The Cure for Anything Is Salt Water Part 1

THE CURE FOR ANYTHING IS SALT WATER.

How I Threw My Life Overboard and Found Happiness at Sea.

by MARY SOUTH.

CHAPTER ONE.

It's never too late to be who you might have been.

-GEORGE ELIOT.

Not long ago, I was probably a lot like you. I had a successful career, a pretty home, two dogs and a fairly normal life. All I kept were the dogs.

Then one day in October 2003, I quit my good job and put my sweet little house on the market. I packed a duffel bag of clothes and everything else I owned went into storage. Within weeks I was the proud owner of an empty bank account and a 40-foot, 30-ton steel trawler that I had no idea how to run. I enrolled in nine weeks of seamanship school, and two weeks after my course ended, I pulled away from the dock on my very first trip: a 1,500-mile journey through the Atlantic from Florida to Maine.

My transformation from regular person to unhinged mariner started casually enough. Lured to Pennsylvania a few years ago by one more step up the book publishing career ladder, I had accepted a job that was editorial, managerial and very dull. I was busy enough at the office but, after work, I didn't know what to do with myself. I cooked, took guitar lessons, went to the gym, drank manhattans, watched movies at home and read books and magazines. But still I faced an abundance of excruciatingly quiet free time. On business trips to the city, I'd stock up on magazines. At first, I read a predictable a.s.sortment for a girl in exile from the big city: the New Yorker, New York, New York Review of Books. Okay, it wasn't all about New York. There was House and Garden, Dwell, Utne Reader, Maisons Cote Ouest, Vogue, Gourmet. I'd read just about anything-which is probably how an occasional Yachting started to find its way into my stockpiles.

When I saw Motorboating, Sail and Powerboating at the local supermarket, peeking out from behind the overwhelming number of firearm and bride publications (a combination that captured the flavor of the area all too well), I thought "Why not?" Soon, I had completely given up on literature, current events, even home decor. I started subscriptions to Pa.s.sagemaker and Soundings, full year-long commitments. From there, it was a scary slide down the slippery slope to more extreme, niche t.i.tles (Professional Mariner Magazine, Workboat Magazine, American Tugboat Review) that I just had to have. I was becoming a trawler junky and I wasn't sure why.

But let's backtrack for a moment. I'd better start by admitting I am an optimist-not just your run-of-the-mill, happy face, Pollyanna-type. I'm Old School-an extreme optimist of the sort that went out of style around the time of Don Quixote.

And like most optimists who regularly suffer the crushing defeats of a world less wonderful than they had imagined, I'm sure I have developed some finely honed coping strategies. (Or denial issues, if you prefer to call the gla.s.s half empty as I obviously do not.) For instance, although I had just arrived at a new job in rural Pennsylvania full of vim and vigor, the deeply repressed realist within me knew almost immediately that I had made a terrible mistake. But there was no way I could admit that-even to myself.

The vocal Optimist in me said: Hey, this is pretty cool. They have an organic cafe at work and the food's really inexpensive. But the mute Realist in me knew: Almost all of the food, no matter what it was, tasted weirdly the same, which-let's face it-was not good. At any price.

The Optimist said: Wow. It's so rural out here that you'd never know you were only 100 miles from New York City The Realist knew: I did not want to live in a place where the Wednesday Bob Evan's special was All the Possum You Can Eat for $3.99.

The Optimist said: What a gorgeous stone house I have found for a bargain price!

The Realist knew: I was going to ruin the rustic exposed stone walls (and drastically lower the resale value) when I splattered my brains all over them after a slow decline into loneliness and alcoholism.

My point is, maybe I wasn't able to admit to myself that I wanted out of that place in the worst possible way but nothing could have been less appropriate to my rural, landlocked situation than a sudden obsession with the boating lifestyle.

So perhaps my newfound pa.s.sion was just a strangled cry for help, issued from the lonely wilds of scenic nowhere. Every day, I'd put on a suit and drive to the office. I'd organize my editors, read submissions, review ma.n.u.scripts, return phone calls from agents, do some editing, write and re-write copy. I seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time in "brainstorming meetings" where a group of us, pulled away from whatever we'd been working on by a prearranged ding on our Outlook calendars, sat in a windowless, florescent-lit meeting room and tried to come up with just the right t.i.tle for a health book. (It had to be prescriptive, it had to hold out a promise to the reader, it had to have punch. Using numbers was good. Dangling a plan was ideal. Thirty-Day Plans were. . .well. . .we were on fire.) Once a week, the staff gathered for editorial meetings to decide which ma.n.u.scripts we should buy. The sales director would weigh in with her department's a.s.sessment on the latest submissions, and it was uncanny how often they seemed to vote with one mind: hers-which was, sadly, as wide as a stream in Death Valley. As long as the author was a celebrity or at least had a well-established marketing platform, there was a possibility we could buy the book. Of course, there were other hurdles to clear. We wouldn't want to take any risks: the topic had to be fresh but not too fresh. In other words, someone needed to have published a book on the same subject, and sold enough copies to prove there was an audience but not so many as to suggest a been-there, done-that readership. Exactly what this number was varied with how much pressure the sales director was under from above, how things were going at home, how long her morning commute had taken and whether Mercury was out of retrograde.

