Phoebe Wang | Issue 40
"In my first season crewing, I felt a plunging disbelief that I was able to spend time on a sailboat, and the feeling still hasn’t quite left me."
Becoming Crew
Will I make it will I make it will I?
It’s a few minutes past five on a sharp spring afternoon. I gaze ahead at the dove-grey slice of lake. It’s not far, but there are so many crosswalks and intersections slowing me down. Every time a big red hand goes up, I’m forced to stop running. I suck in big breaths of air, check my phone, and wedge my body ahead of the other pedestrians. People—there are so many people in my way. Office workers power-walking to Union Station, tourists walking three or four abreast, couples arm in arm, Blue Jays fans clogging York Street near the stadium. I jog underneath the Gardiner Expressway and across streetcar tracks toward the waterfront. To anyone watching, I look like another irritable, impatient Torontonian. I feel like I’m fleeing and chasing something at the same time.
I’m going to make it. The Algonquin Queen II is rounding the Sundial Folly sculpture and pulling up at the dock. A biker dings his bell through the seagulls and club members with Sobeys bags flapping at their feet. I’ve made it. I fill and refill my lungs while looking out at the lake criss-crossed by island ferries. In the early part of the century, the harbour was crowded with docks, wharves, and sheds, and watercraft of all shapes and sizes—paddle steamers, passenger steamboats, lumber carriers, skiffs, and, in winter, iceboats. But today, I take in a view uncluttered by history.
Still out of breath, I join the loose hoop of members and guests waiting for Queen City Yacht Club’s tender boat. The schedules aren’t a secret, but since only members or their guests can book a ticket and board the tender, not many Torontonians know about these club ferries. On race nights, the tender runs every half-hour and drops off passengers right in front of the club on Algonquin Island. There are other options to reach the island, such as the city ferries or the water taxis, but they’re not as convenient or as pleasant. Following an unspoken etiquette, we wait while people with bikes and grocery carts board first. Senior members flash their membership cards and board while the rest of us line up to pay with cash or tickets. The Algonquin Queen II has a capacity of forty-nine and I have to admit I like the feeling of exclusivity. As I slowly move down the ramp to the tender, I leave behind another Phoebe, the stressed-out, overworked Phoebe, like a shadow that cannot leave shore.
During sailing season, I hurry from tutoring centres and ESL schools and offices across the city. I bike from different apartments to arrive on time. I arrange work schedules to have Wednesday evenings at liberty, and when I can’t leave students or escape a meeting early, my mind wanders to the lake, where the rest of the crew are unwrapping lines and sails. From early May to late September, sailors around Lake Ontario understand these rituals. We pack bags with Sperrys, sunglasses, lanyards, sunscreen, gloves, and snacks. We dress in layers. We text boat owners looking for extra crew. We work through lunch so we can power down our laptops at 4:00 p.m. to get over to the island and ready our boats before the race committee makes its starting signals. We don’t take this for granted. Sailing season is short as a Canadian summer. A change of state comes over me when, after a prolonged winter, I step onto the tender and feel its tilt and sway. I’m on the water now. I stand among chit-chatting crew. If I’m in a social mood, I’ll ask after kids and winter vacations. But often I’m silent, watching the city retreat and squinting to see if I recognize any of the Vikings and Beneteaus heeling on the lake. I note the wind direction and the stack of clouds over Humber Bay. I estimate how many knots of wind might be fanning the tender’s flag, though when the sun lowers, it’ll inevitably drop off.
There are many rituals. In the weeks leading up to launching their boats, owners don workpants and old sweaters. They’ll climb ladders to their boats nestled high in their cradles and peel back the covers, hoping not to find too much ice in the cockpit or to have to evict a family of rodents or birds. Rubbing their chilly hands, they’ll start investigating for dampness, rot, mould, and rust, adding to the list of repairs and tasks made when the boats were hauled out of the water at the end of last season. As the ground warms and the trees start to bud, the boatyard will become vocal with hammers, sanders, and the occasional bad word. Owners depressed and flummoxed by a task can usually find a sympathetic ear, a bit of advice, a spare part, or all three. Owners who left their boats in good repair take pleasure in the brightwork and polishing and varnishing the wood trim. On launch weekends, teams of senior members push each boat cradle onto rails so they can be driven down the marine railway and launched with their owners sitting in the cockpits like minor royalty on a parade float. Eager to be in the proximity of a sailboat again, I too have done my bit of sanding and painting of keels and hulls. Though I’m not a boat owner, I’m just as impatient to see them afloat again, lined up in their moors and slips.
