All shapes and sizes

Journeys and destinations… Wes Darling is back!

All shapes and sizes

by Christine Kling

Tomorrow will mark a week that I have been here at anchor off Deltaville Marina in Jackson Creek here in Virginia. Ahhhhh…… I've not been boat driving — I've been peacefully at anchor – well, peaceful except for a couple of 30+ knot squalls, but that's part of the package.

As I've been sitting here at anchor, I've been hard at work on the edits of the new book and I keep hearing in my mind the voices of my critique group as I go through the pages of the new book. Mike harped on the fact that all my female characters seemed to be hard and unlikeable, and Neil said my French characters all seemed to be fat and ugly. I wasn't getting across that people, or rather characters, seem to come in all shapes and sizes.

I've been working on that (and many other issues) here this week while I've been anchored in Deltaville and the reality of it struck me when I realized that like my characters, boats too come in all shapes and sizes.

To start with when I first got my anchor down, I was nearly T-boned by a curious-looking local boat filled with a bunch of local fellows. They tried to sail upwind to clear my bow, but finally fell off and as they sailed under my stern they joked, "What would you tell your insurance man if you got rammed by a 17th century sailing vessel?" It turns out they were sailing the EXPLORER which is a replica of the 1607 scallop that Captain John Smith used to explore and chart the area around the original Jamestown settlement.

They were guys from the Deltaville Boatyard and I found out later they often took her out using her sweeps to clear the dock.

Here in Deltaville there is a boatyard full of boats on the hard, a marina with a variety of local and cruising boats and an anchorage with a constantly changing collection of anchored vessels. And today, I walked over and visited the local Maritime Museum where the EXPLORER was built. The grounds were beautiful and they had a collection of historical boats and boats in the process of being refurbished for the museum. I learned about the many types of work boats they built around these parts to work the fisheries on the Chesapeake Bay.

Here in Deltaville, I've met a fellow who has sailed from California to the Med and back on a Hans Christian, a couple from Oriental, SC on a Bristol 29.9, a couple who've recently upgraded from a 30-something monohull to a 44-foot South African cat and another couple on a Prout Catamaran. The people are as different as their boats and the main point is just that.