A couple of years ago I took some friends out on the boat. One of them looked over and said, "That's a nice beam reach you've got going."
I said, "What's a beam reach?"
I knew exactly what I was doing. I just had no idea there was a word for it.
Eight hours and no phone
That gap goes back to how I learned. When I was a kid, my dad would take me sailing out of Meaford, across to Christian Island and Beckwith Island. It was a long haul, around eight hours on the water, and this was four decades ago, well before anyone carried a communication device that wasn't on Star Trek.
Eight hours with no phone, no screen, nothing to do but be on the boat with my dad. At the time it felt long. Looking back, I'm grateful for every hour of it.
I picked up sailing the way you pick up anything you do enough of as a kid. By doing it. I can bring a disabled boat back to its dock. I can navigate, keep her off the rocks, and read the weather well enough to stay out of the worst of it. I just seem to know how to find the wind.
What I never picked up was the vocabulary. Nobody quizzed me on terms out there. We just sailed.
The tension I didn't know I had
The part that stuck with me most came later, when I was at university in Toronto.
The boat would still be in the water into the late fall, and I'd come home on a Friday afternoon, fried from a week of school. My dad would ask if I felt like a quick sail before dinner. I always said yes.
Those first few times out, something caught me off guard. I'd be standing there as we came under sail, gliding over a gentle roller, and I could feel a tension drain out of my shoulders. Tension I hadn't even known was there until it left.
I didn't realize how much I'd been carrying around until the water took it off me. A few minutes under sail and it was just gone.
I've chased that feeling ever since.
Why I keep coming back to the water
I tell this story partly because it's true and partly because it's a big piece of why I do what I do here. People move to this area for a lot of reasons, but underneath most of them is some version of what I felt on those Friday sails. The sense that the water can reset you.
You don't need a sailboat for it. A paddle, a dock, a walk along the shore, they all do some of the same work. But there's a reason so many of us end up living within sight of Georgian Bay and never want to leave.
If you're thinking about a move and that pull toward the water is part of what's drawing you here, I get it completely. Reach out anytime and we can talk about it. I promise not to test you on the terminology.