WERCCS

I’ll admit it: I’m crazy about sailing. Here’s how that happened.

When I was a kid, my family spent a few weeks most summers in North Truro on Cape Cod, just up the road from Provincetown — home to the West End Racing Children’s Community Sailing club. The club was founded more than 75 years ago, and its origin story is best handled by this 75th anniversary exhibit at the Provincetown Museum:

In 1965, my father — a self-taught sailor — enrolled me in the program so I could “learn” to sail. Back then, “learn” meant putting a seven-year-old in a Sunfish and shoving him or her off into Cape Cod Bay. I spent most of my first two outings in irons: sail luffing uselessly, boat drifting backward through a crowded mooring field. On the third outing, something clicked — I finally figured out how to fill the sail with wind. That was the moment my lifelong obsession with sailing began.

I got the Sunfish moving, and I was so thrilled — and so terrified of getting stuck in irons again — that I just kept sailing. By the time I was nearing the tip of Cape Cod, someone back at the clubhouse must have noticed, because they sent a Boston Whaler out to turn me around and point me home. Eventually I learned to come about on my own, so I could sail out and back under my own steam.

A few years ago, while passing through Provincetown, I stumbled on the club again and was delighted to find it still running — 60 years later. I think the kids there were just as surprised to meet an alumnus from 1965.

It’s a fantastic club: inexpensive, welcoming, and still running entirely on volunteers and donors — a cause I’m now proud to support myself.