And she wasn't the worst of it. My boss was a micromanager with an imagination that was significantly smaller than the stick up her b.u.t.t. She was the cla.s.sic corporate type: she put in long, long hours in a clever sleight that subst.i.tuted endless meetings and frequent memos for actual productivity. But that's why they paid her the big bucks.

Anyway, the point is that innovation, new ideas, anything provocative or controversial was pretty much out of the question. There was a lot of talk about thinking outside the box, but at heart ours was an organization that liked a flow chart, a win-win, a net-net, everybody on the same page. In other words, I felt I had little to bring to the table. Don't get me wrong: I was a team player. But we didn't appear to have a team, just a cheerleading squad for the worst benchwarmers in the league.

I knew it wasn't really as bad as it seemed. It was corporate life. Not thrilling but a necessary evil. However, I was finding it increasingly intolerable. I felt, dully, that my soul was being quietly asphyxiated. And when I was released to the relative freedom of my tiny stone house each evening, all I could do was pour myself another Manhattan, fire up the big screen and wish I was anywhere else. I knew it wasn't just the job. It was everything.

To be fair, I had always been a little of what my brother Hamilton disapprovingly called a "thrill-seeker." Nothing major: I backpacked through Europe, joined the Peace Corps, tried skydiving, sold my car and bought a motorcycle. Maybe my middle-age life and career were merely making me wistful for a sense of freedom that had become buried alive in a routine of dwindling satisfaction. As my office walls slowly disappeared behind a fleet of fishing boat photos, nautical charts and boat brochures, my wishes became increasingly specific: I wanted to be there, on that boat, or that one, and wherever they were going made absolutely no difference.

As my first Thanksgiving in Pennsylvania approached, my family in New York began the annual rite of pa.s.sive-aggressive maneuvering to determine where we would all gather for the feast day. I decided to opt out. (In the South family, we are allowed to skip the odd Thanksgiving without fear of reprisals, as long as we show up for Christmas.) Instead, I decided to test my fantasies by spending a small chunk of my new salary on a boating experience. I flew to Fort Myers and took a five-day, one-on-one course, learning the basics of how to operate a trawler. At the time, it seemed absurd-pointlessly fun: like taking a cooking cla.s.s when you can't boil water, or going to car-racing school when you normally take the bus.

I was learning (and staying) alone that week on a single engine 32-foot Grand Banks trawler from the mid-1970s. Even with my limited experience, I could tell it had seen better days. But I loved playing house on it the first night, bringing groceries aboard and cooking, enjoying a drink on the bridge while the sun went down, listening to the murmurs from other nearby boaters enjoying their c.o.c.ktails. So far, this boating stuff was great, everything I hoped for. Maybe I could get a trawler, live on it and never even leave the dock!

My instructor arrived the next morning and explained the course objectives: I would have five days to learn the basics of the engine and electrical systems, navigation, safety, docking and maneuvering. I'd have to be able to plan an overnight trip, plot it, take us there, anchor in the harbor, bring us back and dock. Yeah, sure. Or then again, maybe I could get a boat, live on it and never even leave the dock!

I learned a lot that week, and though I was very nearly overwhelmed by how much there still was to learn, I gathered a vague sense that I could do this. I had gone from reading magazines and picturing myself on a boat to actually running M a boat very badly-nervously watching my stern drift out of the channel between markers, messing up running-time calculations, forgetting port and starboard repeatedly. Still, here I was at the helm, soaking it all in, slowly but surely improving and, most of all, feeling utterly thrilled to be in over my head.

