Opinion

It doesn’t matter how many children you have, or how much practice you’ve had raising them, one thing holds true: you get to start over with each one.

Why is my family instantly starving the moment we head out to sea? Erik claims it is brought on by boredom, but honestly! We left the anchorage just six minutes ago.

One of the many things I love about sailing is that it is one of the last great freedoms left to us. Raise your anchor and head out to sea and once the coast is a line on the horizon, you’ve left in your wake the world of restrictive regulations and petty laws.

Sitting at a café overlooking “Palace Row,” where the big catamarans floated at the Miami Boat Show, I had a startling realization. Most of the potential buyers I observed being passed from greeter to salesperson to loan specialist to closer were the same people you might see in a Ferrari showroom.

My first boat was a poorly maintained Thompson 21 powerboat that broke down so often I decided to try sailing. After all, having wind as the motive power and an outboard kicker when that failed would, in theory, provide the redundancy to keep me out of trouble and my family safe.

An Englishman I met in British Columbia once told me that sooner or later every sailor falls in love with an older woman. His name was Duncan, and the moment he saw my boat, Drummer, he was awash in longing…

Dropping the hook in remote Bahia Magdalena—on the Pacific coast of Mexico’s Baja peninsula—I was instantly attracted to Puna, a plucky little fire engine-red cutter anchored nearby.

We have an inflatable globe that hangs in our saloon, and it is ruining my life. It is an innocuous-looking thing: the different countries are decked out in cheery purples and oranges, and a there’s jagged Sharpie line showing our route from the Chesapeake to the South Pacific. But somehow, whenever talk turns to the future, the globe jumps off its perch and into someone’s hands. Mesmerized, we turn it and turn it, trying to take in every country, every possibility, every tiny harbor. And we begin to play an endless game of And Then We Could.

One beautiful afternoon last August I sat on an old-growth cedar stump that had washed up on the beach in a winter storm and watched a blue gale blow up the Straits of Juan de Fuca. The straits are straddled to the south by the aptly named 11,000-foot-high Hurricane Ridge and 20-plus miles to the north by the beach where I sat.

Over his three decades of ocean voyaging, author John Kretschmer has been in more than his fair share of heavy weather. In this excerpt from his new book, Sailing a Serious Ocean—Sailboats, Storms, Stories and Lessons Learned from 30 Years at Sea, he looks back at his darkest hour at sea