And it would never leave me. Driven by some sort of genetic blood-memory, fuelled by my grandmother’s stories in the cook camp, all the rest of my life if I wasn’t near or on the oceans I missed them. Became caught in a kind of homesickness.

Then.

Almost exactly twenty years later, when I was twenty-seven and had done with the army and was trying to learn to write, a dear friend took me up to her parents’ lakeside house at Lake Arrowhead, California. It was a beautiful spot with a wooden dock that went out from the shore, and tied to the dock was a small sailboat. It was old, tired, made of coarse plywood, and sloppily painted, but it had a mast and a single sail. The sail was raggedly tied around the boom and drooping into the boat, which had three or four inches of dirty water sloshing back and forth on the bottom.

All in all, not a pretty boat and not one I would have looked at twice. I knew nothing of sailing then – less than nothing. I had gone across the Pacific Ocean in a ship, powered by engines. Why would I care about something as archaic as sailing?

And yet.

And yet.

When my friend asked me if I’d like to try sailing I thought, truly, Why not? So she set me to bailing with an old coffee can while she pulled up the sail and cleated off the halyard and pushed down a flat board that went through a housing in the boat and into the water – a centre-board, I would learn – that kept us from sliding sideways across the water. She then put the rudder down on the stern, handed me the tiller, untied the line that held us to the dock, and pushed off.

There was only a slight breeze but it caught the sail, pushed at it while she sheeted it in, told me how to handle the tiller to make the boat steer in the right direction, and off we went.

Moving.

Sailing.

I remember the feeling when the sail caught air and the boat started moving. As if it suddenly came alive, transformed into something else, some wonderful thing rather than a neglected tub of mouldy plywood and ragged sailcloth.

It danced.

And I was to be irrevocably hooked on that dance for the rest of my life.

As I had been with the sea.

So I suppose it was inevitable that I would ultimately bring sailing and my love of the sea together – as natural as breathing – and it started me in on a seemingly endless procession of boats and what could be called passages.