Toward the end of my week in Florida, on what seemed to a Yankee an oddly sunny Thanksgiving, I remember sitting alone in perfect contentment, washing down my dry store bought turkey dinner with a sea breeze and staring at the sun sparkling on the water. And of course, I thought what we all think at some point on a great vacation: This is the life for me. But a few days later, my tan and I were back in the dark and dreary Pennsylvania slouch-toward-winter, editing books, writing flap copy, sitting in fluorescent-lit meeting rooms, drinking too much in the evenings and watching a lot of bad television. (A combination I highly recommend for those wishing to bulk up rapidly. I had already gained 10 pounds in Pennsylvania Dutch country and I hadn't even touched the baked goods!) Each morning I would find myself sitting at the computer for hours before going to the office, ordering boating books from Amazon.com, looking at Dutch steel trawlers, at French barges, at sailors' web pages and online nautical magazines-at any number of Internet sites that suggested a very different life in a very different place. I've always had wanderl.u.s.t, a short attention span, a completely unrealistic and fickle sense of what I want. I have contented myself with frequent trips, with elaborate fantasies, with a grand view of what the future could hold. . .to the exasperation of my very driven oldest brother. My endless interest in the lives I might have led even amuses me. I admit it: I've never been normal. And yet. . .I had recently seen a toothpaste ad that made me cry. What I really wanted-like most everybody else-was to climb into bed with the same wonderful person every night and know that my world, wherever I was in it, could happily be reduced to the sound of another's breath, rising and falling. The nice life I had competently constructed for myself was starting to mock me with what it wasn't. It wasn't challenging, it wasn't satisfying, it wasn't even important to someone else, let alone me!

My last serious relationship had ended more than two years ago, and even though I had made a real effort to move on, it still haunted me. We remained close friends with an oddly intimate connection to each other. That's probably why I felt a little sad every time we got together-it was a friendship built on the wreckage of love, and it subtly taunted me with how much could be right about something that still didn't work out. All my subsequent stabs at dating or relationships seemed, in retrospect, half-hearted. I didn't mind being alone-in fact, I liked it-but the lingering broken heart had the effect of making me feel lonely and I did not like that.

So there was no doubt that I was just one of those people who craved home, family, a place in the world whose vector is love. But for whatever reason-choices made too quickly, a naive belief that things can always be worked out, a tendency to lose myself a little in my desire to adore someone else-love continued to elude me. Sometimes I wondered if being gay made a difference. You do the math: if 10 percent of the population is gay, and let's generously say that means only 5 percent are lesbians, how many of those are beautiful, funny, smart and available? My results are not scientific, of course, but I'd guess somewhere around six-worldwide-and I had already dated four of them.

Perhaps it was natural for me to consider taking my solitude on the road, to hope that the sensation of movement would create an illusion of meaningful destination. It wasn't exactly running away because I knew all too well that wherever you go, there you are. But I thought an adventure might at least distract me from the tiny universe of two that had eluded me. Okay, I admit it. I was a little depressed. And much, much more than that, I was disappointed with myself.

At my friend Holley's apartment one night, I flipped through the alb.u.m of daguerreotype portraits from the late 1800s that she keeps on her coffee table-something I had often done absentmindedly while we talked and drank wine before her cozy fireplace. Buried between blue velvet covers were sixty or seventy people, mostly young at the time, immortalized in the dour expressions that must have been all the rage back then. To my lazy modern eyes, so caught up in the vividness of my own reality, I had always thought these people resembled each other in their creepiness. But on this night, for the first time, I saw that they didn't. Each one of these faces had been animated, had expressed the joy and grief, contentment and longing, peace and frustration of being alive. They had made their own families, had their own love affairs, heartaches, dreams, plans and disappointments-just minutes ago! It took my breath away.

From then on, the fleetingness of everything we are-blood, bones, brains, dreams, hopes, loves-would haunt me in little gusts-sometimes when I was laughing about a moment that seemed to have happened yesterday but was really twenty-five years ago. Once I recalled a cla.s.smate who died at 12-and then I counted the years I had lived beyond him. And I was completely slammed upside the head by it when my grandmother died and The Farm, the only fixed home I had known in my peripatetic childhood, was emptied and on the market within a week-its old farmhouse and weathered barns no doubt destined to be torn down and replaced with a development of vinyl-clad colonials; its beautiful, rolling acreage probably on the way to being subdivided into tiny, tacky parcels and renamed something unintentionally ironic like The Estates at Bear Trap Farm.

Was I having a midlife crisis? The timing was right. But to me, it seemed more like a reckoning-a complicated concoction of ennui and despair that was nothing more than appropriate. I think most people face this at some point. Some drag it around like an albatross for years. It can be disguised as depression. It can be subdued by drink. It can be pushed back into the corners of our minds by great vacations, by fantasies, by love affairs. But I was no longer able to fend it off.

I suppose I wanted to see if I could resolve my crisis of meaning by living out a wild dream, by casting off the harness that had held my nose to a perfectly pleasant grindstone keeping my mortgage and car payments current but demanding little from my heart or soul.

