The sail, the play of its pulse so like our own lives: so thin and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and impatient when least effective.
Henry David Thoreau
Here’s the thing about getting on a boat with someone in the middle of San Francisco Bay: you find out real quick who’s full of shit and who knows their business. Ava Roy isn’t full of shit. Captain Ava Roy, and you better believe that “Captain” isn’t some weekend warrior affectation, it’s earned in wind and salt and the kind of hard-won competence that doesn’t need to announce itself.
Ingwe cuts through the water like she’s got somewhere to be, and Ava’s hands on those lines, on that helm, they tell you everything. No performance, no theater, just pure function married to something deeper, call it love, call it obsession, call it the only goddamn honest relationship most of us will ever witness. The bay will humble you or it will elevate you, and Ava? She’s elevated.
There’s something almost obscene about watching someone who’s actually, genuinely good at something in this age of ten thousand frauds. It’s intimate. It’s vulnerable. It makes you confront your own bullshit, your own half-assed approximations of mastery. The boat heels over, the wind fills that sail, Thoreau had it right, thin but full of life, and you realize this is what it looks like when someone stops pretending and starts being.