The joke is that with sailors, the story always starts with, “The waves were this big, and the wind was blowing this hard…” We love these stories, and sometimes I wonder if that’s one reason we sail. We need to feed our story souls. We need adventures, big and small.
In his essay “The Sea and the Wind That Blows,” the great E.B. White wrote, “The sea became my unspoken challenge: the wind, the tide, the fog, the ledge, the bell, the gull that cried help, the never-ending threat and bluff of weather.”
His essay is a love song to boats and sailing, but like any mad love, it is fraught—perilous and thrilling. “I found that what I had feared and hated, I now feared and loved,” he wrote, and…
