It's been awhile... I'm taking a book-length project workshop this summer, so I'm writing ten pages a week but I don't know how they are coming together as a whole unit yet. Here's a sample...

I had never been to a yacht club before. I had never even seen a yacht before, so when the press rep for the McNish Classic Yacht Race told me she’d put my name on the guest list for the Friday night reception at the Pacific Corinthian Yacht Club in Oxnard, California, I conjured images of men in navy polos and white loafers, of women wearing pearls with frosted blonde hair, of pink alcohol in martini glasses and small plates of things called canapés. So I dug through my closet, discarding blouse after skirt, until I could piece together from my dirt-poor, post-college wardrobe something respectable enough for a yacht club: a pink sleeveless shirt, my purple a-line (with French words on it), the pale pink kitten heels that my mother’d bought me to wear to church last Easter Sunday, and the fake pearls I still had from my performance of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” sophomore year. Other than the notepad poking out of my purse, a necessary accessory for a journalist, I figured I’d fit right in.

But when I ran into Louise, the press rep I’d spoken to on the phone, in the parking lot of the yacht club, a loud, round woman wearing a red visor, khakis and embroidered McNish Classic polo, she snickered. “Cute shoes, doll. Too bad you’ll have to take ‘em off.” I had no idea what she was talking about. Louise had to take a call and waved me inside, where a brunette woman in a PCYC blazer gave me a nametag and directed me to the upstairs ballroom.

I stood awkwardly in the corner, surveying the room until Louise came back to start introducing me, berating myself once again for being a shitty journalist. What kind of reporter is too shy to talk to people? Kind of goes with the territory. I pulled out my notepad and started jotting down observations: my fashion assessments had been pretty far off, but my cocktail predictions seemed accurate. Cosmopolitans, glasses of white wine, martinis (with extra olives): I wandered over to the bar and picked up a glass of chardonnay, then out onto the balcony, settling myself in a corner to observe. Almost everyone was wearing shorts and t-shirts, mostly untucked. People were laughing more than I anticipated members of a yacht club laughing. I thought I’d stay for an hour, get a handful of quotes and head home.

Home was just a ten-minute drive from the yacht club, a tiny one-bedroom for $900 a month two blocks from the beach. Tonight was an hour covering this story, dinner for one of a quick stir fry with the last of last week’s farmer’s market vegetables, an hour of TV, organizing whatever notes I gathered tonight and going to bed. Most of my three months in California had been spent similarly: every other week the boyfriend I’d followed here was out on the island counting nests, so I put in plenty of overtime at work to fill in the blank spaces and got used to hanging out in my underwear and cooking for one. Tomorrow, I’d roll out of bed early to head back to the yacht club and cover the race itself. All I knew so far was that this was the 30th and final year of the race founded by and named after the infamous Dick McNish, a notoriously shy 82-year-old Venturan. The race was open only to classic yachts, and I didn’t yet have any idea what that meant. My editor Matt had instructed me to get some good quotes from McNish, known for his disdain of the media. Matt had purposely sent me to cover the race, thinking if anyone could get McNish to talk it’d be a petite 24-year-old “with that big smile”. Tomorrow, I’d be out on the press boat, watching the race from a distance, so this was my chance to meet the man himself. I had a tendency to get seasick, so I reminded myself to stop and get ginger tea on the way home. Louise had warned me that anyone on the press boat who ‘fed the fishes’ would be mocked mercilessly.

I leaned against the metal railing along the deck’s edge and closed my eyes, trying to conjure the words for the dank smell of the ocean in high summer. The gray-blue water bobbed quietly, sending shivers of splash against the bellies of boats docked at the harbor. All I could see were tall-reaching masts: a mix of white fiberglass from the PCYC’s members and the varnished wood of the visiting classic yachts. I felt a hand on my back and turned to see Louise, who told me Dick was doing an interview with the County Star but would talk with me later.

