EVER since we cruised from Acapulco, Mexico, to Bay of Islands, New Zealand, in 1988 on Freelance, our 28-foot Bristol Channel Cutter, my wife, Harriet, and I longed to return to the South Pacific. In spring 2021, while going through a closet full of stuff in our condo, out slid a box of old paper charts from our voyage. A large chart of Bora Bora unfolded in my hands. The perfect circle of reef, the lagoon of dazzling blue, clouds streaming like cotton from the island’s volcanic peaks—the South Pacific had enchanted us again. We sketched a plan: From our home port of New Bedford, Massachusetts, we’d head to Bermuda, then Puerto Rico, then the Panama Canal, the Galapagos, French Polynesia, the Cook Islands, the Kingdom of Tonga, and Fiji.…