Boston Community Sailing

I'm a sailing hacker, can't hardly make proper knots, but there is a place for sailors like me.

I have one original painting, bought on a Brookline Open Studio day several yeas back, now on loan to my sister, it's a colorful landscape of Beacon Hill from the Cambridge side of the river, with lots of sailboats, I bought it in commemoration of summer 2001 sailing those Mercury bathtub-hulled sailboats from the Boston Community Sailing, that place on the Esplanade near the Longfellow bridge. It's a classic Boston thing, because the views are great, the wind is New England weird, it changes all the time, there are can be dead zones in the shadow of the the Pru and the Hancock, you see cloud patterns divide over Boston-Cambridge, this heat pocket, with the broad Charles as a cooled subpocket within. I got a little tired of it after that summer because you can't go past the Longfellow Bridge or the Mass Ave Bridge, you end up sailing the same places over and over. You can buzz the sweeties sunbathing on the Esplanade. These sailboats are fairly indestructible, I've banged up against the wall on the Cambidge side, smacked into the dock, run aground. I've seen people capsize and take a bath in the Charles, you need to let off on the tension when big gusts come up, some people don't get it. In Jamaica Plain in 2004 a Boston DPW worker flushed flourescent green dye down my toilet, and discovered my poop drained into the storm pipe which led to the Charles, not the sewer pipe at all. He told me "Oh yeah there are thousands of places in Boston attached to the wrong pipe". Oh geez and I see naive people fishing on the Charles. So you definitely want to avoid capsizing, but learning how to let off is part of the beauty of the analog non-digital practices of sailing. I would never buy a motorboat. That's like driving, whereas sailing is subtle and much more rewarding. But you can't haul a waterskier, so motorboats have their place. Anyway Community Saling boats are deliberately heavy and hardy because they know there's going to be a bunch of knuckleheads out there. They give you a training of about 2 hours and then you're on your own, it's strange they don't require life-jackets, seems like the ambulance-chasing lawyers would be salivating about this. The Mercury's are pretty easy to sail. But there is a lot of traffic, lots of sailboats, 40-something from Community Sailing, dozens of MIT's little sailboats, those wake-raising Duck Tours, worst of all the obnoxious motorboaters from Watertown and Waltham who come zooming down the Charles as fast as they can. And the chubby tub Mercury's do not perform in low wind. In 2001 Community Sailing cost $75 for 45 days, you can get more expensive yearly memberships, but the 45 day deal is sufficient, I think the best thing is start June 15th and take the whole month of July, you can sail almost to 9pm, it's warmest, and August is disliked in sailing for its humid windless days. It's a fun thing for a date, depending on the person.

Once I was aboard as ballast on one of the higher end sailboats that Community Sailing also offers, it had 3 not 2 sails, and V of a half-dozen Canada geese crossed us right off the bow, it was so David Attenborough.

They have a bike-rack on the dock, you can ride your bike down the Esplanade, or just take the mole-train, excuse me I mean the T.

The deadest spot wind-wise seems to in the area of the dock itself, so sometimes I would listlessly drift in. The only other sailing I've done is on a bantumweight Sunfish, which you can drive by blowing on the sail, these Mercury's are a bit more unwieldy, but it's fun to get out there on the Charles and review Back Bay and MIT, if you live here try it at least for one summer, it's quite a novelty for a month or two.