“The world of science and the world of literature have much in common. Each is an international club, helping to tie mankind together across barriers of nationality, race and language. I have been doubly lucky, being accepted as a member of both.”
– Dr. Freeman Dyson

You know the difference between a sea story and a fairy tale, don’t you? A fairy tale starts off “Once upon a time…”. A sea story starts off “Now this is no shit, you guys…”

20′ is considered a heavy sea, but keep in mind the crests are quite far apart, so it is not as terrifying as you might think. The steep seas you see on surfing beaches do not occur in deep water offshore. It is very difficult to judge their size and shape, particularly from a small boat, and sailors notoriously exaggerate the heights of the seas. The largest actual sea ever measured (in a hurricane)was 112′ in 1933. The height was triangulated from a ship in the trough where the bow was at the crest. But it was a big ship (500′)and the vessel was not in danger.

Basic structure would be about 10 feet per floor.

No doubt the seas were high, but are the broadcast sea-condition measurements generally taken from trough-to-crest or sea level-to-crest? If sea level-to-crest, then “19 foot seas” would be about 4 stories trough-to-crest.

You might be interested in old.reddit.com/r/ultralight – the subreddit is devoted to the art of min/maxing hiking and camping gear and utility – as an aspiring engineer, I find the info here is highly useful and relevant.

Personally, I follow a similiar route with my EDC – SC (which I’m sorry you missed) is a small place, and I can use my bike to get everywhere. Usually,, I keep a backpack full of potentially usable items in one of the baskets, It’s bulky enough that you don’t want to make a habit of carrying it everywhere on foot, but small and lightweight enough that bringing it with me to and from a bike (which acts as a “home base/pack mule” wherever I lock it up) is easily managable. I enjoy having the ability to carry the extra gear and supplies, just in case.

I did learn the extremely hard way you do not want to overload your bike! Extra mass isn’t just encumbersome, it’s dangerous, and you want to be careful how much you cart around, and for how long. With the right weight load, however, this shouldn’t be a problem.

Many places might not have waterways, but there’s always a road to travel.

Steve described himself as “a recovering dentist” who had forsaken the suburban rat race and was striking out for the South Seas. The harbor in San Diego is full of these people, waiting for a wind or spare parts or courage to head west to Hawaii or south to the Canal. Steve fit the stereotype. Haiku’s 28 feet were hastily crammed with the debris of this man’s life, cooking utensils, power tools, sail bags, even some dental instruments. There was precious little room for my gear so I had to park most of it in the way, on the cabin sole, before I could crawl into the quarter berth and get some sleep. Even the head was buried under a mountain of luggage so that relieving oneself first required a three-point transfer of cargo. The third member of the crew was Steve’s cat Fang, a grotesquely obese creature who obviously disliked boats and water intensely. Everything below smelled of cat shit and kibbles, along with the usual small-boat brew of sweat, dirty clothes, stale food, sewage, diesel, and decaying plankton.

It was ten in the morning before we were underway, Steve had left a long list of chores to be done at the last minute, and as a result we wasted hours of daylight and a favorable tide. We motored to the City, turned left toward the Golden Gate, and left again threading the channel between Four Fathom Shoal and the beach. As soon as possible Steve headed offshore for deep water. October is not a good time to go to sea in the northern Pacific. The first of winter’s gales hit us about noon, and in a matter of minutes we went from a lazy rolling swell to a brisk, then a stinging, wind. Just like they tell you in the books, the first bit of weather tells you what gear is adrift. Within minutes the cabin was a shambles, clothing bags and food and equipment boxes were rolling about everywhere, the cat’s litter tray overturned and an open port got hit by a stray sea. Water poured in as if from a fire hose, and I got soaked trying to secure it. As I stood up I tripped on some loose gear and, on the way down, took the decorative antique lantern with me, adding kerosene and glass shards to the general confusion below. It took me an hour to clean up enough to make the cabin safe from injury and fire.

