I remember December days like this on the beach at McCrae. The clouds heavy and low, the air quiet as dust, the odd breeze lazily pushing the warmth around. Rumblings of unseen sky planes above the high cloud. The tense summer air waiting.
Around midday one of two things would happen: either the sky would rip open, demanding that you enter the water or roast, or the pressure would build and a squall would brew. When that happened the clouds would hunker down and a black line would begin to collect across the horizon of the bay from Sorrento and like a distant battalion, chart east towards our little patch of concrete just above the sand.
This was before radars and smartphones, when men would look to clouds and water and teach their children to read ripples and windshifts and the ancient language of mariners: windward, leeward, clew and cleft, haulyards, sheets and vangs. Every Saturday we would run upstairs at the club to learn how to tack upwind, set sails on a beam reach, run without capsizing, and avoid getting your fingers caught in a block.
Lesson done, we'd clatter down the stairs, all bare feet and wetsuits, don life jackets and zinc cream, and, like baby turtles, flap and frolic our way to our dinghies perched on the beach. We'd furiously hoist sails and cluster round to carry each others' boats down the beach, staggering with preadolescent legs and impossibly bulky life jackets.
Once the boat was lifting in the shallows, you'd wade out, breathless and gasping as the water crept up the thighs inside the wettie. With the craft walked out to waist-deep, you'd drop the rudder, turn her away from the wind and belly flop over the side of the boat. Once in, you'd jam the rudder with one foot, duck a rearing unharnessed boom, scramble up onto your bottom, connect appropriate ropes and handles with appropriate hands, pull, and away she would go.
The older kids, with a couple of years and a few inches on us, made this look graceful. They'd give a good hop and with a leg over the gunwhale (another maritime word, one can only imagine its origins), they'd pull the tiller and sheet on hard so the little raft, with no time to slack, would take off as if slapped on the rump. But we were only 11.
Finally, we were all off, heading out to