Google alerts, to which I do not recall engaging, sends me emails when my words appear online. Usually these are unauthorized use of “A sailor is an artist whose medium is the wind”—all that I expect will be left of seventy decades of struggle and passion and joy—but I just received one that quoted me from STORM PASSAGE as saying: “I would have set my course at that instant not for the nearest star but for the farthest.”
I don’t recall ever writing that. It is decades and millions of words ago, but I would be proud if I did. And while frayed by time and chance, I am still what I was or I am nothing,
So now I find myself considering a passage of six hundred miles, not light years.
The forecasts are not what I want.
Not the nearest star but the farthest.
The forecasts show another front with strong gale force north wind in the middle of next week.
I may leave Saturday instead of Sunday and try to reach Port Pierce before the next front. I care about protecting GANNET, whose hull/keel cracks prove that I have taken her far beyond anything for which she was ever conceived, more than I do myself. But tomorrow I might just buy another bottle of Laphroaig and then last it out at sea.
I am seventy-six years old. I am a work in progress.
