Pictured is my prideful bride Clare and family member Corky after her eventful first dock. I'm sure she's thinking, "What's so hard about that?"

Learning to sail for my bride and me was a passage of self-fulfillment. In other words, we learned on our own. One of the biggest, and of course, first challenges was getting in and out of our dock. The space between piers in our inland lake marina was scant at best, and made even more daunting by the narrow channel approach that required a 180-degree turn with a very tight radius to get our nose into our slip.

I, being the masterful, manly man that I am, was the first to learn this difficult maneuver. My wife also wanted to be able to tackle docking, so on an early summer weeknight; we went down to the lake. Only a few anglers were witness to our activities, but they were on the bank directly across from our dock. First I drove the boat out, then back, my sweetheart watching intently as I talked through every nuance. Then she took the tiller and I stood there in the cockpit telling her each move to make. Next, I stood back and told her when to do what she already knew what to do.

Finally, it was time for her to do it on her own. This was to be the real thing… her first docking. I removed the lifeline on the side for the finger pier as we moved down the channel. As she began the turn around the end boat into our tight gap, I stepped up onto the seat. As the boats bow swung by the stern of our dockmate, I stepped back onto the combing to watch. As the stern came in line for a perfect docking, I stepped back to make sure we had cleared the end of our dock…

At that moment, I felt exactly like the coyote must have felt in all those old Roadrunner cartoons. I was suspended for that briefest of instants, in mid air, sporting this "I didn't really do this, did I?" look on my face, before I suddenly dropped into the chilly water. As my head popped back out of the water, I could hear my wife screaming at me. The exact dialog has been lost, but the effect was "How DARE you desert me in the middle of this!" Her docking was picture perfect, but my embarrassing dogpaddle to the neighbor's swim ladder was not. As I climbed out of the water, I glanced at the anglers, expecting to find them laughing hysterically. Actually, thought, they were staring with slack-jawed amazement.

To this day, my wife, although a great helmsperson in her own right, will always turn the wheel over to me before docking. She claims it is because she is nervous about docking. I think it is because she is afraid I will step out for another cold one just when things are getting interesting!