On deck, Steve had secured the engine, hoisted the storm jib, and had rigged the self-steering vane for a southerly course, lashing the rudder amidships. With a 30 knot wind blowing on her starboard quarter, Haiku roared along like a locomotive, alternatively rolling from side to side (although favoring her port to her starboard) and simultaneously pitching in a treacherous following sea with a sickening corkscrew motion. Fortunately, the captain seemed to know what he was doing, and in spite of his lubberly and unseamanlike housekeeping, the boat was well managed. But like even the best of seamen, the skipper had his touch of first-day-out seasickness, and soon went below to try and sleep it off. I was left to the first watch, thanks to my immunity to the mal-de-mer.

As the afternoon wore on the storm increased. Piled higher and higher by the unforgiving nor’wester, the seas grew and grew, following behind and following faster; towering over the boat as if to crush it, then sliding beneath her at the last moment to break with a crash and roar just ahead. The word “billows” kept coming into my mind, from either Melville or The Land of Counterpane, I couldn’t remember which. I could never see why they always used the word “billows”, now it made perfect sense. I had little to do besides contemplate my situation, the small scrap of sail forward and the windvane kept us pointed downwind where we needed to be in this weather. Haiku, a squat ugly duckling of a boat, was thriving under these conditions. She was built for this, and her hull lines and sturdy rig carried the racial memory and experience of the British mariners who had developed this shape and this balance over a thousand years of tragedy and landfall. If her crew exhibited due prudence, she would not let them down. For my part, I realized I had been offshore in small boats before, and I had been out in bad weather before, but I had never been offshore in a small boat in bad weather. The sky and sea turned a monotonous gray and the boat’s course, not quite parallel to the coast, gradually diverged further out to sea. Dark came early in the overcast, and the last sight of land was the lights of Monterey. Soon we were driving off alone into the darkness.

I had hoped the skipper would duck into Monterey Bay for some shelter, perhaps even spend the night there or Santa Cruz. It was not to be, the captain was up, refreshed from his nap, and took the watch. He took a quick fix on the GPS, plotted the position on the chart and layed out our night’s course. I made it a point to look over his work, he seemed to be a fairly competent navigator, so I could sleep with some sense of security. The rest of the equipment was not so reassuring. The radio transmitter was not working, although the receiver was functioning. In this storm, we seemed to be the only non-commercial traffic on the water between San Francisco and Point Concepcion. I turned to my berth, covered with gear, where Fang had settled in the only soft spot left. For a while I thought I would have to fight him for it, but I eventually persuaded him to move, and crawled in, not even bothering to remove my dripping foulies. There was nowhere to put them and I was too tired to worry about it.

I never sleep well the first night in a strange bed, and this time was no exception. Besides the frantic symphony of motion below and the crash and thump of loose cartons and cans and other detritus, the green glare of the GPS screen was right in my face. Outside, the wind howled louder and louder as the night wore on, the jib flapped, the halyards slapped against the mast, and there was the constant sound of waves crashing against the hull and rolling under the keel. The groans and sounds of hull and rig were normal, even reassuring, nothing unusual or unexpected, but I would need some time to get used to this particular boat’s song. At midnight the skipper woke me up; I know I slept because he complained about my snoring, but it couldn’t have been for very long. Still, I was looking forward to getting on deck, the stuffiness and stench below was starting to get to me. I snapped my safety line to the padeye by the hatch and crawled out to the port side of the cockpit. My instructions were simple, steer due south (the skipper had disconnected the wind vane, because the wind was from the north now, and self-steering gear was not effective with the wind directly aft). He also warned me that Fang had installed himself underneath the life raft (it was lashed to the cabin roof) and refused to come out. He wanted to practice deploying the raft, in case it became necessary to do so in an emergency, but to do it would mean crushing the beast between the hatch cover and the raft. In order to remove the raft, it was necessary to slide the hatch out of the way, and the cat was in its path. He was determined not to move and I didn’t think he was likely to feel any differently if the boat were on its side and filling with water, either.