So many of us have a secret dream, something we set aside for another day-when the timing is better, when the kids are grown, when there's money in the bank. For me, there was an actual moment, a tipping point, when I stood at the edge of a chasm, just another daydreamer, like you-then threw caution into the teeth of a gale, closed my eyes and jumped. I was in a New York hotel conference room at a company "offsite" where the main topic of the meeting was the phenomenal success of a book I had slaved over. The heads of sales, publicity, marketing-everyone but the mailroom and food service departments-were all up on the dais, partic.i.p.ating in an orchestrated frenzy of congratulation and self- congratulation that was almost as comical as it was icky. It was a little like being forced to watch your colleagues in a very uns.e.xy orgy. Okay, you do me, then I'll do you and you do him, then he'll do her. As much as I wanted someone to acknowledge my many months of hard work, I felt even more keenly the need for a very hot shower, Silkwood-style. I was in a contamination zone and felt panicky about getting out.

During the next coffee break, I calmly pushed through the ballroom exit doors as though I was going to the restroom with everyone else, walked past the banquet tables piled with spring waters and caffeinated beverages, through the densely carpeted lobby with its obscenely expensive floral spray and softly piped music, and out onto the hard and dirty midtown sidewalk. I remember standing still, looking up at the blank gray sky and b.u.t.toning my jacket against the fall wind. My heart was racing and I felt a p.r.i.c.kly, intense flash of recognition. This was the same sensation I'd known in dreams, when I was being followed or chased. I wasn't just skipping a boring late-afternoon meeting. I was escaping. I stood on the sidewalk and felt my soul slipping into the crowd, walking fast, faster and finally sprinting away. And that's when I realized I had just quit, that I wasn't going back, I was done and utterly free.

This is the most honest explanation I can give for why I woke up one day, a 40-year-old book editor with virtually no nautical skills, and decided to throw away my old life, buy a boat and go to sea. Fortes fortuna adiuvat was our family motto. And Fortune does favor the brave but-let's face it-I also had nothing to lose.

CHAPTER TWO.

If wishes were fishes the ocean would be all of our desire.

-GERTRUDE STEIN.

So, I was going to follow my salty bliss.

Once I'd made up my mind, it all began falling into place. Actually, it was sort of like pushing a boulder off a cliff: after the first shove, everything else seemed inevitable.

The house went on the market and I quickly found a buyer. I started sorting through my belongings and paring things down for life aboard a boat. Oh, yeah: a boat, I still needed to find a boat.

My obsessive online wanderings, previously symptoms of a fantasy life gone awry, were about to pay off. Although I still had plenty to figure out, it was absolutely amazing how much I'd already absorbed. And if I knew only one thing (though some would call that an overestimate), it was that if I was going to sea, I was going in a trawler.

There has always been a great divide between those who motor and those who sail. I could try to delineate it for you, but it is probably best compared to the ancient schism between those who wear briefs and those who wear boxers, or those who cook and those who bake. It's personal, essential and somewhat mysterious. Aesthetically and spiritually, I had always been drawn to the romantic simplicity of sailboats. Yet I recognized that being a great sailor takes not just a thorough knowledge of basic seamanship but a whole new vocabulary and years of understanding the wind. Mystique aside, it's a much more complicated proposition than running a powerboat. My respect for the sea, as well as my innate laziness, left me with no doubt that a powerboat would be easier to master-or at least skipper with competence. And since I loved the lines of a salty-looking workboat nearly as much as a cla.s.sic wooden sailboat, a trawler it would be.

Trawlers, which were originally fishing vessels that trailed nets, come in many sizes and shapes-for instance, the rusty shrimp and scallop hunters off the U.S. coast; the large European, Scandinavian and Baltic boats that catch tuna, mackerel and anchovies, and even the ruggedly adorable crabbers off the British Isles. But you probably know them best as the gaily painted wooden souvenir miniatures, sold in every seaside town from Apalachicola to Wellfleet. Of course, these kitschy tributes to a town's fishing heritage, usually painted bright blue or red and adorned with minuscule lobster traps or nets, have as much in common with their real counterparts as George Clooney does with a real captain of a swordfish boat. They're mere Lilliputian replicas of the R-rated originals that go to sea and stay at sea until the holds are full of fresh catch, no matter how rough the weather.

Somewhere in between these two extremes, you will find modern trawler yachts. Made of fibergla.s.s, wood or steel, they may have a single engine or twins and their fuel capacities and ranges vary wildly. Their looks are deceiving, too: some of them are the spitting image of their blue-collar relatives, and some resemble the love child of a fling between a naughty tug and a slick cigarette boat.

