The Devil is in the details, they say. We shall see.

[First in a series of greatest hits reruns] Joseph Waggenhofer is a priest, pastor of St. Joseph’s Church in Somers Point, NJ. He’s learning to sail. Pray for him. Not because sailing is dangerous, but because it can cause even strong people to cuss and drink and forget their obligations and behave in ways that are generally not priestly.

  Be strong, Father Joe. It is a difficult road you have chosen. Or did it choose you?

As usual when it comes to sailing, a so-called friend is involved. “Come on out,” they say, opening the Gate to Ruination. But you go, because it sounds like fun, a relaxing day on the water, and of course it is not relaxing. As soon as the wind hits the sails the boat starts leaning – man, can this thing tip over? – and the skipper suddenly starts yelling for people to do things they’re not doing quickly enough, and a big long metal pipe running along the bottom of the sail keeps hitting you in the head. “That’s why they call it the boom,” the skipper yells, which makes him laugh every time he says it, about every four minutes – and when you get home all you want to do is to change into dry clothes and lay on anything that doesn’t move.

You also wonder why anybody with a lick of sense would want to own a sailboat, and then realize nobody with any sense gets involved in sailing. If you could open up a can of logic and apply it with a brush, or maybe even spray it, and have it dry to a semi-permeable finish that would repel crazy thoughts, sailing would never make it inside. My daughter is 4, and she knows about boats. She calls my sailboat “slow” and “stinky.” It is both – slow when I’m sailing and stinky when motoring.

Sailing is an acquired taste. When you come home from your first sailboat ride, glad to be alive and even more glad that somebody else is stuck with that slow boat, going back out isn’t your first thought. They go nowhere slowly. They’re a lot of trouble. They make spouses fight. So why is it that by the next weekend you’re back out there, and this time you’re asking questions about lines and mainsails and where the wind is coming from and how come you can’t just head straight over there?

Father Joe’s first experiences were – forgive me father, for I am about to sin – a Baptism of fire.

“I enjoyed it,” he recalled the other day, as he was preparing to sail his own boat. “Even though I didn’t know what I was doing they had me cranking down on something or other.”

His current boat is an AMF Puffer, 12-1/2 feet long, lots of sail area, pretty powerful, and he knows how to rig it and everything. At first he didn’t have the nerve to sail it. He put the oars in the oarlock and just rowed it around.

Now Father Joe’s skill as a sailor can be measured in a very direct and powerful way. He goes out and comes back without injury to himself or his boat. He has a book on sailing, but already he has learned books can only tell you so much. To really learn sailing you have to bounce off a few docks and leave some bottom paint on a sandbar, stuck waiting for the incoming tide. You’re not a sailor until your blood is dripping on the cockpit floor, mixing with sweat.

“This is my escape hatch,” Father Joe said, smiling.

Ah, father, father… already it’s getting bad.

“It’s kind of a meditative thing, once you get over the terror,” he added.

He paid $300 for his sailboat, and if he has any sense he will keep that boat forever. But soon impure thoughts will enter his head. “A bigger boat,” they’ll whisper. “More room. Faster. You could cruise. Stay dry. Take your friends out … introduce more people to the wonderful world of sailing.”

See how it works? It is dangerous, Father Joe. Be very, very careful. But then again you know some good people in high places. In the world of sailing that is a huge advantage.

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