“You wanna see a tall ship,” she asked, smiling. I bit my lower lip to keep from giggling at the vaguely sexual language I’d be encountering all night, but nodded, and Louise introduced Jon and Graem, co-owners of the Raietea, a 43-foot sloop whose name is a lesser-known French Polynesian island which, in Tahitian, means bright sky, up from Long Beach for the weekend. “These gentlemen volunteered to be your tour guides for the evening,” she told me. It’s in my nature to be a little wary when two middle-aged men offer to show me their sloop, but I definitely wanted to see what the inside of a classic yacht’s cabin looked like so I shook their hands demurely and got the spellings of their last names and let them lead me down the winding staircase to the plank dock below.

As soon as I stepped off the bottom step to the dock, Graem’s head snapped around to look at my feet.

“Heels?” He shook his head, the gray edges of his hair rustling in the ocean breeze. “No way you’re getting on the Raietea with heels on.”

Jon laughed a little. “Took us two hours to varnish the main deck’s teak flooring and a couple thousand to pay for those boards—you’ll scratch ‘em up.”

I was horrified. How did I always manage to do it? I thought I’d get all decked out, did my best to look the part and still embarrassed myself. Why was I even a writer? Could I be any more obvious?

“No big deal, sweetheart,” Jon said, throwing his big arm around my shoulders. “You’ll just tour the boats barefoot.”

Graem smiled again, kindly. “You’ve never done this before, have you?”

Though it was true—my cute shoes had betrayed me for the conspicuous outsider I was—I felt better knowing that it was out there. I wouldn’t have to pretend to recognize anything, and I knew it was better for the story that they carefully explain everything to me as a beginner anyway.

“Alright, star reporter,” Graem continued, taking the empty wine glass from my hand and setting it on the bare deck. “Let’s get you a real drink.”

My heels shoved into the tote bag slung over my left shoulder, I took the hand Jon offered me, pulling me up and over the brass railing onto the Raiatea. Graem ducked into the cabin to start mixing drinks and Jon led me around the main deck, describing the hard work of varnishing the floorboards, which he and Graem did themselves, on their hands and knees. The masts, he told me, were the same holly beams that the original owner, who built the boat, installed, and they had bought crisp new ivory sails for race day. The back of my throat tingled slightly from the sharp smell of varnish still fresh on the deck, and then a breeze passed through, trembling the rolled-up sails. I wrinkled my nose: fish, Jon told me. Most of the yacht owners spent the long weekend in Ventura for the race, went fishing on Friday and cooked their own dinner.

“That’s why you smell kerosene, too,” he said as Graem emerged from the belly of the ship with two cocktails in his fists, handing one off to me without bothering to tell me what it was. “The party’s just getting started.”

I was conscious, when I accepted the first Jack and Coke on board the Raiatea, of the fact that I probably shouldn’t be drinking while covering a story. But something about it seemed appropriate here: these men referred to themselves as salty dogs and to me as a star reporter; they wore baseball caps to a yacht club and had stocked the bar on their boat with top-shelf liquor and plastic tumblers that wouldn’t scratch the floorboards if they shattered. My kitten heels were poking out of my purse and my bare feet felt comfortable on the teak floorboards. Plus, I hadn’t been out for drinks since I’d moved to California. My boyfriend was gone most of the time and anyway his idea of going out was throwing on a pair of flip-flops and grabbing a beer at the Sewer, the alleyway bar around the corner from our apartment. I worked as a reporter, a largely solitary job. I spent my days wandering around in the sand, marveling at the ocean and typing at coffee shops for the free wireless. I made barely $1000 a month. I was 24 and I lived at the beach. Nothing seemed better to me than watching the sun set into the Pacific with cocktail in hand, shooting the breeze with a bunch of kind middle-aged men. Here was a chance to play dress-up and entertain the notion that I was an adult who knew how she liked her whiskey. Plus, open bar.

So I followed when Jon and Graem led me onto the deck of their harbor neighbor, the Spitfire, where the crew were playing Scottish bagpipe music loudly and accepted when they offered me a mai-tai, and a second one, and declared myself a member of the Hunter S. Thompson school of journalism. I kicked my bare feet up on the white plastic cushions on the Spitfire’s benches and said, “Tell me your favorite race stories, gentlemen.”

We spent an hour and a half there, men gossiping on the deck of their yacht like they were around a kitchen table:

“I heard that the paint job on Circe cost more than the down payment on a house!”