The world outside had changed, it was totally dark, but the sky had cleared, a full moon was overhead and the sky was filled with stars. The mountains of water made their presence known by occulting the stars behind them, and in certain directions, the sea had transformed itself into a bubbling molten silver. The temperature had dropped, and it was further exacerbated by the biting wind and the spray, which was now pretty well constant. I was well protected by my foulies, but my hands and feet were bare and they were soon stiff from cold. The water, as always in the northern Pacific, was deathly cold. It was an arctic desolation, an alien planetary landscape from the edge of the universe, which after all, is exactly what it was. I had seen the sea like this before, but never from a small boat, close enough to the water to reach down and touch it. It was as beautiful as it was terrifying.

Without Iron Mike hooked to the tiller, I had to work now. I sat with my back to the cockpit bench, and with my feet braced on the opposite side, both hands on the tiller and with my eye on the steering compass. After the initial period of learning the boat’s response, the steering settled down and became routine. Most of the time, the tiller was limp and the boat raced downwind, like a living thing. Occasionally, some vagary of wind or wave would bring her head around and some effort was required, either toward or away, to swing the boat properly under the compass card as it locked onto the earth’s magnetic field. The longer I delayed, the harder I had to work, and the more likely I was to overshoot and be forced to correct. Eventually, the brain would master the feedback and the boat’s wake trailed behind in a perfect straight line over the rolling sine waves on the sea. The helmsman’s hands are where the sky and the sea, the sail and the hull meet, the microscopic boundary between the atmosphere and the ocean where the boat travels, with man at its precise center.

Of all of man’s artifacts, a sailboat is most like a living thing; it reacts to the chaotic forces of nature, not only through the hands of its crew, but through the minds and experiences of the thousands of generations of mariners and shipwrights that preceded us. It is their skill and their failures which are embodied into the graceful lines of the hull and sails, as sleek and sensuous as the hips of a beautiful woman…Or as my friend Tom says, “AArgh!, me likes the turn o’ her bilge, matey!”

At daybreak, I volunteered to continue at the helm while the skipper cooked breakfast: coffee, biscuits and gravy. The simple meal was delicious. Shipmates now, we opened up a bit to each other, and gossiped about the night’s events. My trick at the helm had been pretty uneventful, except that we had been pooped once during the night by a rogue wave. A ton of water landed in the cockpit, almost knocking me down, and pouring several hundred gallons through the open companionway hatch. The goddamn cat, of course, slept through it all. The electrics pumped out the yacht’s bilges, but I had a little trouble locating the cockpit drains (they were under two feet of water) to make sure they were not plugged up with debris. My foulies were well buttoned up, but were never designed for hands and knees in hip deep water. It wasn’t til after the water was cleared that I realized how dangerous that can be; the first wave stops you helplessly in the water, unable to maneuver, the boat gets hit full force by the next and capsizes her, the next one sends her to the bottom.

Through the night, the winds had moderated somewhat (or maybe I had just gotten used to them). The seas, on the other hand, were now enormous. They came racing impatiently behind the boat, foaming at their crests, scud and bubbles blowing down their forward faces and their trailing slopes. The color of the seas well offshore is totally indescribable, like dark blue ink poured into a glass of water, all offset by the blinding white of foam and spindrift, and contrasted against a paler, but no less bluer sky. They would momentarily tower over us, but Haiku would lift her skirts and let them slide harmlessly beneath her rump so they could continue their breathless rush to the end of the world. The waves looked as high as a four story building, although the radio assured us that they were but “19 foot seas”. It is a discrepancy which has been documented before, the mariner should be forgiven for a bit of a stretch of the truth. It is as much an optical illusion as it is a sailor’s exaggeration. Later that morning we saw the only other vessel that shared that windswept ocean with us. A huge container ship crossed our bows about a mile ahead of us, I could see an officer on her bridge through binoculars, watching us through his. We waved at each other, and I felt sorry for him, his ship was built to carry cargo, a blunt box with a flat bottom; riding broadside to the seas and with no top hamper to steady her, she rolled sickeningly in a beam sea.

