On Not Giving Up Sailing” that aging is no reason to stop sailing. “The risk and discomfort sailing requires,” he writes, are the “…same things that keep us fully alive.”
White did sell his 18-foot sloop Fern (named for the young protagonist in his novel Charlotte’s Web; I also named our boat after a character in one of my novels) in 1963 when he was 64. But the sea’s summons must have overpowered his hesitations; at 68—my age—he started sailing Martha, a 20-foot pocket cruiser that his son, Joel, built for him.
I can’t deny my ambivalence increases every year. Which means I’ve become more selective when I sail.
“What I really love are windless days,” White confessed in the same essay.
I used to swim out to Finn from late May to early October. Many times, I took the dinghy instead, especially on raw days, but I preferred the simplicity of swimming. The swim never fazed me even when I had to steel myself against the cold. Outbound, I breast-stroked with our yachtlet in my crosshairs, giddy with anticipation. I back-stroked sea-otter-like to shore, the better to admire her after our sail.
Fear had yet to dampen my sailing fever. On drafty days, I reefed the sail and felt a pulse of pride that I ventured out when others found conditions too sporty. You could call me avid, if not foolhardy.
I can’t pinpoint when I crossed the line, but more often, I face the swim—and hoisting the sail—with a fluttering heart and a frisson of fear. Will I cramp up? Capsize? Will a Sea-Doo do me in? Will I suffer the same fate of Jenny Phillips, granddaughter of famed editor Maxwell Perkins, who at 76 and in excellent condition drowned while swimming back to shore from her small sailboat in Nantucket?
Yes, fear makes me waffle, even when I head out only to scrub the boat. But still, as White wrote, “I cannot not sail.” The urge to sail seizes me at almost any hour of the day.
My breath catches when a wave washes over my waistband.
I dunk in to avoid prolonging the torture-by-cold-seawater. I rise sputtering and wade on. By the time I reach Finn, the water is neck-high—not the thin water I expected. Maybe taking the dinghy would have been…wiser.
I clamber aboard, give Finn’s deck a love tap, unsnap the cockpit cover, pump out the bilge, grab the scrub brush, and pause on the transom. Minnows fin just astern in slants of sunlight—in their element. A breeze wafts over me, pebbling my skin with goosebumps. I inhale and join the minnows.
At first I work fast. I bounce on my toes to keep waves from sloshing over my face. Soon my head is almost awash, and I need to hold onto the rail with one hand. I inch forward, releasing puffs of green bottom paint mixed with algae specks as I scour the waterline and the hull underneath.
Halfway along the starboard side, my left calf cramps. I grimace. The right calf follows. I flex both legs, and the cramps subside. As I work down the port side, my hand stiffens, turning eyeball-white. My feet are losing feeling. I try to work faster, but I’m slowing down. I’m losing grip on the brush. Another cramp grabs my right hamstring.
A thought surfaces: Hypothermia? In 70-degree water? Is this too cold…now that I’m old?
I push myself to finish the skeg and haul myself by the rail around the hull, checking her waterline once more.
I try to hoist myself aboard three times before I succeed and flop panting into the cockpit. My skin is fish-cold. My prune-like fingers fumble with the snaps on the cockpit cover. I hammer at them with my fist to finish the job.
I grit my teeth as I let myself back into the water to swim to shore. I roll onto my side, not to admire Finn but to scissor-kick, the stroke that takes the least effort. My progress is so slow I might as well be treading water.
At last I touch bottom. I drag myself out of the water past the jetty over stones and weed, my dripping trunks shellacked to my thighs. I snatch at my shirt, drop it, scoop it up, then fight to pull it over my head, sleeves straitjacketing my arms. I wobble through the sand of the pathway and pass the dinghy. If it says, “Sorry, I could’ve helped,” it does so under its breath. Or am I too intent on getting to the house to warm up to hear it? In the outdoor shower, I tremble as I wait for the water to heat up. My numb palms and soles look like frozen butter.
I finally thaw out—after standing in a life-restoring steaming cascade for a quarter of an hour. I towel off, bundle up in long khakis, a sweatshirt, socks and sneakers, and sit in the sun, watched over by my wife, Ellen.
As feeling returns, my cheeks flush, my fingers and toes prickle. Warmth suffuses me—as does the realization that now, the ordeal behind me, my experience exhilarates me. I escaped my brush with hypothermia with a heightened sense of life.
That is Cheek’s point: The risk and discomfort of sailing are what keep us fully alive. Now I can’t wait to get out to our boat again. I can’t wait to sail. I am rejuvenated. Once again my sailing fever spikes.
And yet…
“The old yearning is still in me,” White wrote, “belonging to the past, to youth, and so I am torn between past and present.”
I am torn about the future. I tell myself that I will not give up sailing. But I wonder: What will I have to give up to keep sailing?
I only have to look back to where Finn rides on her mooring for the answer. That I reached such a state in what was once my element seems an object lesson: Learn to draw the line, old salt, between when to be in the water and when to leave it to the minnows.
June/July 2025
