Last summer we did Pilates on a sailing boat on Lac Léman. We had been planning it since March. Sixteen women, one boat, one captain, one wind that did not behave. Here is the day, in the order I remember it.
06:30 · The list.
I have a paper checklist for every event we run. Most of it comes from the first time we tried something and one specific thing went sideways. (You think this is overkill until the day you forget the iced coffee thermos and you have eighteen women standing in a marina at 09:00 looking at you.)
The list for the boat: charts, life jackets (the captain's job but verify), waterproof speaker, two thermoses (one coffee, one mint tea), one big basket of pastries from Boulangerie de la Tour, mats × 16, sunscreen, a single tube of lip balm we share, a back-up swimsuit because someone always forgets theirs, the paper class plan in a Ziploc bag.
09:00 · Marina.
The fountain is on. The boat — a Bavaria 38, white hull, blue piping — is at the end of the third pontoon. The captain is older than I expected and wears a navy jumper that is too warm for August, which I take as a good sign. He shakes everyone's hand. He calls all of us "madame," which we like. We get on.
10:15 · The almost-disaster.
We are forty minutes out, mid-lake, when the wind picks up twelve knots in five minutes. The captain says, in French, that he is going to bring us about and head closer to shore. I translate. Two women are already a little green. I think for a second this is going to be the part of the story I tell badly for years afterward — that one time we did Pilates on a boat and everyone threw up.
But then the captain finds a small sheltered cove on the Vaudois side and we drop anchor. The lake is suddenly glass. The two greenish women lie down on the deck and sleep for ten minutes. The wind drops. We do class.
11:00 · The class.
A boat deck is not a Pilates studio. The deck is teak. The deck slopes. The deck moves. I had planned a sequence of forty minutes, mostly mat work, with the explicit instruction to feel the boat — let your body micro-adjust to the lake, let your obliques work without me asking them to. We do that. People laugh. Two women try the half-roll-up and slide six inches gently to leeward and burst out laughing. We do not do burpees on a boat. We do not do burpees on land either, honestly. After forty minutes everyone is hot and we jump in the lake.
12:30 · The picnic.
Boulangerie de la Tour bread. Ginette cheese. Tomatoes. A peach. The bottle of rosé I had not planned to bring but did anyway. The captain sits with us. He tells us the boat is called Esmé after his daughter. We toast Esmé. We toast each other. Two women cry, briefly, the kind of cry that comes from being so glad you came that the gladness has to go somewhere.
15:00 · Back.
We sail back with the late-afternoon wind, which is the gentle kind. Three women fall asleep on the foredeck. One reads her book. One sketches. I sit at the back and watch the wake and write down the things I will need on the list for next year — captain stays, route stays, boat stays, but bring more peaches. We touch the dock at half past three. Everyone is quiet. The day is the right kind of tired.
What almost went wrong.
- The wind. (Captain handled.)
- One forgotten swimsuit. (Spare from my bag.)
- I left the speaker on the dock. (Two women noticed before we cast off and ran back.)
- The rosé was warm. (Lake is cold. Solved.)
We are doing the boat day again this summer. Tickets here → Bring a swimsuit. There will be peaches.