That's as far as I'm going with Leaving Harwich. If you have been critiquing it, you should have enough now to draw some conclusions. If you do, I hope to hear your thoughts. So far, only two readers have weighed in, but they both have been immensely helpful.
Next up, a few chapters from An Irresponsible Adult. I've already included the first chapter early on in this blog, but I'll post it below so you can start fresh. The same rules apply. Please, no flattery. Only thoughtful criticism that will improve the work.
An Irresponsible Adult is subtitled: Reflections on a Solo Voyage. I call it a motivational memoir because of its purpose.
See what you think.



AN IRRESPONSIBLE ADULT




Reflections on a Solo Voyage









By

Douglas A. Campbell








Part I – Alone



Chapter One




I am alone on my sailboat in a harbor at the edge of the treacherous North Atlantic, but the feeling inside my chest is that of a high wire aerialist about to cross a cable strung between two skyscrapers. I am not afraid – not yet – because I am as focused as is that hypothetical acrobat. I’m trying to stay out of trouble by navigating a safe course. My boat, Robin, is steered by a tiller – a long, curved lever made of laminated wood and attached to the rudder, which hangs off of my boat’s pointed stern. I am shoving the tiller to port and to starboard, steering Robin east and then west, within the limits of the Newport, Rhode Island, harbor. To my south, an invisible line crosses the harbor. At one end of the line is an orange buoy. At the other end is a small, anchored power boat. This is the starting line for a race I have entered. I am staying well away from that line. I am not afraid of the line. Fear is beyond it, although at this point I only suspect that. I am not thinking about fear. I am thinking very hard about avoiding the 39 other boats that are crisscrossing the harbor to the north of the starting line. Some – the lighter boats – are sailing already. I am running Robin’s diesel engine because the wind is slight, not really enough to move my heavy, 32-foot boat with anything less than all her sails raised. A half hour ago, when Robin was still tied to a mooring amidst perhaps 200 other vessels in the cluttered anchorage close to town, I raised the mainsail up its track on the back of the mast. Until only days ago, that had been a very difficult job, resulting in rivers of sweat. Then, after three years of sailing Robin, I discovered a very easy way to raise the mainsail. So that’s what I did back there on the mooring. If there is any wind, the boat will swing around its mooring and point into the wind when the mainsail is raised. That didn’t happen this windless morning. Once the main was up, I raised the staysail, a small sail hung in front of Robin’s mast. That left the genoa, Robin’s largest and, at times, most powerful sail, still rolled around the cable – called the forestay – that angles up from the very tip of the bowsprit to the top of the mast, about 43 feet above the cabintop. The genoa is rolled up like a window shade, so I could, at any time, unfurl it by pulling on one of two ropes or lines – we sailors call them sheets when they control a sail. But I have left the genoa furled because it is a cumbersome sail to handle each time you turn the boat. It gets caught around the inner forestay – the shorter slanting cable that the smaller staysail is attached to. I didn’t want to deal with a tangle of Dacron sail fabric, not now, a half hour before the start of the 635-mile Bermuda One-Two sailboat race, not in the midst of 39 boats waiting to cross the starting line, not in front of a few hundred spectators who have bothered, on a chilly, overcast Saturday morning in early June, to focus their attention on this gaggle of boats and the solitary women and men who are poised on each, preparing to leave this safe harbor for many days alone at sea.
I am no more afraid – although this will be my first long offshore voyage alone – than the seasoned aerialist, who ignores the chasm below his high wire, the ghastly pit into which one misstep will send him. And yet, I am not brave. I simply cannot, yet, see the ocean – with its unmentionable depth and its ability to turn in minutes from serene to savage. That is beyond the land that confines this harbor. I am too busy to think of all that could go wrong. In stories that I have written as a staff member of Soundings, a boating magazine, I have catalogued the mistakes and misfortunes that have sent other sailors to their graves out there. And so, with an intensity bordering on obsession, I have spent recent months eliminating risks. Before this race, Robin had no life raft. Now she has one, strapped in a corner of the cockpit. She had no emergency radio beacon to alert the Coast Guard should I need to be rescued. Now a so-called EPIRB is mounted high on a wall inside the cabin. There was no manual bilge pump. Now there is one in the cabinet below the EPIRB and another near my shins out here in the cockpit. The list of safeguards is enormous. It shows in the credit card bill that Monica, my wife, tries to pay off each month. I started with a budget of $2,000 for this race. The decision to buy, rather than rent, the life raft nearly took care of that budget in one shot. But the intensity that is now guiding my hand on Robin’s tiller would not allow the collapse of my budget to be a reason for quitting this race. I had to be in Newport on June 9, 2007. Reining in a squandering man is certainly the job of a wife. But Monica, who right now is standing under some kind of shelter on the shore to the east, only encouraged my preparations for this contest. Indeed, she will meet me when I arrive in Bermuda and then race back to Newport with me on Robin.
For now, however, I am alone on board this boat, and I will be for several days and nights. I am not afraid, and yet I am not happy or excited. Twenty-eight years of sailing have led me to this harbor. Absent-minded reflection on the sailing adventures of others has turned me toward this single-handed challenge. A couple of years of immersion in my work as a boating writer has given me an appreciation for what completion of a voyage to Bermuda could feel like. And here I stand, steering Robin closer and closer to the reality that I have for so long visualized. My hair should be standing up on the back of my neck, like a dog ready to fight. Maybe a gunslinger’s grin should be forming in the corner of my mouth, or a coward’s quiver revealing itself in my grip on the tiller. I should be reacting in some way that I am not. Almost every emotion seems to have been wrung out of me as I wait for the cannon blast that will signal the start of the race. I am purposeful, businesslike. My approach has been conservative. I will roll out the genoa only in the last seconds before the cannon fires, and then I will – from wherever I find myself in this harbor – drive for the starting line and the ocean beyond. I can feel the pace of these coming moments establishing itself. In the passing of another sailor’s boat, I hear the hiss and gurgle of a wind-driven bow wake, the flap of a loosened sail as another boat turns through the wind. Robin’s engine is off now. Four of the classes have already started: the fastest boats got off the line more than thirty minutes ago. A blue and white flag on the boat at the end of the starting line shows that there are less than four minutes until we in Class Four race. I steer Robin to the east, trying to gauge where I will turn around to begin my run toward the start. My heart beats slowly, almost coasting like a locomotive when the throttle is eased. I have an inner momentum that carries me forward. Inside, I feel as I have – too infrequently – when taking an exam that I know I will ace. I am confident in Robin. I am confident of my ability to handle her. And in that place where pleasure and sorrow each can reside . . . there is nothing. Or that is how it feels. It will take me months to categorize the sensation, to realize that it is resignation, like the acceptance phase of the terminally ill. It is resignation, seasoned with dread.