There once was a man who owned a wooden sailboat named Luna.

Luna wasn’t the first sailboat he owned, but it was the first wooden one.  A 1949 Mermaid sloop built on Mt. Desert Island in Maine by E. Farnham Butler.

For years, he pined to own a wooden boat and searched and searched until he discovered Luna. She was being rebuilt at a wooden boat school. While she was being worked on, he periodically drove the four hours to check on her, and when she was finally restored, he brought her home.

For decades, he babied this boat, spending hours painting the hull, varnishing the trim, protecting the original bronze hardware from stains, and ordering better sails to improve her performance. He wanted her to be perfect. Her annual launch became a big deal to him.

Sailing on a wooden boat was indeed as magical and smooth as everyone had said it would be. Instead of bouncing along on the waves like his prior boats, Luna’s wood absorbed the salt water, and she became one with the ocean. 

The father instilled a love of the ocean in his son at a young age and taught his son to sail. By age seven, the son raced sailboats with him. Even though they always came in last, they continued to plan what they would do differently next time to win.

Just as in sailing, the father was a reliable partner and friend for the son. When the son’s first career in accounting became unfulfilling, the father encouraged him to go back to college to pursue the son’s real passion — engineering — and to follow in his own footsteps of attending a maritime college and working on ships all over the world. Again, they would share their love of the ocean.

When time permitted, the son returned to visit the father, and to sail on Luna.

“You haven’t seen Maine until you’ve seen it from the water,” the father always said.

Luna was the last sailboat the father ever owned.

Ten years ago, this smart, athletic man, this family man in his early 70s, suffered a tragic stroke.  In the hospital, his son sat by his bedside, wondering if the father he relied upon for guidance and friendship would ever wake up.

After thirty days, he did. But he wasn’t the same. The left side of his body was still and crooked. His emotional responses were anger.

The years and distance had not lessened the father and son bond, but now, it was the father who was distant despite being right there.

After his stroke, the mother waited for him to recover. She kept Luna for one year, then two, and finally three years. When it was obvious that the father would never sail again and that keeping the boat was futile, she let Luna go, first by trying to sell her, and when no one was interested, Luna was donated back to the wooden boat school to be used as a fundraiser.

But Luna was missed. 

Almost as soon as Luna was given away, the son regretted it. Her absence was felt and echoed the loss of the father being his full self.

Framed photos of the family on Luna were placed in both the son’s house and his parents’ home.  A wall hanging of a replica life preserver of Luna hung on a wall. But Luna herself was gone.

Ten years passed since the initial debilitating stroke. In between, a number of other strokes occurred. The once angry responses softened and were replaced with a seventh grade boy humor and a natural friendliness, but the father didn’t know where he was, what year it was, and what was going on in the world around him.  

On some days, he still thought he had Luna, and in the middle of the pandemic, he used her as a lure to entice his son to visit. “You can use the boat,” he said.  He didn’t loan her out lightly.

The son hadn’t lived near an ocean to take Luna when the father had fallen ill, but now that he too had a seacoast home, he became haunted at the loss of Luna. If he had known he’d living on the coast, he would have asked his mother to wait and keep Luna for him.

But Luna was long gone.

Online searches only showed the “for sale” listing he had put up seven years prior to help his mother. Year after year, he drove to marina after marina, harbor after harbor, hoping to get a glimpse of Luna in the water. But he never found her. Maybe she didn’t exist anymore. Maybe Luna had sailed her last voyage with his father and was left to rot somewhere. He finally asked the wooden boat school if they knew what happened to her seven years ago.

Within a day of his message, the son received a telephone call from a British man.

“I have your father’s boat,” said the man. The boat had been an hour away all the time.

The British man had her the whole seven years. “And I think I’m done sailing a wooden boat.”

The son inquired how much money he wanted for Luna.  His heart pounded as he waited for the answer, afraid it would be too much.

“Nothing,” the British man said. “Luna should go back to you.”

Out of gratitude, the son donated Luna’s fair market value to the wooden boat school. It was what his father would have wanted. Within a week, Luna arrived to sit out the winter in his backyard. She had been sailed and cared for those past seven years, but the meticulous painting and work of his father’s touch was gone.

Now, every scrape, every brush stroke brings Luna back to life, and brings the son closer to the relationship he once had with his father. It’s almost — almost — like doing the work with his father at his side.

Next Spring, Luna will sail again, this time with the son at the tiller. The father is too weak to get aboard the boat and too lost to know that Luna has been found, but Luna seems to know that she is home. Wooden boats are like that, you know. They have a soul. They are alive. It is said when you work the wood of a wooden boat, you stay in them and them in you. When Luna hits the water again, a little bit of the father will once again be a part of the ocean breeze, and the son will sail with him again.

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