Saying Goodbye To Star

Standing in her main cabin in Newport harbor, I try to take in as many details as possible: her smell, the faded photos along the cabin, just how small everything is….

She feels so small now. Have I grown too big for her? Was I really that small before?

After not spending much time on her in the past two years, I marvel at the fact that we sailed around the world on her and slept in this cabin for so many years.

Star was my life for so long. My mother tried to give birth to me on her. She was my playground and means of travel well in to my teenage years. Nearly everything that defined me for so long, came from her.

And now she is leaving me. Possibly for good.

My parent’s have decided to sell her. They want something that is smaller. More manageable. Not a 55-foot, three-masted schooner that is nearly 50 years old.

I get it. The rational part of my brain gets it, but the highly emotional part does not. My inner child is crying uncontrollably for this loss.

So I sit there, trying to take it all in. I breathe in her damp, diesel smell. When I was a child, it permeated into all my clothes, which sat next to the large diesel tanks, capable of carrying her across any ocean.

Now, when my parents visit, it rubs off on me, leaving me with an olfactory memory of their presence when they are no longer there.

I know that when they set sail again, disappearing for days at a time, I will still be able to smell them on certain pieces of clothing.

It seems silly, to have such a strong reaction to the selling of what essentially could be compared to any childhood home.

But Star was more than just a home, she was my homeland. She was the place that I truly belonged to as a child, when I felt foreign everywhere else.

She brought me around the world, across the Atlantic several times, and back and forth from the Caribbean to the U.S. at least ten times.

She wasn’t just an inanimate object. She was alive always, protecting me.

I never imagined my life without her somewhere in it. As a child, I imagined taking her over one day, continuing the legacy. Later in life, I thought that my parents would live out their days on her.

My father is in nearly every part of that boat. He made her a home for us when she was just a fiberglass shell of a vessel. Saying goodbye to her is also saying goodbye to his legacy in some ways.

But here I am, having to think of her part of someone else’s family. In a time where we are all living through loss and change, it is so hard to accept it, but then again, there never was going to be a good moment for this to happen.

Everyone must say goodbye at some point. I have a new home. A new family. A whole bunch of worries and life projections that no longer include Star.

It is so hard to say goodbye, but I know that the love that was put into her by my family, will allow her to find her way into the right hands.

Though they won’t be mine.