The gale blew all day, but by evening began to moderate. As we expected, it had petered out to nothing by the time we rounded Pt. Concepcion and we changed course to parallel the coast. We secured the jib and fired up the engine and traveled within sight of the coast towards our destination. As if on cue, Fang emerged from his hideout, went below and lost himself in the clutter of the cabin. He spent the whole gale on watch and now he was ready for some serious sleep. The day was cool and crisp, and as we threaded our way through the channel islands we could easily imagine ourselves the only ship on a primeval ocean. The islands rose like monoliths from the sea, some close enough aboard for us to see the colonies of sea lions littering the narrow and cramped beaches, at this distance, tiny maggots crowding the carcass of a dead whale, a monstrous dead whale of stone, the size of a mountain, floating in the deep blue vastness. Every fissure in the rock, highlighted by the long shadows of a setting sun, continued the cetacean illusion. The islands were wrinkled behemoths, without a particle of green fur, brown rocky skins like an elephant seal’s. With nothing but the sea lion colonies to give them scale, it was even difficult to judge their distance and size.

I recalled the last time I had sailed this way, a few months earlier, although then it was night, and we had taken the channel side on the lee of the islands. It had been overcast and dark, the islands invisible, but sensed from our knowledge of the area and the silent witness of the chart. The low cloud layer by coincidence was at the precise level of Anacapa Light, and the sweeping beam from the rotating beacon perfectly illuminated the exact bottom of the cloud layer. It was an unforgettable illusion, truly the Light at the End of the World, a godlike flash as the sword of light sliced over our heads again and again, precisely at the level of the fog bank. But there was no light from our present perspective, just an occasional aid to navigation blinking its coded message. For Haiku’s crew it would mean a sleepless night, we were approaching the crowded waters of southern California, with their heavy commercial and yachting traffic and the threat of collision had to be dealt with by constant vigilance. Steve went below and used the radar, calling out ranges and bearings which I, with my dark-adapted night vision, could verify with binoculars. Navigating by GPS and radar, we approached our destination until daybreak when my shipmate finally begged me to carry on alone for a while so he could get a few hours sleep and make our final approaches alert and refreshed.

I was tired as well, a bit punchy from the night’s sailing, although my work had been physical rather than mental so the fatigue was not as severe. I knew that with sunrise I would get my second wind. Through the dim twilight we were well into the oil patch, threading our way through the pumping stations and offshore platforms. The ocean is foul here, not from the derricks and pipelines, but from petroleum bubbling up from the sea itself. The stench is everywhere, and you could see the droplets of crude floating past, some still racing up from some hidden fissure in the sea floor to break at the surface after countless milennia under the crust of the earth and the shroud of the sea.

Soon, even this dead zone was behind us, and that sacred time came when, just before sunrise, there is plenty of light to see but no harsh glare to squint the eye. A trick of the atmosphere colored the scattered clouds a bright solar yellow, while between them was the dark violet of an early morning sky, a color once described to me as “Maxfield Parrish blue”. The combination of colors was so unexpected, a salmon and indigo is what one usually expects from this time; but some trick of the light or some unexpected illusion of these two contrasting colors, violet and yellow, came from the sky in alternating bands as the parallel stripes of cloud and sky provided the color backdrop. The surface of the sea, almost perfectly calm, also had its alternating pattern of crest and trough, tiny wavelets just a few inches high and a few feet apart. The pattern of the waves suddenly meshed with the striping in the sky and for a few moments the surface of the sea exploded into a geometrical spray of yellow/violet reflections that throbbed and propagated in a bizarre Op Art extravaganza. The effect was not natural in appearance at all, it appeared almost mechanical, computer generated, artificial, and it only lasted for a few seconds while the geometries of sky, sea and boat motion briefly merged in perfect synergy.

