Craftsmanship

I was testing a boat the other day at the little marina at Pier 66 in Ft. Lauderdale when a sight hove into view that blew me away and had a similar effect on the folks I was with. As a bunch of us strolled down one of the docks that adjoin the parking lot, having just destroyed a few sandwiches at a little waterside open-air cafe, I noticed a megayacht in the outboard fairway adrift for all intents and purposes, except for a couple of TowBoatU.S. vessels, one hawsered to the bow, the other bridled to the swim platform at the stern.

The two little boats had just pulled the megayacht into the fairway stern-first and were proceeding with their vast charge toward the inner end where we stood along a face dock. They looked like two mice harnessed to a huge, sleeping cat.

"Wow," said young Jon Viestenz, Product Manager for Cruisers Yachts, just about the same time I uttered an identical exclamation.

The sight was rather thrilling, actually, and put me in mind of a couple of tugs working a ship into a tight berth in an inner harbor.

The sound effects were cool. You could hear the studied laziness of the drawls of the two guys on the two TowBoats reverberating within the fairway from their respective VHFs. Had you only listened to them, you'd have thought they were playing a leisurely game of poker or shooting the breeze at the back of a feed store, instead of maneuvering a multimillion dollar vessel amid many other super-pricey vessels with wind gusts afoot and some swooshy currents running.

But what was even cooler was the lead boat. There was one solitary guy onboard and he was a consummate boathandler--I mean he was so good that at one point, with his port quarter maybe a foot from the stem of a whopping motoryacht and the push-knee on his bow a foot from the swim platform of the mega, he was able to precisely spin his boat in place--one engine ahead and the other astern--so he could show off just a tad and reposition for a slightly different angle of thrust.

Although the owners of the motoryacht charged out to the foredeck to look on with alarm, the pure, mathematical artistry of the guy in the TowBoat was so utterly apparent that Jon and I sort of looked at each other and simultaneously agreed, "They ain't got nothin' to worry about--not with somebody like that at the helm!"

Heck! I don't know if boat handling in close quarters is a sport or not, although it can devolve into some rather intense sportiness sometimes. But I tend to admire great boathandlers the way I admire great athletes, whether well known at the national level or not.

Craftsmanship is at the bottom of it all, of course: the ability to gracefully bend a hulking piece of waterborne machinery to one's will, no matter what conditions Mother Nature happens to be dishing out on any given day.

It's a beautiful, artsy thing to watch. And with time, practice, and a little bit of luck, it can be a beautiful thing to experience as well, even for a modestly-talented guy like myself, if only for a moment or two, here and there.