Day 265 - Come Sail Away With Me. Lads

April 30th, 2010

I love water. I accredit this affair to:

- Being born under the Pisces sign

- Taking peculiarly long showers.

- Learning how to swim when I was two because we had a pool in our back yard. Safety was number one in the Kabat house. Except when my brother tackled Danny Silvers in our basement. Danny needed stitches in his head. We were watching “SpaceCamp”. On Betamax.

Today I revisited the seas and took an impromptu sail on The Clipper City, a steel replica of an 1854 wooden cargo schooner built from the original plans in the Smithsonian Institution that is licensed for 144 passengers, the largest passenger sailboat in the United States. There were flawless views of Governors’ Island, Lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty. Side note. In fifth grade, I played the French gifted statuette in a play about how being a free nation is supposed to be a good thing. Or something like that. Try holding your right arm up for an hour.

The 158' long tall ship left from Brooklyn’s Pier 11 in Red Hook, one of the oldest neighborhoods in New York that is recognized for being full of industrial charm, cobble stone streets and a highly regarded Fairway, Brooklyn’s “it” grocery.

Having a lifetime interest in all things water, Red Hook’s harbor is what I find most stimulating. It’s gritty. It’s authentic. It’s Jax.

On day 23, I wrote an entry entitled “Dude Looks Like a Lady” and stressed my hopes to involve myself in a water front way of life. http://jacquelinekabat.blogspot.com/2009_08_01_archive.html.

Here’s a blurb:

“I hope for the following scenario to occur at some point in my lifetime:

You: Jacqueline, What do you do?

Jacqueline: Well (You), I work down at the docks.

I crave for the opportunity to verbally express that my income is based on my ability to operate a machine that lifts and moves cargo on and off ships. Bonus if I eat lunch out of a lunch box, learn how to gut a fish and shoot the shit with a guy named Smitty.”

Up to this point in my existence, my most noteworthy undertaking of genuine seawomanship was when I attended Camp Seafarer for girls in Arapahoe, North Carolina. The good news: I mastered the nuisances of sailing, motor boating and water-skiing on the Neuse River. Bad Neuse: Campers were required to greet other campers and counselors with an enthusiastic “from the heart” “Ahoy There!”

Since my life seems to continually gravitate towards the flow of the world’s rivers, seas and showers, I am committing to making more of an effort to place myself at bodies of waters more frequently. Even if it’s Brooklyn’s notorious Gowanus Canal which takes pride being solid with algae feeding on human waste. In 2007, a minke whale swam into the canal, beached itself… and died.