The trip north with Robin last weekend was interesting in many ways, and I'll recall the ways in subsequent blog posts. There were lessons to be learned, and I may have absorbed at least one of them.
That most interesting lesson deals with heroism. Alone on a boat for a couple of days, one has the opportunity to ponder deeply. On Saturday, I had about ten hours of solitude, much of that time in near-gale conditions, enough hours make whatever observations I chose. It wasn't until today, Monday, that I found the words that for me define the truth in the particular observations I made two days earlier.
Yesterday, on the third and final leg of the trip that began in Cambridge, Maryland and ended in Croydon, Pennsylvania, I was accompanied by my friend, Tom Gilmore. Tom's a few years younger than I, and when he arrived at Robin on Saturday night, having seen the conditions on the water from shore earlier in the day, he said he was amazed that I had accomplished the trip that day from Arnold, Maryland, to Chesapeake City, a distance of about 50 miles.
"Men your age just don't do that sort of thing," he said, or words to that effect. I feigned a feeling of offense at his choice of words as they regarded my relative youth.
In fact, I took his comment as praise, since he is my mentor in extreme sailing. I was particularly pleased when, eating his crab bisque soup at a nice restaurant, he said: "I wouldn't have done it. I'd have stayed put, read a book and sipped tea."
What a hero I am, I thought, in not those precise words.
A thought exposing a dangerous lack of humility, it began visiting and combinging with my recollected observations from earlier in the day.
To be truthful, there were times when, taking a battering from a rough chop blowing out of
Baltimore's Patapsco River, I was completely miserable and even had thoughts of turning back  to the protected anchorage where I'd spent the prior night in Arnold.
I had known the forecast before I left that anchorage in the early light Saturday. Winds 15 to 20 knots, gusts to 35, from the west. The Upper Chesapeak Bay, where I was headed, slants slightly to the east, about 30 degrees from north. A true west wind would mean Robin would be on a beam reach, an easy point of sail.
Just before there was enough light to see the channel markers leading out of my anchorage, I began raising Robin's anchor. The wind was strong, even in the anchorage, but I saw that, as forecast, it was coming directly from the west.
Once I was out on the bay, I raised the staysail and, motor-sailing against the current of a falling tide, was able to add a knot of forward progress above what the current alone would allow. My chest swelled with joy as the GPS told me we were making 5.5 knots. This was going to be a great day of sailing. Perhaps I'd even be able to raise the reefed mainsail and turn off the engine.
To the north was the 4-mile-long Chesapeake Bay Bridge. I sailed toward it and then through it's center span.
That's when the wind from the Patapsco hit Robin on the bow. The chop was rough, with steep black faces on the waves and white foam -spindrift -- blowing off the wave crests.
In calculating this leg of the voyage, I had forgotten to account for the effect of the Patapsco on wind direction. I knew from the past that a strong wind, when it reaches that river, tends to follow the stream's northwest-southeast track. It was doing that Saturday morning, and it was whistling in the rigging.
The result was that Robin's progress at times, when her bow slammed into a 4 our 5 foot wall of water, stopped completely. I would guess I was averaging about two knots of progress overall. If this kept up, it would take 24 hours to get to Chesapeake City.
My mood soured. It grew darker when the staysail, stretched tightly from mast to deck, began thrashing as the direction of the wind moved closer to the bow. I went forward and took the sail down, but I was unable, with waves breaking over the bow, to stuff the sail into it's bag and had to lash it to the stanchions of the lifelines to keep it from shredding in the violence of the wind.
For the next two hours, there was no improvement. Robin crept up along the north shore of Kent Island, pushed east, ever closer to the island ,so that I had to steer a more westerly course, almost directly into the wind, to make her crab across the water and keep on course.
It was during this period that I contemplated turning back. But I'd done that last summer, aborting a voyage to Maine when I was in a funk, and I didn't want to repeat that decision.
So Robin pounded slowly ahead.
This morning, I recalled my impulse to take pride in my decisions Saturday morning, and I thought of the word "heroic." I disected the word, and what I realized is that heroism is risk-taking for a noble, selfless cause.
Without a noble cause, the same risk-taking reveals poor decision-making.
Without a selfless motive, what would have been heroic becomes, simply, stupid.