And then it was over. The alignment shifted slightly and the yellow/violet kaleidoscope collapsed back to undifferentiated chaos, and the colors changed slightly to something more familiar in the gradually increasing illumination of the scene. It had my attention, and I shifted my head back and forth in a vain attempt to recapture that fleeting pattern of reflections. It was not there, but looking into the water itself I could see something below the surface. A huge pod of Pacific dolphin was passing under Haiku, the nearest to the surface just a foot or so below. They are smaller than our Atlantic Coast porpoises, and more boldly marked, and there were thousands of them. In a moment they were gone too.

In fall and winter, after a cold front blows through the Gulf, the wind shifts northwest. It’s a long fetch from Texas to the Florida coast and the seas get as high as they ever get here–except when there is a hurricane offshore. With a thousand miles of deep water to cross and a constant wind behind them, the big rollers build up until they feel the tug of the shelf that extends seaward, from the surf line out to where the water gradually darkens from green to aqua and finally to inky blue. The drag of the sandy bottom on the big ones distorts and bends them but they stay together somehow until they dash themselves in a frenzy against the beach. On days like this, when the weather turns cold and the cloudless sky darkens to the most remarkable and unexpected blue, the sea shimmers a pale green from the sand kicked up by the surf while the whitecaps stretch out to the far horizon.

This is the best time to sail to the key, when the wind and cold and chop drive the power boats off Anclote Anchorage and the weather, although stiff, can be guaranteed to only get milder over the next few days. My friend and I know this. After the thunderstorms that mark the front’s passage rush away to the southeast we are ready and have the boat packed; by early morning it is off the trailer and rigged and we are underway. The Pelican is small but designed precisely for this sort of adventure, strong, roomy and overbuilt. On the typical mild day on the Gulf coast she is slow and sluggish but in conditions like this she comes alive and is in her element. Just right for a crew of two, the lug-rigged cat sloop is perfect for the day: solid, dependable, and with plenty of room to carry all the additional gear safety and prudence demands we have with us on a trip like this. Where we are going there will not likely be anyone else and we need to be self-sufficient.

Anclote Key is four miles offshore, an uphill slog all the way, directly to windward. To round the southern tip as is our plan requires a series of alternating long and short tacks into wind and chop. The continuous glistening spray soon drenches the boat and its contents. The crew, in spite of the generous sun, is warmly dressed, foulies over sweaters; but the water falls everywhere, sloshing back and forth in the bilge, dripping off the sails and rigging. Wind and water are cold and the first leg of the trip will take several hours of hard beating to windward. A swift current in the Sound and the boat’s flat bottom work against us; leeway pushes us south so we must tack often. My shipmate and I have been doing this for a long time so scarcely a word is required between us; the maneuvers are crisp and efficient and the boat drives on like a locomotive, with sails full and lines taut, pounding into the chop with a bone in her teeth. Slowly but inevitably, we claw our way upwind.

On gentler days the shallow water is clear; plainly visible through it are great patches of turtle grass separated by stretches of white sand. In season, clouds of scallops scatter as the boat approaches, like wind-up comic dentures swimming through the transparent water. Sometimes porpoises follow the boat, often leaping alongside it, and in their time the stingrays scurry across the bottom out of our way. But not today. When the nor’wester blows, the sea floor is turbid and the surface a tangle of ripples and foam and whitecaps. The boat is a living thing, crashing through the waves like a wild horse through tall grass; spray leaps off the blunt bow and rains in sheets on and about us. As Pelican heels hard to leeward the crew leans to weather; the helmsman looks forward and is soon drenched, but the man handling the jib stands facing aft, his back to the spray. Periodically, we change places. Conversation is possible, but soon we are hoarse from shouting over the wind and splash and the pounding of the boat. For long stretches we just do our jobs, the tillerman concentrating on rudder and mainsail trim, the man up forward minding the jib sheets. Our eyes move from the straining rig to the angle of the wind, invisible, but we can sense exactly where it is. If we keep the boat perfectly balanced on that edge, the voyage will be over much sooner. Pelican responds, a machine in tune and in harmony with her human cargo and the sea around us; under our control, but allowing us to do what we could never accomplish without her.