True trawlers always have one thing in common: a full displacement hull shape. A displacement hull is just what it sounds like: the bow literally plows through the water, smoothly sweeping it aside as it makes way. This form of travel is slow but economical, and it's the most important reason (of several) that trawlers are often capable of ocean crossings. While their working-cla.s.s cousins toss relentlessly in 15-foot swells for weeks on end, slowly depleting their fuel tanks as the fish fill the hold, today's trawler yacht has adapted the same slow engine and fuel economy to the purpose of exploring the world in comfort and safety.

In the last few decades, recreational trawlers-once spurned by sailors as little more than houseboats because of their engines, amenities and limited coastal range - have undergone a kind of revolution. That's due in large part to the development of smaller trawlers with ranges of over 3,000 nautical miles, built to withstand any kind of sea conditions.

These vessels are as capable of circ.u.mnavigation as a sailboat yet far more comfortable and reliable-that is, dry and independent of the wind's whimsy. They are mini-ships with salty pedigrees that lure lifelong sailors into warm, comfortable pilothouses as a form of luxurious graduation rather than sissy shame.

My needs were basic: I wanted a boat that was handsome, fuel-efficient, and most of all, seaworthy. The catch was, I had to be able to afford it-and that very conveniently ruled out 99 percent of the trawlers on the market. In other words, I was not looking for a boat but for a miracle.

Every morning I logged on to www.yachtworld.com (and several other sites) and perused their thousands of listings like a woman possessed. The pickings were slim. If I could afford it, it was thirty years old and a call to the broker inevitably revealed expensive "issues" that needed to be addressed before the boat was fit to splash. If it was absolutely perfect, it was generally a half million dollars more than I could dream of spending. At points, I became so discouraged that I started considering bigger compromises. Maybe a motor sailer.

Maybe a cla.s.sic wooden sailboat. Or maybe just a very large inner tube.

One day when my efforts were starting to seem hopeless, I tried entering something different in Yachtworld's search engine fields. I had been looking at Nordhavns, Krogens, Fishers, Cherubinis; at steel, fibergla.s.s, wood; at sailboats, motor sailers, trawlers. But on this morning, I haphazardly tried out the word "custom," and a secret cyber-wall swung wide open, instantly revealing a dozen listings I hadn't seen before. One of them sent me into immediate orbit: a 40-foot custom steel trawler in Pahokee, Florida.

At first glance, the boat seemed way too good to be true. Shady Lady was only thirteen years old. Photos suggested that the interior was positively s.p.a.cious-and good-looking, in a utilitarian way. (Even a lot of the luxury trawlers have interiors that look like fancy RVs or tacky 1980s condos.) The listing details claimed two staterooms, two heads, a pilothouse, a big salon with a galley in the corner, a walk-around engine room with workbench (virtually unheard of on a 40-foot boat) and plenty of outdoor deck s.p.a.ce. Fuel capacity was 750 gallons, which gave this boat a cruising range of over 3,000 nautical miles. Its tanks held 400 gallons of water. And it was at the high end of what I had decided I could afford-roughly one-quarter of the price of a used 40-foot Nordhavn.

A call to the broker revealed that Shady Lady had been on the market for a few months and that the owner was also the builder. A master steelworker, Mel Traber had built the boat for his retirement, with the design a.s.sistance of the legendary Phil Bolger. Since I'd become a fanatic researcher, I already owned a copy of Bolger's book, Boats with an Open Mind. I rifled through the index and found Shady Lady on page 392. She was featured as an example of a rare trawler design by Bolger, whose cult following consisted mainly of sailors.

I saw only two immediate drawbacks to this boat. I had originally hoped to find a vessel capable of circ.u.mnavigation-not that I was deranged enough to attempt that, but I liked the possibility of it. Bolger's text revealed that Shady Lady was designed for going as far offsh.o.r.e as Bermuda, which is about 600 miles out. Unless I added paravane stabilizers (the large outriggers that you see on many fishing boats), she would roll a bit too much for the kind of continuous and serious swells an ocean crossing might entail. She also lacked other equipment that would make her ideally suited for a transatlantic crossing: a backup (or "wing") engine, a generator, a water maker. Most of this could be added if I had the money but for now, I would have to limit myself to coastal cruising if I bought this boat.

My other hesitation was that despite liking almost everything else about Shady Lady's lines, I had some aesthetic concerns about the stern. In the small online photo, which was difficult to see, its rear end looked big, high, square. Lots of junk in the trunk. Bootilicious. Packing much back.

I tried gently quizzing the broker about this but it was hard to be subtle.

"Ummmm. I really like the looks of this boat-it seems great-but the. . .ummm, stern. Is it kind of. . .ungainly? Boxy? Ummm, I guess what I mean is. . .b.u.t.t-ugly?" His stiff reply was, "I don't know. It looks fine to me," in a tone that implied I must have some kind of sick derriere fetish to even notice such a thing.

