Always wave to other boats

As a sailboat captain, I must trust the quantifiable measures of my trade: atmospheric pressure, fluid dynamics, magnetic pull and the rest.

I believe a good knot will hold, the right course will lead safely home, a marine head under back pressure will explode, and the natural laws can otherwise make or break you anytime.

But I have felt forces reaching past science into magic, like the wind with all its ridiculous tomfoolery. I can't blame seafarers for their superstitious ways.

Out here, I find something beyond belief - a primitive but direct comprehension, a respect and dare I say love for the great mechanisms of the thing, the push and pull, creations and destructions, the fragilities and brutalities at play.

At times I feel it in pure junkie sensation, my body itself as an antenna, on high alert colliding and colluding with it all, feeling the pulses, pains and intensities... Wow-wee!

Along the way, in perpetual motion through many miles and adventures big and small, I have developed a devout belief in waving to every boat I see.

The true boat wave should be an open hand raised high above the head. I like to throw it up there with some gusto - it feels good - and leave it up a long moment to show I mean business.

I have exchanged the goodwill gesture with all manner of other craft, sharing that shiver of pleasure in its return. I have waved madly to billionaire yachts and Mayan dugout canoes. I've seen that a dark low craft speeding toward me off a foreign shore makes a far different impression once its occupants break out in friendly waves.

Far out to sea, I've chanced upon another small vessel going the opposite direction, our two tiny dots of matter trading compass points. That hand held up from the other boat as it rose and fell on the wide spaces held a startling force.

I've seen my wife wave back at me across a tropical anchorage, returning back to our own little boat that is home, and felt that particular wave go straight to my heart.

I believe I am obligated to wave, no matter my own state of affairs, and no matter what I think of the size of the other's wake, noise of their engine, cut of their jib or color of their flag.

A waterborne conveyance passes, and now my arm goes up - a reflex of the best kind.

I even believe in waving to the guy who has just landed a massive river-run salmon, with much hooting and hollering, right out of the very place where I've been fishing my heart out all day with no luck at all. Yes, that wave hurt, but I did it anyway.

Not every boat waves back. Some people stare, then look away, without even a wiggle of the fingers or a lift of the chin. This used to make me feel angry and even abandoned. Not anymore!

These days, I believe I know why. I've decided that their waving arms are broken, or maybe only severely sprained, and they just need time to heal.

So in some harbor someday, if you see a sailor waving like a fool, it might be me. Why not? We are all in fragile craft transiting a brilliant, perilous, one-of-a-kind voyage together, no matter our current heading.

So I'll keep waving, and I hope, my friend, my fellow wayfarer, that you will see my hand across the water - and you will wave back at me.

David Kilmer of Coeur d'Alene is a professional sailboat captain who has also sailed his own small craft from Vancouver Island to the Caribbean by way of the Panama Canal, and who says water magnifies everything.