And “to rename your ship superstition says you’ve first got to run her aground, and no self-respecting yacht owner would ever dream of hurting his girl like that,” and

“Grand prize is the skipper’s weight in Mum’s champagne!” and

“It’s not about who wins or loses, but about getting these old gals together,” and

“The anchor motor on the Sparrow came from a B-52” and

Goddamnit we’re out of rum! – Let’s head over to the Sparrow!”

And, glasses raised, “To Dick McNish!”

This was July in southern California, so even as eight p.m. rolled around, the sky was still a pink-streaked blue and the conversation lulled like the waves softly rocking the boat.

“See, man, we don’t need a flat screen,” Jon said to Graem.
Graem smirked and turned to me. “Ok star reporter, settle something for us,” he said. “I think we should get a flat screen HD for our cabin. Take ‘er out on a Sunday, get a cooler of beer, watch the game. Duff here thinks I’m being spoiled.”
“Not spoiled,” Jon said. “I just think—we go sailing to get away from that life.”

The other men nodded quietly, as if a grave secret was being shared. I asked about day jobs: IT manager, auto parts manufacturer, quality control specialists. I had no idea what any of them really did, because while they were here, docked in Oxnard, drinking cocktails as the waves lapped at their girls wooden bellies, they were ships’ captains and nothing else. They lost themselves in this life, in manning the helms and reading the wind. This wasn’t a general kind of escapism, not middle-aged men looking for some retreat from the daily grind: there was a specific charm to racing these boats, this way that was so appealing to them. Wooden boats have a history tucked inside the grains of their floor boards, and the owners seek only to highlight that history, to bring another time back to life for an afternoon, to remind themselves and the race’s audience of an era of boating before fiberglass and high-speed motors.

“These are time machine boats,” Jon said. “The moment you step on board, you are transported back.”

I saw other boats: with enchanting names like the Dauntless, the Rose of Sharon, the Vignette, Circe. But the tours were a blur of minute details: the original 1947 lantern mounted from the cabin’s ceiling; the story of the silver dollar installed below the center mast for good luck; the forest-green sleeping bags balled up on the thin mattresses in the sleeping quarters, since all captains believe you must sleep on the boat the night before a big race; the names of their wives engraved on a brass plate mounted beneath the steering column; the laughter, the leis, the mixed drinks. Everything was hand-chosen, carefully researched, perfectly authentic. Owning a wooden yacht, they told me, is a labor of love.

The sun dipped lower, casting a harsh orange sheen on the surface of the ocean as we again fell into silence on the deck of the Raiatea. I sucked on the cherry from my hurricane and thought about my job. Being a journalist was going pretty well. When I’d moved to California, I took a job helping the underachievers of rich Orange County lawyers study for the SATs and had gotten a little freelance reporting on the side. Now I had a story every week, some of which had taken me out to the islands, into symphony halls and crowded bars for live concerts, browsing around art galleries, interviewing Ben Harper and lounging at the yacht club on a Friday night. I was teaching and writing for a living. So why did I still feel so disconnected from this strange permanent-summer life?

A small motorboat chugged by, helmed by the people I expected to see at the Pacific Corinthian that night: an older man with a white driver’s cap and navy-striped polo steering; his wife, bleached blond hair, black dress, white cardigan tied tennis-style around her shoulders. She sipped her glass of chardonnay and looked out toward the motley crew of us—men in tartan hats and Hawaiian print shirts, with purple leis and umbrellas in their red plastic cups, women without the decency to wear shoes—and yelled out to us that classic yachts were, “too high maintenance!” We all laughed, and the men echoed what they’d told me all night: that was the difference between people willing to sacrifice the history and effort of a classic yacht for the creature comforts of modern boating, who would pick the easy care of shiny white fiberglass over the smooth, peaceful sailing of a wooden vessel. All anybody else saw when they looked at a wooden boat was the work involved, the very thing they loved.

Graem snickered slightly, and took a shot back: “Actually, I think she was talking about herself.”

I ended the night with Jon and Graem back inside the club, the three of us gathered around a small white-clothed table, a Long Island iced tea in front of each of us. It had been dark when we’d climbed the stairs back into the club and Louise gave me a bear hug, patted Jon on the back.