I knew I needed to get down to Florida right away and have a look but my house closing was just a few days away and I was only about halfway through my packing. Though I was a veteran itinerant, who had never lived anywhere for more than two years until I moved to New York City in my mid twenties, I loathed the process. Usually, I got away with just jamming everything into trash bags at the last minute. But since I was moving aboard a boat, I tried to embrace the minimalist fantasy wholeheartedly. I had visions of myself with nothing but a couple of pairs of khaki shorts, a closet full of crisp white b.u.t.ton-down shirts, no more than two pairs of worn TopSider sneakers and an array of baseball caps that would take my outfit from daytime casual to. . .well, nighttime casual.

But it was just a fantasy. When push came to shove, I found I was appallingly attached to nice things. I couldn't part with a couple of designer suits, even though I hoped I'd rarely have to wear them again. And though I'd already read my many hundreds of books, I couldn't discard them. (Me parting with my books was like a mechanic parting with his wrenches, a chef parting with his knives, a soccer player parting with his legs. As a seasoned editor, I also knew these awful a.n.a.logies were indicative of my desperation to justify keeping the books, and that seemed reason enough.) Rising above my fondness for the Hefty-bag method of packing, I carefully filled several plastic boxes with things to make my trawler feel more like home: all my nautical books, my favorite kitchen stuff, fancy gla.s.ses, an Hermes tray, a silver ice bucket, some framed family photos-all these were separated, wrapped and marked BOAT. I even packed a fancy electric espresso maker and a drip coffeemaker. (Shows how much I knew: unless you have a generator aboard, only 12-volt appliances work when you're away from the dock.) It was psychologically tougher to let these material things go than I had ever expected: they were the small rewards I'd provided myself as compensation for my wage slavery, and I clung to them like a life raft while I bobbed between the two sh.o.r.es of present and future, home and boat.

I had infrequent but intense moments of feeling I was in way over my head. Despite my nomadic childhood (or maybe because of it) I had always felt a deep attachment to at least a sense of home. I remember walking through my loft like living room with its high ceilings and exposed stone walls, looking at the stacks of books on the floor and my art leaning against the walls and feeling a sense of panic. Sure, I hadn't liked it here, but I had made it a lovely residence. All I knew about the next one was that it would float-and that wasn't much to go on. I had no job, I was about to have no house, I still hadn't found a boat. I had jumped into all of this without any kind of backup plan. Every other accomplishment in my life had been part of a sane, linear progression.

Now I faced a series of unknown what-ifs. What if my house deal fell through? What if I couldn't find a boat I could afford? What if I couldn't handle a boat? What if I got sick or ran out of money? All I could do, I realized, was surge ahead, clear one hurdle at a time, and keep on believing that I would be okay.

It wasn't much of a game plan, but it was what I had. And so, two days before my brother Tom was scheduled to help me with what was bound to be a nightmarish move, and three days before my closing, I got on a plane to see Shady Lady in Florida. It was clear that I would probably not get much sleep over the next four days if I planned to get everything done. But maybe, just maybe, this was my boat.

S K I P, T H E M AR I N E B R O K E R , picked me up at Palm Beach International Airport, and we headed out to Pahokee, which is on Lake Okeechobee, about 45 miles inland. As we headed west, the endless strip of hot, white, palm-fringed highway and fast-food joints gave way to orange groves and flat farmland that was virtually uninhabited.

Pahokee itself, or at least what I saw of it, was just the way I'd pictured central Florida. Lots of ranch houses with jalousie windows, trailer homes with hurricane shutters, and small cottages with front porches that had long since lost their paint. I had the distinct feeling that people ate black-eyed peas and played the banjo out here. Men in overalls sat on front porches in rocking chairs, waving away flies while hounds slept at their feet. Okay, maybe I made that last part up. But I was pretty sure a girl could buy moonshine in this part of the world. Looking around, there was no way to miss that this piece of Florida, away from the touristy coastlines, was still the deep South.

I caught a glimpse of Lake Okeechobee flashing like tinfoil beneath a bright sky. It was staggeringly big, hence its imaginative name, derived from the Seminole Indian words for "big" and "water." The second largest lake in the United States, right behind Lake Michigan (the other Great Lakes are shared with Canada), Lake Okeechobee is better known today as "The Ba.s.s Capital of the World."

Less than 15 feet deep, it has a circ.u.mference of 150 miles and covers an area of 730 miles, or almost half a million acres. On this hot, hazy day it was impossible to see a sh.o.r.eline, and its flat, naked expanse stretched out, shimmering, like a bright dead sea.

