We tried to buy a boat from Costco once. This is true and it is the correct place to start. A hungover saturday in 2023, Al and i wandering the warehouse, and there it was, some inflatable dream sitting between the kayaks and the patio sets, and we were thwarted by summer ending before it in full had started. for surely no good reason we did not even get a damn boat, i wrote. we consoled ourselves with a boat's cost of american wagyu beef, which is the most us sentence in the whole record. the longing was already there, is my point. it was just still dressed up as a joke.

Then came a weekend in may of 2025 when it stopped being a joke. I can't tell you exactly what did it. i caught a fish that weekend, i biked eighty miles to tomales bay, the boat was rocking under us like it always does, and by sunday night Al and i had decided, out loud, together: get a real sailboat, learn to really sail, and go. far. that week i wrote could hardly sleep for all the excitement and dreams even of sailing and boats and the sea. a grown man lying awake like it's christmas eve, and the present is the entire ocean.

The education since has been humbling in the specific way i needed. I bought a little sailing dinghy that summer, assembled the mast in a super janky way, and pushed off from the houseboat with no control whatsoever. couldn't sail it. couldn't even paddle it. had to scramble back aboard while my meetings raged on without me. the sea's first lesson, delivered free of charge: enthusiasm is not seamanship. but a week later i took that same dink out at sunset with lady sitting up in the bow (a figurehead with ears) and something in my chest lay down flat and calm, and i thought, there it is. that's the feeling we're chasing. Al and i sailed out of the berkeley marina that august, and then came the real schooling: ASA classes, sitting in a classroom drawing points of sail like a kid again, close-hauled, beam reach, broad reach, run, the same diagrams i had already smuggled into the cow game (apparently i teach cartoon cows whatever i'm scared of forgetting). knots in the evening on the houseboat rail, bowline behind my back, cleat hitch without looking, figure-eight while talking, until the hands know it better than they know a keyboard.

and the boat listings at midnight. this is the new vice and i am not quitting. al asleep, some neighbor's anchor light swaying outside the window, and me scrolling hulls: thirty-five to thirty-eight feet, a stout old monohull, nothing fancy, and above all shallow draft. why shallow? because of where we're going. the bahamas sit on great limestone banks, old reef, old sea floor (the geology degree purring at last), and the water over those banks runs ten, twelve feet deep for miles and miles, gin-clear over white sand, so clear the boats look like they're floating on their own shadows. your keel is your whole argument down there. every midnight listing gets measured against a country.

the charts live on our table now. paper ones, the abacos spread out under the coffee: hope town, man-o-war cay, marsh harbour, little harbour, the sea of abaco lying quiet behind its chain of cays. i read them the way i used to read geologic maps, which is to say a lot. and between here and there runs the test: the gulf stream, an actual river in the ocean, warm and blue, hauling more water than every land river combined. you learn its one commandment early. never cross with wind against current (a north wind against that north-running river stacks the sea into standing walls), so you learn to wait. you watch the forecasts like a farmer. you wait for the window, for the wind to come gentle and southerly, and then you go, at night usually, and at dawn there is supposed to be a light on the far side. that's the plan. some winter, when the window opens. patience is a sailing skill and i am practicing it hardest of all.

Crew of three. Al, who was there on the bean bag and there at the altar and there on the dock and is here now at the table, reading the wind like she reads everything, saying yes the way she does. And Lady (eight years old, boat veteran, fretting dog, first mate), who will get a harness and a shade patch on the foredeck and a solemn assignment to bark at flying fish. Old superstition says it's bad luck to have a lady aboard. we have been running that experiment for years now. results are in. best luck i ever had.

People ask if I'm scared and the honest answer is yes, correctly scared, scared the way you are supposed to be of the sea, which is different from being scared of your life. a tarot reader at a holiday party once told us quite definitely go on your sailing adventure. I don't believe in tarot. i believe in anyone who tells you that.

so here is where the book ends, because it ends where every day here ends: evening on the dock, the fog holding off behind tam, herons working the mud, some sea lion coughing out by the channel, al inside with the chart and a glass of something, lady flat on my feet doing slippers one more time. the tide comes up under the house and lifts it an inch, and somewhere south of here the stream is running warm and blue, waiting for us to learn its name, knot by knot, window by window. that's the whole story so far. We'll see.