By lunchtime we have reached the southern end of the island. We give it a wide berth, there is a tangle of shoals and channels and confused currents there that on another day we might thread our way through, perhaps to camp on the beach for a long fishing weekend. But not now, this is a day sail and we round the southern tip, gulp down a sandwich, a candy bar and a drink and turn across the wind and steer north, parallel to the long weather side of the island. We are cold and wet but the sun is higher now and the food warms us up. Conditions are a little better too, the waves are rollers here in deeper water and the chop is not quite as bad: soon the slickers come off. We’re on a port tack now and we only come about when the leeway pushes us too close to shore–that turbulent cauldron of surf is no place for a small boat. It is ironic, this boat and crew are only in real danger if they get too close to land.

The trip along the length of the three mile long island is the mirror image of the sail from the boat ramp. Now we have the wind to port, an invisible wall we slide against, as close as we dare get before it before it begins to slow us down. The little boat, despite it’s deep wide centerboard, loses ground continuously to leeward towards the churning shore and we periodically have to tack and beat out to deeper water before we can come about and resume our course parallel to the beach. Ironically, during these short detours we are losing ground, traveling further from our destination. It’s just part of the charm of sailing, I guess.

The sail north lets us get a good look at Anclote Key, a long thin sandbar with a glorious sandy beach and a spine of palms and scrub down the middle; there is a mangrove swamp on the lee side, but we cannot see it from here and the sand sparkles white and featureless except for the lines of weed and spindrift deposited there by the falling tide. On it the surf beats mercilessly, these days of heavy waves are infrequent and tomorrow the outline of the coast will be visibly altered. The key is a living thing, over a period of years we’ve seen it change and move and writhe along the surface of the sea. My friend and I have often remarked how fascinating a stop-action movie of the island might be, one frame taken every day over a century then all played back in a few minutes. The island would wriggle like an eel and swim down the Sound. Everything is alive out here, just at different time scales.

We pass familiar landmarks, the automated lighthouse and the old wrecked shrimpboat, only her pilot house now visible above the sand. There is a new wreck too, a lovely yacht, her spine broken irreparably high up on the beach, her mast pointing to sea, parallel to the ground; the sand is littered with debris. A quick look through the binoculars shows she has been there for some time; scavengers have already stripped her expensive deck hardware. Almost as if we had unexpectedly stumbled across the corpse of a beautiful young woman, it shocks us, then breaks our heart. She was certainly a stranger to these waters and in the dark her skipper probably mistook the lights of the tall smokestack on the mainland for the lighthouse. The island is so low you can’t see it at night and they probably sailed her right up on the beach. We hope her crew got off all right.

It takes us hours to sail down the length of the island. At the northern end, sportsmen and even professional fishermen rarely visit; there are no ports to speak of for miles further north and the mudflats and oyster bars up the coast are unfriendly to small craft. We find the deep channel between the end of the key and the sand flats and make our turn. The wind behind us now, sailing becomes a little easier so I kick up the centerboard to let us scoot through the shallows, leaving it down just far enough to warn us if we’re running into shoal water. Traveling with the wind, the impression is that it has suddenly dropped to a gentle breeze–not really, we’re just moving with it. My crewman stands on the foredeck with his trusty Polaroids and helps me pick our way through the shoals. The water is only a few feet deep but we’re a small boat so it presents no threat, we can always jump out and push. Offshore, the big rollers crash into a long sandbar so we are protected and we know the hardest part of the trip is over. After clearing the tip of the island we turn south, with the wind behind us we glide parallel to the edge of the land along the mangrove thicket that extends the length of the bay side.