It was probably just as well that I didn't know anything about my family's connection to the area until days later, when I had returned to New York and was telling my brother Hamilton about the trip. "Oh, Lake Okeechobee. That's where Hamilton Disston did all that drainage." He was vague on other details, but a little research revealed that this part of the world had been well known to my ancestors-actually, more like owned by my ancestors. In the 1880s, Hamilton Disston (my great-great-grandfather's cousin and best friend and the man for whom my grandfather, father and brother are all named) became obsessed with the idea of draining the Everglades. A wealthy Philadelphia toolmaker, Disston bought 4 million acres from the state of Florida for 25 cents an acre, instantly becoming the largest landowner in the United States, with over 6,000 square miles of Florida to his name. Yet today, when I visit the Sunshine State, I am forced to stay at a Days Inn and eat at Denny's like everyone else. It seems so very, very wrong, doesn't it?

Disston, who became known far and wide as the Drainage King (eat your heart out, Michael Jackson!), dredged ca.n.a.ls connecting Lakes Kissimmee, Hatchineha, and Tohopekaliga. He also deepened and straightened other lakes that formed the headwaters for the Kissimmee River. He blasted out the waterfall of the Caloosahatchee River and connected Lakes Bonnet, Hicpochee, and Lettuce by ca.n.a.l systems. Disston's projects drained a total of 50,000 acres, increased agricultural lands and created a navigable route from the central Florida town of Kissimmee to the Gulf of Mexico. He also established a large sugarcane plantation in Osceola County and founded the resort town of Disston, which is now known as Gulfport.

Despite these successes, the panic of 1893, the repeal of Grover Cleveland's sugar-growing incentives and several freezes in a row brought Disston's development dreams to a crashing halt. Though he was officially reported to have died of heart failure, it was widely known that he shot himself in the bathtub of his Philadelphia mansion.

I was amazed that all of this had been completely unknown to me. Finding my boat here, in the unlikely place of Pahokee, now seemed like more than geographic coincidence. It seemed fateful. Rather than focus on the billions of dollars that 4 million acres of Florida would now be worth, or the lasting ecological damage my ancestors had ignorantly wrought, the eternal optimist in me decided to see this coincidence as a positive omen about the boat and a rare chance to feel like a relative financial success. After all, the $28,000 I had once drained from my own 401(k) now seemed like a small drop in Big Waters.

We reached the marina, and Skip pulled his new SUV into a parking lot beside a flotilla of other SUVs and American-made pickup trucks. When I opened the door the crisp chilliness of the cab instantly wilted in the midday heat. We walked down a short slope to the no-frills dock, locked behind a chain-link fence and gate.

And there was Shady Lady. She looked all wrong for that spot-too distinctive, too majestic, way too salty. I experienced an immediate joy that overpowered all common sense. I hadn't even been aboard yet-she might be a disaster. But something in me knew right away that this was my boat. The first thing I did was walk to a nearby finger pier and gaze across at her stern. It was all right. Not svelte but certainly not the clunky eyesore I had feared. While the broker unlocked the boat, I climbed aboard and checked out the decks. They were white and almost blinding in the harsh noon sunlight. There was plenty of s.p.a.ce at the bow, which was high and solid-looking. Side decks with hand railings stretched back to the stern, which was big and open, with room for a table and chairs. You could have a dinner party for six back there and still have room for a wandering mariachi band. There was even more deck s.p.a.ce above the salon, where a hard-bottomed dinghy lay, lashed to one side.

I couldn't believe my luck. I had all but given up on the idea of outdoor s.p.a.ce as I researched trawlers. Even the very expensive ones had tiny rear c.o.c.kpits-on smaller boats designers almost always preferred to utilize every square inch to maximize the accommodations.

Much as I might want to be sunbathing, the pilothouse would be where I'd spend most of my time underway and I loved Shady Lady's. It was shippy, with a forward rake to its big view. The instruments were all aligned overhead on a cleverly hinged shelf that folded down for access to the wires at the back. The electronics weren't new and they weren't fancy, but there seemed to be plenty of them. It was hard to say what was missing since I couldn't even identify most of the equipment. But I liked the white chart table that was topped by a cabinet with four mahogany-stained flat drawers for holding paper charts. There was an upholstered bench with a toggle switch on the armrest that Skip explained you could use like a joystick to maneuver the boat around crab pots and other obstacles without having to get up and adjust the autopilot.

The helm was a stainless steel wheel to starboard, just above the steps to the salon.