“Jesus, where’d you take her,” she harassed them.

“They took good care of me,” I replied. “I saw all the great ones. I heard about the Dauntless and the Rose of Sharon.” I could see her pride as I showed her my five pages of notes.

“Well, Dick’s gone for the night,” she told me, and my heart skipped. Hunter S. Thompson my ass, who was I kidding, I couldn’t pull off this kind of journalism, I’d missed the big interview. Louise must have sensed my disappointment. “Don’t worry, doll,” she told me. “I’ll get you five with him at the trophy ceremony tomorrow night.”

So I relaxed and Graem said “one more drink?” and I nodded and slumped at the table with them, listening to the jazz trio on the balcony finish out the evening.

“So star reporter,” Graem leaned in. “Tell us something about yourself.”

First, don’t talk about yourself is a pretty basic tenant of journalism. It’s not about being secretive, but the more you talk the less they do, and they’re the story.

Second, generally speaking, it’s a good idea not to get personally involved in your story. It’s much more difficult to write something when you feel too strongly one way or the other about your subjects. So making friends is generally discouraged.

But third, I was drunk. I weighed 120 pounds, hadn’t had dinner and had downed a glass of wine, a Jack and coke, two mai-tais, a hurricane and was working my way through a Long Island iced tea at this point.

So I told them I’d just gotten engaged.

And they balked—couldn’t believe how young I was. Where was the ring? Well, it was spontaneous, I said, and told them the elaborate story. How I’d gone out to Santa Barbara Island with him for a night, and how we’d sat watching the sunset on Signal Peak. And how he’d just leaned over and whispered, “let’s get married” and how I’d started to laugh at first because I thought he was joking. And how we wouldn’t actually get married for a few years but we wanted to make that commitment.
None of which was true.

And even as the words were coming out of my mouth I wondered why. I had plenty about myself I could’ve told them that wasn’t a lie, but suddenly I wanted all of this life. I wanted, very suddenly and very strongly to be this person: the girl who wore pearls and drank whiskey at yacht clubs, the girl who was engaged to the boy she’d already moved cross-country for—twice—the girl who could swap stories with anyone she encountered, seamlessly, flawlessly, without being too shy to ask any questions or getting drunk and missing the key interview or wearing the wrong damn shoes.
Instead I stumbled home that night, twisted my ankle walking through the front door. I passed out diagonally across the bed in just my tank top and underwear and woke up at two a.m. to puke and realize I’d forgotten to stop for tea.

At seven my alarm went off. I actually do get seasick and probably should have turned down the assignment but didn’t want to pass up a feature. So I rolled out of bed and showered leaning against the wall and threw my wet hair in a ponytail. This time I just wore jeans and sneakers and dark sunglasses to cover the bags under my eyes. Luckily, the Leaf and Bean on the way to Oxnard had peach ginger tea so I bought two cups and downed them before I made it into the PCYC parking lot, then dragged myself over to dock eleven, where Louise had told me I could meet the press boat, a gorgeous white motorboat with an expansive front deck that I spent the next three hours cross-legged on, watching the parade of the time machines.
The magnificent vessels floated gracefully along with the wind, their massive sails puffed out without a single wrinkle, as if a solid, structured thing. Some were brand-new bright white, others ivory, others the worn gold of years-old. I was surrounded by these historic creatures, dipping and curving into the wind, waiting patiently for their start time. Dick decided to delay the start an hour, in hopes that the wind would pick up, as if they could control this thing, this ocean. The sun was harsh bright, a white-hot yellow and I squinted into the puffy clouds. Even just five miles out from shore I couldn’t see the harbor, couldn’t see anything but the line where the sea met the sky and these floating artifacts, their tall masts lovingly varnished and glinting in the sun. A crew member of the Bequia climbed the mast, and I held my breath. The boat rocked with the waves, but he remained steady, harnessed in, a testament to the skill the crew put in to sailing these ships. Watching them race, slowly, was a reminder of the time they have not forgotten—a time when everyone who owned a boat built her himself, and knew how to sail her, too.

And the ginger tea must have done the trick, because I didn’t throw up.