Like baseball fans, mariners of all kinds are an oddly superstitious lot. If you’re worth your weight in ballpark suds and dogs, for example, you keep your mouth shut when you realize you’re on the verge of seeing your team notch a no-hitter.
Because you know that the gods of baseball are cruel and malicious. As soon as you start flapping your gob to your buddy, some journeyman-hack hitting .175 will break up the no-hitter with a bloop-single over the second-baseman’s head. The outcome of your indiscretion is as sure as the direction of sunrise. And ludicrous and self-indulgent as it is, you will believe your careless words cost your pitcher the game of his life.
So you keep your lips zipped.
Likewise, as a boater you don’t talk about perfect weather and water conditions until you’re back at docks and the boat is put to bed. You don’t mention how well the boat is running. You just smile now and then during the day.
Because as soon as you start basking aloud in your good fortune, those conditions—despite the marine forecast—will crumble. Or lacking that, your engine, drive or propeller will break.
The shared coda between baseball and boating fans is simple: If you talk about it, you jinx it. So keep your pie-hole shut, because all will be lost if you open it.
Superstition? Of course. Irrational and lacking anything like numbers-backed research? Hell yes. But that’s kind of the essence of superstition.
And who am I to question it? Especially since I believe in it.
So two days ago when Deep Impact Custom Boats owner Mark Fischer and I headed north form Miami Beach Marina to Lighthouse Point in a 499 center console powered by five 425-hp engines from Mercury Marine I bit my lip. From Government Cut, the Atlantic Ocean waters appeared to be of the 2- to 4-foot kind, not gentle but far the wild stuff I continually find myself in when I’m boating with Fischer.
I wanted to tell him this might be the first time we’d been in the Atlantic together when conditions weren’t nasty, that the ride back might actually be fast as the boat will that power package runs more than 70 mph. Yet I didn’t. I upheld the superstition-based practice and kept my mouth shut.
But the damn tradition let me down. Less than halfway to our destination, the water became a jumble of jagged 6- to 8-footers, which to its credit the 49-foot beast handled comfortably at 37 to 43 mph.
Other than one near-shore fishing vessel and a few cargo ships on the horizon, we saw no other boats on the wind-whipped water. Confident as were based on rough-water experience in the 49-foot model, we were on our own. For lots of good reasons, there were no other takers.
The wind got stronger, and soon the squall in the distance became the squall overhead and it started pouring. The rain lasted until we reached the channel leading to Lighthouse Point. Rainbows dotted the horizon.
This time around, the superstition didn’t hold. Keeping my mouth shut didn’t work. I did my part and It didn’t matter. Conditions fell apart regardless.
But as a devout baseball fan and equally devoted high-performance marine industry reporter, I have to stick with it. To hell with pesky facts and evidence. You either believe or you don’t.