The whole character of our world suddenly changes, the wind, blocked by the land and the thick mangrove forest, dies down to the gentlest of breezes. The water is flat and serene, clear as glass, and the Pelican ghosts along quietly in less than two feet of water. We strip off our wet clothes, change into dry ones, and have another snack. My friend lights up his pipe for the first time all day, relaxes and enjoys the view, the lazy smoke from its bowl drifting along with us. It is late afternoon now and the thick mangrove passing to starboard has a primeval, prehistoric look to it. The sun low in the sky and behind the vegetation; Pelican silently drifts along in shadow, sails limp and barely pulling. It is quiet and peaceful but the mangroves, menacing and impenetrable, are only yards away. Beneath the boat is a slimy fine mud, almost quicksand, and the mangrove is as interlocked and tangled as the Devil’s own basket; even a man with an axe could not hack his way through it. We are comfortable and relaxed, but without the boat around us this meeting place of land and sea is as inhospitable to us as the crashing surf on the weather side of the island. The wind is muted, but there’s enough to keep the salt water marsh mosquitoes down. In a few days the crop of wrigglers hatched after yesterday’s rain will make this stretch of water a living hell. We have our rods and had planned to try for snook and snapper here, but we are both too tired and without a word decide to save it for another day.

The island passes slowly by and we use the time to bail the bilge and secure the loose gear that came adrift from the almost continuous pounding we had been in all day. We discuss cutting our cruise short and setting a course back to Tarpon Springs and the boat ramp: the chart is consulted and a compass bearing laid out. It is almost night now and most of the long trip back will be in the dark. But Anclote Key has one more show to put on for us, one final act.

Out of nowhere, a school of mullet has materialized. Between us and the shore, the fish seem agitated, nervous, individuals are jumping and the school rushes about like a single panicked creature. We soon see why. A small shark has appeared, four or five feet long, perhaps a young bull or lemon, it is hard to tell in the dim light. Only the dorsal fin can be seen slicing the flat, still water, and an occasional glimpse of tail. The predator dashes through the mullet, zig and zagging while its foot-long prey scatter to confuse and avoid the assault. As he passes, they reassemble into a tight knot of swimmers, almost touching each other, and the shark circles back, again and again. The running battle continues, gradually moving south along the tangled mangrove roots where the prey huddle as best they can. By coincidence, the skirmish is moving along at about the same speed we are and for long minutes we follow and watch, transfixed. The battle continues until it is almost too dark to see and suddenly it is over as quickly as it began. Have the mullet scattered and headed for deeper water? Has the shark fed to satisfaction? We do not know, but it is over.

It is time to go. We turn away from the mangrove and head southeast into deeper water.
It is dark now and the distant lights of Tarpon Springs are winking on, our little boat picks up speed as we depart the lee of the island and pick up the northwest breeze again. This time the wind is on our quarter, the ideal point of sail, and traveling with it our speed is subtracted from the wind’s to make what we feel aboard much more moderate. The seas too are now coming up behind us and rather than crashing through we lift our stern to them so they slide effortlessly beneath us to pass ahead. It’s a gentler ride and a dry one, even with the quickly dropping temperature we are comfortable. The law tells us our boat is not long enough to require running lights, but we each have flashlights ready to locate gear or to shine on the sail if another boat comes near. But we have little need of them except for an occasional flash at the compass to ensure we are still on course for home. The sky quickly turns black and a blaze of stars appears overhead as they are never seen from the city. It is still almost two hours before we get back to the ramp and the bowl of night embraces us; while astern, a long trail of phosphorescence, unearthly green-glowing plankton, marks our wake, a ghostly road in the sea. We settle down for a long ride, dreading the chore of putting the boat on the trailer, the clean-up, and the long drive back to Tampa. I sip at the last of the lukewarm coffee from the Thermos and my shipmate lights his pipe and remarks that throughout the entire day we have not seen even one other boat.

My brother rented a pair of llamas once to take his young kids camping in the Front Range. He had a great time.

When I was working on my master’s, I spent a week alone camping in the field. It was only a two mile hike out, but I still felt alone in the wilderness. My support vehicle was parked a mile in the opposite direction. Traverses included a stop by the vehicle to resupply. It was a great experience. I haven’t done a solo like that since.