Sail On, Sail On, Sailor

Sail On, Sail On, SailorAt a certain level you really have to hand it to him. Here’s a 21-year-old pining for a new life. So, naturally, he travels 2,500 miles to Montauk, hops on a sailboat he purchased one day earlier on eBay, and rounds the Point with a plan to live onboard after anchoring in the ocean off the Hither Hills campground, to which he’ll travel by raft to take showers and use the restrooms.Perhaps not astonishingly, the plan fails. The sailboat’s engine dies when most needed, as the Arizona resident has been warned that it might, the boat is beached, towed offshore, and then sinks en route to the harbor. A total stranger to this area, young Matthew Hunter is out $700 of the $1,000 he had in his pocket, and he has nowhere to work and, now, nowhere to live.

The level of interest in this tale is, well, interesting, and responses run the gamut. Some people want to start a GoFundMe to help Mr. Hunter get his feet on the ground, while others want him to learn some responsibility at the school of hard knocks. Certainly, the moral of the story is unclear. It was a foolhardy thing he did, one that could have killed him and had other consequences — for people who might have had to rescue him, for the marine environment, and so on.

And yet. This is the type of soil from which great adventures spring, from “Huckleberry Finn” to “Robinson Crusoe.” Remember, too, that all of us once were young.