Spring fever is hitting me hard this year.

The thrill of watching the weather to find out when we’re going to have our next snowstorm has worn off. I’m tired of unburying, scraping, thawing and pushing my car out of every hole it seems to find, and I have started carrying around my favorite pair of sandals, just in case.

The past couple of 50-degree days had me looking very seriously at removing the clear shrink-wrap cover on our 32-foot sailboat. In the fall the plastic cocoon is a welcoming sight for my wife and I; we know it can snow, sleet, hail or blow and we’ll be safe. By this time of year the clear wrap has faded to a foggy shade of gray from soot dropped by the planes flying overhead, the deck is covered in a greasy black residue from our diesel heater’s chimney and the straps holding the plastic in place have settled slightly so the entire cover shudders at the slightest breeze. Slicing the plastic off the frame is like opening a springtime Christmas present, transforming our stationary, floating living room into a mobile and graceful sailing vessel.

I convinced myself to leave the cover on, but I did fire up the engine and put her in gear at the dock for a few hours. 

It was not the liberating, spring-fever-curing experience I had expected.

The entire boat pulsed with the motion of the two-cylinder diesel that hadn’t been fired for at least a month while she tried desperately to break away from the dock, held tight by heavy duty lines we’ll probably have to replace next year. The noise level, between the shuddering shrink-wrap frame and the twitching standing rigging, combined with the clunking motor mechanics in such a small confined space, was enough to drown out the ring of my phone when my wife called to let me know she was on her way home from work. When she arrived, I had just shut the engine down by removing a large portion of the galley and reaching into the guts of the engine compartment to pinch off the fuel line (covering myself in grease and oil in the process). Our cat was locked in the head (where she was content shredding anything that happened to be in there with her). The entire cabin reeked of kerosene (including the duffel of clean laundry I had lugged down the dock earlier that afternoon) and over the ringing in my ears I could barely hear her shouting, “What is going on!?” at me.

Mainers are a bit like a kid on a first date when it comes to the changing of the seasons; we forget how to drive, start staying up too late or getting up too early and wear the wrong clothing for the occasion. It’s only natural tourists might think year-round locals are a little nutty when they see us roar past them at four in the morning with the windows rolled down mid-March, blaring summertime tunes you’d likely hear on a tropical beach.

 Hopefully next time I put the motor in gear there won’t be any lines to hold us back, the cat will be on deck sunbathing alongside my wife, and I’ll be able to fall asleep to the sounds of one of Casco Bay’s many anchorages rather than the rolling whine of the laundromat machines while I wait for our kerosene soaked clothing to dry – watching the sleet outside encase my car in ice once again.

– Nate Jones