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It is Wednesday morning, just before 7 o’clock. At 11:40 a.m., I will have completed four days at sea. In the last eight hours, Robin has covered only 17 miles. She was making as little as 2 knots of headway during the night. With daylight at 5 o’clock, I went forward to inspect the damage to the genoa. What a relief it was when I found that the snap-shackle that holds the tack of the genoa to the boat had simply popped open. I snapped it back into place, and now I’m sailing with the genoa and the mainsail and making 4.2 knots in 6 to 8 knots of following breeze. It was an adventurous night all around. Moments ago, I wrote this blog.

The importance of keeping a 20-minute watch was brought home last night. You look at the vast Atlantic and wonder how a collision between two needles in this haystack is possible. You then consider that most traffic is going to and from a handful of destinations. Now it becomes a 12-lane freeway of sorts, where anyone can hop on any lane in any direction.
After I doused the genoa last night and was making less than 3 knots, I was keeping my watch between naps. Sometimes my dreams seemed to follow me into consciousness and plead with me to return to them immediately. But every time the egg timer rang, I managed to get to my feet and walk around.
It was sometime after 11 o’clock when I noticed white lights ahead of me to starboard. I got on channel 16; gave Robin’s name, her coordinates and my course of 120 degrees; and asked for a reply from the vessel eight miles ahead. I had checked the radar to get the miles.
A voice answered and told me that he would alter his course to starboard and give me a wide berth to my port. The eight miles were consumed in less than a half-hour. Twenty minutes between watches was a bare minimum.

The gentleman in command of that ship spoke perfect English with an accent I could not identify. Perhaps he was Greek, but he might just as well have been Russian. He definitely was polite. His voice was resigned, almost grave. When I thanked him for changing course – imagine a huge ship stepping aside to let tiny Robin pass – he demurred that he was only obeying the international shipping regulations. I got a lump in my throat as I watched his lights pass two miles to my east and disappear over the northern horizon, leaving Robin and me alone once more.

I am alone now, but to get here I have been helped by many, some of whom could never have known where their kindness of a moment was leading. Two people come immediately to mind as I stand beside the nav station. On the tabletop where I spread my charts, a small harmonica is pushed off to one side. A fiddle – a raised edge on the table – keeps the harmonica and the charts from sliding off when Robin heels. There is a second harmonica in the top drawer below the table. (This is the “junk” drawer. The second drawer down is the galley drawer, where the knives, forks and spoons are kept. The lowest drawer of the three is the chart drawer, where I keep the charts I’m currently using, along with the dividers, plastic triangles and other apparati used in plotting my course.) The harmonicas are gifts, prompted by a couple of lines in blog that I wrote back in Newport.

I tried to find a harmonica, since I read in Jan de Hartog’s book that it is the purest nautical musical instrument and I want to serenade the tuna out there. In all of nearby Newport, I have yet to find a mouth harp.

I wrote that on Thursday, June 7. On Friday, the first harmonica arrived, sent by one of my talented Soundings editors, the musically-inclined Michael Labella who in each issue does his best to preserve my writing dignity. Then before the race started Saturday, my sister, Janet, arrived with the second instrument. Offshore, I have played them alternately. They have been a great comfort to me, helping to occupy me in the long spans when Robin, steering herself, has no need of me.
These acts of thoughtfulness are among the most recent. My enjoyment of sailing can be traced back 47 years, to the summer following my graduation from high school.
I had, during most of my summers growing up, spent a full month vacationing on or near water, although almost never near an ocean. My parents were outdoors folk, and our recreation involved camping, hiking and fly-fishing. My father’s employer shut down for the month of July, and from the time I was about nine years old, we headed to the forests of Maine almost as soon as school let out.
Even then, I knew I wanted to be on a boat. Occasionally, we would come upon a pond where someone had left a wooden rowboat. The ones that were not chained to a tree were waterlogged. My good parents would not let me use the chained boats. That left me confronted with attempting to make the waterlogged craft float. Since that, of course, did not work, I resorted for navigational purposes to the occasional log raft that we would find in the tundra-like vegetation that grew as a beard along the banks of these remote ponds. The ponds themselves were shallow, the deepest perhaps eight or ten feet deep. The rafts were ancient collections of cedar logs lashed together to cross-poles. They were maneuvered by pushing on long, branchless cedar poles. To anchor a raft, you would jam the pole down between the logs and into the bottom of the pond.
We caught a lot of trout on wet flies like the Coachman and the Royal Coachman, flies that we bought pre-tied at the L.L. Bean store on the drive north from Massachusetts. I spent most of four weeks with sneakers that were wet from standing on partially-submerged log rafts. I learned to move one of these craft against the cold summer wind blowing down from the surrounding alpine landscape and whipping the pond into whitecaps. I never learned to like the taste of trout, and I never lost my desire to sail a real boat.
My best friend, Joel Plastridge, the classmate with whose family I had spent winters skiing, had been raised sailing. In high school, he built a Sunfish out of plywood. We took it one day to a nearby pond, but on a hot summer afternoon there was no wind, so we did not sail. Another time, I had gone with his family to a trailer they kept on a sand spit between a freshwater pond and some tributary to Buzzards Bay. We launched a fiberglass daysailer in the pond, but again there was no wind.
Then Dan Plastridge, Joel’s father, asked me to drive the family sports car – a black Triumph TR-3 – from the coast north of Boston, where they had left it when they had boarded a bareboat charter, to Buzzards Bay, where they had sailed the 28-foot wooden ketch. My payment – in addition to being given the keys to the sports car – was a night aboard the ketch and a day of sailing on the bay.
The scenes that I remember from that experience fueled a fantasy that would live in my heart for many years to come. I awoke in a creaking hammock in the main cabin, sunlight from the bronze ports racing across the cabin wall as the boat rocked, the aroma of bacon and eggs frying in the galley filling my nose. And then, as the ketch sailed in an afternoon southwesterly, I rode on the bobstay – the cable that runs from the front of the bowsprit down to the stem at the waterline. I can still see the bow wake splashing white beneath me. Dan’s gift to me has lasted a lifetime, first in memories and now, alone, offshore, far beyond the Gulf Stream on my way to Bermuda.