Waking or sleeping, I dream of boats - usually of rather small boats under a slight press of sail. When I think how great a part of my life has been spent dreaming the hours away and how much of this total dream life has concerned small craft, I wonder about the state of my health, for I am told that it is not a good sign to be always voyaging into unreality, driven by imaginary breezes.

E. B. White, “The Sea and the Wind that Blows”

Like E.B. White, a good deal of my dream life - awake or asleep - is spent in small boats, sailing on imaginary breezes. At such times my mind turns to long stretches of empty coast or tight clusters of uninhabited islands, seeking always (from the safety of dreams) those places where water has crept into the remotest crooks and angles of the world, creating possibilities for voyages that a small boat sailor might dare to attempt, if he had the nerve, even in waking life. These voyages into unreality don’t make me wonder about the state of my health, though. I gave that up long ago. Instead, I wonder about everyone else’s health. Briefly, anyway. Then I go back to dreaming about boats:

Dreaming about boats… Jagular in the Benjamin Islands

A small sailing craft is not only beautiful, E. B. White explains, it is seductive and full of strange promise and the hint of trouble. Yes. A small boat - even one that has yet to be built - may be the most effective catalyst of dreams ever conceived. Merely glancing at a lines drawing or a set of plans, or running a hand along a smoothly sanded gunwale, is enough to set in motion another adventure. Some of these imaginary voyages, I suppose, will never escape the dreams in which they were born. Others might be more memory than dream, though I’d guess that for most of us there’s less difference between the two than might be expected. A few such imaginings might cross the hazy uncertain boundary between dream and reality sometime in the future, when someone gets up the nerve to begin, in the waking world, a journey that he has already traveled, time and again, in his mind. But if the reality never emerges, I don’t count the time lost - it is enough, sometimes, to dream.

For the next year, I’ll be sharing some of my own ideas for adventures, real and imaginary, in this monthly column at Duckworks. If some of you are inspired by what you read, and make the leap from dream to reality ahead of me, I’ll be more than pleased. If others aren’t sure they’re ready for that, my advice is simple: don’t overthink it. Just go. As I’ve learned from long experience, you don’t have to be prepared as long as you’re willing suffer the consequences.

Dreams Transcribed onto Paper

First, though - the boat. I feel obliged to start here, for a set of plans to build from is nothing more than the dreams of a sailor transcribed onto paper. The mind runs through the build again and again, struggling to see in three dimension what is recorded in two. Each imagined plank and bevel becomes a small step on the long journey from dream to reality, until - even before a saw touches wood - a ghostly shape begins to emerge, a harbinger of future realities edging ever closer to the intersection of thought and action. And it carries a cargo of dreams.

The shadowy, half-seen shape that sails through my dreams of late, growing slowly more solid and distinct, is an 18’ lugsail ketch designed by Don Kurylko. But it began, as all boats do, not as a boat, but as an idea: to hear the wind’s call, to hoist the sails and ready the oars, to set out past the edge of whatever you’ve known before, in a boat built with your own hands.

The idea becomes a decision, the decision a set of plans:

The plans suggest a shape - a shape that slowly begins to emerge from dreams into reality:

A rough idea, now, of what it will become someday:

Glue and dust and long hours with little to show suddenly come together in an apparently sudden leap of progress, the rough idea not quite so rough now:

And so it goes, a slow accumulation of errors and remedies and simple honest work, and the shadowy shape that haunts my dreams draws closer to waking reality. Soon now. Soon…

Ah, but to actually begin! To hoist the sails, ready the oars, and slide off the edge of the map - our dreamings have the power they do, perhaps, only because they carry within them the promise of what might be. Dreams provoke us to action. It is not so far by water, after all, from the doorstep to the wide world.

Imaginary Voyage One: Georgian Bay

Temperatures have been down around -20 degrees Fahrenheit the past couple weeks here in Wisconsin - perfect weather for dreaming. And when my thoughts turn toward summer, more often than not they turn toward Georgian Bay, the first of the imaginary voyages I’ll offer here. For those of you who don’t know the Great Lakes, and have never sailed the rocky wilderness coastline of Ontario, here’s a look at what you’ve been missing:

Georgian Bay is outlined in red in the image above.