After a fifteen-minute crossing, the Algonquin Queen II draws up alongside the white-painted, two-storey clubhouse. My gaze takes in the balconies and planters of flowers. I thank the crew as I step onto the dock, make my way to the club washrooms for one last stop, then shortcut along the marine railway toward the south gate. I pass the bigger boats in their slips, the cottonwood trees that drop sticky yellow buds each spring. The long line of masts shifts in the breeze along Algonquin and Ward’s Island, accompanied by the tinkling sound of metal snaps and stays. Boats that don’t race expectantly await their owners, like unopened gifts. I pass other crews unplugging extension cords and unzipping sail covers. When I reach Panache, the 26-foot Niagara I crew on, I don’t have to ask permission as I step over the lifelines and onto the deck.
Mark, the owner and skipper, feels my weight on the boat before his eyes crinkle in greeting. Because he is my friend and roommate, I frequently ignore and make fun of him, but because he is also my skipper and the person responsible for steering the boat and instructing the rest of us to carry out manoeuvres, I have to pay attention to him. We grin at each other in silent acknowledgement of this shift, then he continues a story he was in the middle of telling to Phil or to Pat, already on board. I leap down to the cabin, stow my knapsack on the floor, put my beer in the locker, and peer up at Mark with jib sheets under my arm.
“There was a lot of breeze in the harbour,” I report. “We’ll go with the number two then,” Mark says, lowering the outboard motor and plugging in the fuel line. Handing the jib sheets to Phil, who starts unwrapping them, I find the right sail and haul it up onto the foredeck, or the bow of the boat, unzipping the bag to find the tack and clew ends. I clip the jib to the forestay with the snap hooks along the edge of the leech, then sit on the deck tying bowline knots on the jib sheets, which I run outside of the shrouds but inside the lifelines, through the blocks, loosely around the winches, ending with a figure-eight knot to keep the lines from sliding out. This was the first knot I learned, and I can make them without thought now.
In my first season crewing, I felt a plunging disbelief that I was able to spend time on a sailboat, and the feeling still hasn’t quite left me. I didn’t grow up sailing, and I believed that no one in my family had either. But my parents are islanders, and my mother tells me that my great-grand-mother lived on a houseboat in Hong Kong’s Aberdeen Harbour. Like most people unfamiliar with the sport, I imagined uniformed crew outfitted in hundreds of dollars worth of Gore-Tex, moving in coordination on a huge yacht slicing through ocean waves. I imagined millionaires’ playthings, Olympic athletes in bright jerseys, and lone, eccentric teenagers embarking on oceanic journeys.
I’m not old, white, or rich. I don’t think I fit anyone’s expectations of a sailor, as evidenced by the looks of surprise I get when I bring it up to family, friends, and fellow writers. Their assumptions exhaust me, and I don’t always have the energy to explain how I began racing, how active the sport of sailing is on the Great Lakes, or the special atmosphere at Queen City. As a result, some people have known me for years and not known that I’ve sailed. In the mirror is a petite Asian woman with a round, serious face who looks like she spends more time in the library than doing rigorous physical activity. Peering closer, I see the bruises on my shins and my foul-weather gear hanging on hooks. But on occasion, someone corners me with their curiosity. “I hear that you sail,” they say, and the words spill out of me. They ask how I started, where I sail, whether it’s an expensive sport. I watch for bewilderment or eyes glazing over at the stream of boat words that I can’t help using and that I try to define for them, but curiosity is a hatch I could pull someone through to a club visit or race, where they too might surprise themselves.
I tell people that QCYC is one of the oldest sailing clubs in Toronto, as comfortable and informal as a hoodie softened by the sun. There’s no dress code—I sail in a uniform of old jeans and a ball cap, and my foul-weather gear consists of a $20 pair of rain pants, hand-me-down gloves of dissolving leather, and a Columbia hiking jacket. No makeup, just sunscreen and my hair in a ponytail. Nor is there a need to be particularly athletic, though it helps. Racing is a few compressed minutes of adrenaline-inducing activity interspersed with long intermissions of sitting, crouching, waiting, and watching.
On a racing boat, there’s a variety of roles to suit strength, agility, and ability. These roles can include skipper, tactician, mainsail and jib sail trimmers, and foredeck, which I’ll explain in more detail later. Among my assets as a sailor, other than my ass itself, which is useful for ballast, is that at five foot three-and-a-half inches tall, my low centre of gravity makes me comfortable balancing on the foredeck. Generally, there aren’t many women who helm or crew on race nights, and even fewer women of colour. Members nod and smile at me in recognition, and I wonder if that’s because there are so few Asian Canadian women my age in the community. I’m used to the visibility and foreignness of my body, having attended literary events and art openings for decades where I’d hardly see another Asian woman. I enjoy undoing other people’s expectations, and even my own.
