Carlotta ghosted along at dusk in the Gulf stream. The wind had gone down with the sun, and it was that quiet time between the death of the day and the rebirth of night.
Carolyn, my wife and fellow sailor for the past 14 years, puttered at the galley sink. Roma Orion, our three year old daughter who had twenty stamps in her passport on her first birthday , sat beside me in the cockpit. She waited expectantly for her nightly bedtime story. I took a deep breath and began. And if I was good, my daddy would let me sit in the cockpit at night, and he would tell me stories about fishing and sailing and swimming. And about how the stars tell you where you are and how each ocean wave contains answers to many questions She said nothing, but I could tell that she remembered.
She had been afraid of the thin palsied hand that had reached out between the white sheets to embrace her. I steered all night, not bothering with the electric autopilot or the windvane. Sleep never entered my mind. Carolyn came up a few times and offered to take a watch, but I turned her down. I wanted to be alone with only my boat and my thoughts.
I wanted to talk to my father one last time. Fools command ships, sailors guide them. The Art of Sailing is one of listening, asking, understanding. Accommodate them. Learn from them During one of our annual haul-outs, Elizabeth, a foot schooner, was next to an old yawl that had just been purchased by some college kids. A whole gang of them were working on her furiously. They were bringing her down to bare wood. They came to my father for advice. By amidships, they were concerned.
My father said nothing. A commercial artist and sign painter by profession, his very eye was a straight edge. Around the other side of the boat he went, and when he reached the bow, the lines joined perfectly. The name stuck. He never circumnavigated.
