Not All Points of Sail Are Equal

If you were a schooner, you would outrun the swiftest, you with your mad eyes locked on elusive prizes, trying to shoot the bar before it shoots you. Steering and trimming and trimming and steering, leaving the safety of broad reaches, risking side-swipes from the heavy boom. You would careen as you drew closer to the wind, pushing for the horizon, a-tilt, blinded by spray, moderation foreign to your one-man armada. If you were a schooner, you would forget the simple lessons of Newtonian mechanics: all with or all against the gale’s force is never as safe as a steady beam reach. Closer and closer you would haul your craft until you were, at last, in irons.
     If you were a schooner, you would end locked in a standstill, pointing toward an edge where dreams and fate coalesce, with no hope of further motion.

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Credits

fiction by
Christina Dalcher
@CVDalcher

image by
kerry rawlinson
kerryrawlinson.tumblr

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creators