I didn’t expect to move to Toronto in the summer of 2008—my intention was only to stay a few months. I sublet a room in a Bloordale duplex full of ex-New Brunswick actors and musicians. Shortly after I’d moved in, one of my new roommates invited the household for a sail on a second-hand boat he’d bought the year before. Mark had saved for a year on his “peanut butter and jelly sandwich plan.” It turns out that it’s possible to buy a boat at the age of thirty by saving for a year, not eating out, and living with roommates, so his oft-told story goes. He’s a Maritimer, so tall tales and storytelling are his heritage. Though we’d barely interacted—I was working three jobs at the time—I eagerly responded to his invitation. All I remember of that sail is the evening light on the waves, the laughter of my roommate Amber, her best friend Michelle, and Mark, who was steering us into the middle of the harbour. I hadn’t yet made up my mind about living in Toronto, but being on water gave me a feeling I’d been searching for. The next spring, when Mark sent out an email inviting friends and roommates to crew the club’s Wednesday-night races, I started showing up. That’s how I tell it. I have a sailing story now. And sailing stories are the best stories.
With just half an hour before the race starts, it’s time to get off the dock. Amanda and Tim hurry aboard as I step up to the bow to find the mooring lines beneath the weight of the jib. I unhook and hold them taut while Mark starts the motor, and only when he gives me the go-ahead do I toss the lines onto the grass. Panache backs slowly out, jostling the boats on either side of us with her bumpers. Other crews wave to us, wishing us a good race and a good time. Some yell out a joke that is lost over the sound of the motor. We keep buoys to port and motor past the Ward’s Island ferry dock, where passengers watch us and sometimes wave or take our photo. When we’re in sight of the race committee boat, Mark shuts off the engine and tells us to hoist the sails. We pause our chatting to fit the handle into the main halyard winch, pulling and grinding, tilting our heads back to see when the sail reaches the top.
What makes a crew? When do we become a crew? Is it the moment we step onto the boat, performing our various duties? Or is it when we adjust the sails so that they fill out, the boat heeling with the force of the breeze? I’m not sure. I do know at some point I stopped being a passenger. I became— am becoming—a maker of knots, a trimmer of stories.
Published with the permission of Assembly Press from Relative to Wind: On Sailing, Craft, and Community by Phoebe Wang.© 2024.
Phoebe Wang is a first-generation Chinese-Canadian currently based in Toronto, Canada. She is the author of the poetry collections Admission Requirements (McClelland and Stewart, 2017), shortlisted for the Gerald Lambert Memorial Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and nominated for the Trillium Book Award, and Waking Occupations (McClelland and Stewart 2022). Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Globe & Mail, The New Quarterly, Brick and The Unpublished City, shortlisted for a Toronto Book Award, and she co-edited The Unpublished City: Volume II, The Lived City. She is currently on the editorial board with Brick Books. She has been a mentor with Diaspora Dialogues and is an adjunct professor and mentor in the University of Toronto Creative Writing MA program. Wang lives and sails in Toronto, Ontario.
Relative to Wind: On Sailing, Craft, and Community by Phoebe Wang Assembly Press, 2024
A lingering, long-haul collection of writing about sailing for readers of Julietta Singh and Kyo Maclear.
In Relative to Wind, Phoebe Wang delivers a poetic rendering of her decade-long journey of learning to sail and a deep dive into what it means to be a newcomer to an old tradition. From working alongside crewmates in tempestuous conditions to becoming an avid racer and organizer to drafting a wistful love letter to a Wayfarer dinghy—while examining the loose tether between sailing and a creative life—Wang delivers a book for sailors and would-be sailors that is thoughtful and surprising at every tack.
"A thoughtful, illuminating look at life away from land."—Kirkus
"Although it takes place mostly on the water, Phoebe Wang’s absorbing Relative to Wind covers a lot of ground. In formally inventive chapters, Wang touches upon the history of sailing, the legacies of colonization and discrimination, the emergence of North American yacht clubs, and the evolution of Toronto’s waterfront. She does so with poetic prose."—The Literary Review of Canada
“A riveting book about our parallel lives, the side passions that steer our hearts and right our balance. I am not a good sailor, have honestly rarely sailed, but I can say without hesitation that you will not find a book that better captures the sport—or the vagaries of wind, collaboration and creative practice. Phoebe Wang’s expansive prose is wise and guiding, and I was very happy to have travelled with her.”—Kyo Maclear, author of Unearthing
"Wang's book demystifies sailing and the process of learning to sail in a fresh and inviting way. Her story will encourage anyone inclined to step on a boat without experience, and her perspective paves the way for much-needed diversity and accessibility in the sport. Her love for this new nautical world reminds all sailors why we yearn again and again for the wind to fill our sails."—Captain Liz Clark, author of Swell
“For readers like me who are unfamiliar with the intricacies of sailboat culture and its boat speak, poet Phoebe Wang offers a headlong introduction into the world of winches and jib sheets. Relative to Wind is an obsession turned lyrical meets technical that sails into the gust with no looking back.”—Amy Fung, author of Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being
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