I was fortunate enough to spend three weeks cruising Georgian Bay this past summer (my first visit but not my last if all goes well), in my brother’s beautiful Phoenix III (designed by Ross Lillistone at www.baysidewoodenboats.com.au). What I found was a windswept coastline of exposed granite and tall white pines:

Thousands of rocky islands:

Narrow channels:

And plenty of room to get lost in:

In short, plenty of reasons to return - and plenty of reasons to dream of that return now, as winter tightens its grip on the land and turns the river that runs past my door to ice. But my dreaming continues unhindered by the cold. Here’s how my imaginary voyage goes, at least for today; tomorrow I may choose another route:

I could load up my boat on a trailer and begin my journey at 60 mph. But my car has 250,000 miles on it, and I wouldn’t bet on making it that far. And there’s no need to save time when you’re dreaming, anyway. So I’ll launch from Sturgeon Bay, at the base of Wisconsin’s Door County peninsula - that’s less than a 4-hour drive:

From Sturgeon Bay I’ll sneak along the shoreline of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, make the hop out to some of the uninhabited islands of northern Lake Michigan (dangerous diversions, islands - I may lose a week or two here if I’m not careful), sail under Mackinac Bridge and on eastward into the North Channel, and all the way to the North Channel’s eastern end point at the mouth of Baie Fine. That’s 350 miles, and we haven’t even hit Georgian Bay yet - and that’s just about right, I think. A long voyage is an invitation to a slower-moving world, and we’d be foolish to rush through it. Better to approach slowly, choosing gradual immersion over the sudden jump. This isn’t airline travel, after all, where the main objective is to get somewhere - anywhere - as fast as we can. So quickly, usually, that we cannot even recognize the distance we’ve come. That’s not a problem when you’re traveling by sail and oar, at three or four knots - a good, honest, human pace. A pace that leaves plenty of time for anticipation and reflection.

So that’s the prelude - far more satisfying than throwing the boat on a trailer and driving 15 hours. One month aboard, more or less. Enough time to get into the proper mindset for long-distance voyaging, as the clutter and busy-ness of life ashore drops away. But not everything about life ashore is so terrible. That’s why I’ll stop off for a pizza as I’m passing through Killarney, at the gateway to Georgian Bay:

And continue my summer’s cruising with a clockwise circumnavigation of Georgian Bay:

Another 300 miles. Maybe 8 weeks of sailing from Sturgeon Bay to my return to Killarney, I’d guess. This is one dream voyage that actually starts to look realistic when you run the numbers. Of course, my 8 weeks of sailing leaves me stranded in eastern Ontario, with no car. I suppose I could get my wife to drive over and pick me up…

That would work. Or I could take two or three more weeks and sail back - haven’t seen the southern side of Manitoulin Island yet, and it’d be an interesting leg of the journey, running along the edge of wide-open Lake Huron. Or even make the long hop directly across the top of the big lake…

Or - and this is the best part about imaginary voyages - I can revise from the journey’s midpoint and try another option. More ambitious than my original plan, maybe, but still realistic: sail down to the southern end of Georgian Bay and on into the Trent-Severn canal system:

Which connects to Lake Ontario and the Rideau Canal:

Which leads past Parliament (oh, to have a Parliament instead of a Congress!) and on (down a steep staircase of locks) to the Ottawa River, and, soon enough, into the St. Lawrence, which empties into the sea…

That trip would be a long one, but not so long that you couldn’t finish before the ice set in. At least as far as Ottawa, anyway. If you started early enough - late April, maybe. Or early May. My wife wouldn’t mind driving to Ottawa with the boat trailer, would she? Hmm…

You see - that’s the danger of dreaming: dreaming provokes plans. Plans lead to action. And the consequences of acting can be unpredictable. Get in a boat, even a small one - for that matter, even a boat that hasn’t been built yet - hoist the sail and ready the oars (whether dreaming or waking), and it might not be long before you find yourself swept far from your doorstep, setting out into the wide world.

TOM PAMPERIN (www.tompamperin.com) is a freelance writer and small boat sailor, and (under protest, sometimes) even a boat builder from time to time. He lives in northwestern Wisconsin with his wife and cat, who are decidedly NOT sailors.

Tom’s first book, Jagular Goes Everywhere: (mis)Adventures in a $300 Sailboat, is available from Duckworks HERE.