If the pilothouse had excited me, the salon left me speechless. There were seven 23-inch portholes with tempered gla.s.s and aluminum bolts and hardware. (Most boats I had seen had portholes of 9 inches or less, if they had any at all. The trend was toward larger, squarer, picture windows.) The interior felt bright and s.p.a.cious, with more than 6 feet between the cabin sole and the painted steel beams that ran overhead. Usually, interiors turned out to be smaller than they looked in website photos, but I was amazed by the size of the salon. In the forward port corner was a galley with a stainless steel sink, a small wood-topped cutting counter and a full-size gas stove. A big cabinet with reach-down refrigerator compartments bordered one side, and perpendicular to that was a long countertop, with storage underneath.

Behind the counter was the sitting area: nothing fancy-a varnished trestle table with a matching bench on one side and an upholstered settee on the other. The white surfaces with dark wood drawer fronts and trim (known as "Herreshoff style" in boating circles) continued throughout the boat and did a lot to keep things cheerful.

At the forward end of the salon, a short flight of stairs led down to the guestroom. It had a double berth and a small head on the port side and a single berth on the starboard side. Overhead was a big square hatch that propped wide open for sunlight and air. The portholes down here were somewhat smaller but still very big.

If you turned and faced the stern, you were in front of another doorway with metal steps that went down into the engine room. Because Shady Lady had a box keel, the engine sat down very low, providing extra s.p.a.ce and stability. You could walk all the way around the engine, which was a very basic Ford NorEast 135 horsepower diesel. Of course, I knew absolutely nothing about anything in this engine room at the time and planned to have an expert survey it for me. In the meantime, Skip showed me all of the well-thought-out details and explained that this was an excellent diesel to have because parts were readily available for it anywhere in the world. Everything on this boat seemed to be about simplicity and good design.

I had looked at enough boats to know that the average engine "room" was hidden under a hatch in the salon sole. Once you pulled up a bunch of heavy floor panels, you faced the unappetizing prospect of crawling down into a tiny dark hole with a big hot engine and no room for maneuvering. That was what an engine room looked like. This one was bigger and brighter (and probably cleaner) than my first apartment in New York City.

We pa.s.sed back through the salon and down the steps to the master stateroom in the stern. On the starboard wall was a white countertop above a series of built-in varnished drawers. There was a queen-size bed with room to walk around on either side. On the wall at the foot of the bed was more storage: two dark varnished cupboards on either side of a matching bookcase. A countertop and sink lined the port wall, with a toilet tucked away behind a small privacy wall. At the other end was a steel shower stall with a built-in bench. Big portholes everywhere.

I was beside myself. This boat appeared to have almost everything I wanted, even though I had long since concluded that it was going to be impossible to find at any price.

I shot a roll of photos and then Skip locked up. We sat down at the small lakeside concession stand, and I started filling out the necessary paperwork for making an offer. I didn't even need to think it over. What I knew about boats was very little, but I had fallen in love at first sight. This was my boat. I had to get it. There would be a survey before our deal closed, and that would give me an opportunity to back out if my beloved was revealed to be a crazy waste of money.

Skip had some fried conch and a Heineken as he walked me through the forms. I was too wound up to eat, but I was not about to stand by and witness the tragic spectacle of a man drinking alone. My beer was icy cold, the day was swelteringly hot and I was happy as a clam.

I flew home, and two days later, my belongings were gone, I was no longer a homeowner and I had made a deal on the boat of my dreams.

P EO P L E O F T E N A S K M E , why this adventure, why a boat and a life on the water? There's a popular belief that those who go down to the sea in ships must do so because they were born to it-or because they were exposed to it so young that they caught it, like some kind of virus.

In my case, I have no single, logical explanation, though I can offer up a host of coincidences. I have lived near the ocean, off and on, throughout my life. I crossed the Atlantic by ship several times in my youth. My first crush was on a Russian sailor and my second on an Irish fisherman. And then there's blood: my grandfather's brother was an admiral in the navy. And my grandfather, who retired as brigadier general in the Marine Corps, was the naval attache to Brazil for a time and, after his retirement, a public relations director for the famed Moore-McCormack ocean liners. Hard to say what's cause and what's effect. But I often find myself marveling at the intersection of (an often unknown) past and the present in my life. Finding my boat on Lake Okeechobee is an example. Some people call this coincidence, or synchronicity, or serendipity. Call it what you will, but the older I get, the harder I find it to believe that anything is entirely accidental.

And it was comforting to remind myself of this belief as I waded into the grueling process of making the Shady Lady mine. Though the owner and I came to an agreement on the price very quickly, I was unprepared for how difficult it would be to get financing. I had about 50 percent of the boat's purchase price to put down in cash, but I immediately ran into other obstacles that threatened my deal.

First, I went to a specialized marine broker, who shops for money for boat purchases much the way a mortgage broker does for home buyers. She was kind but very discouraging. The fact that the Shady Lady was not a production boat but a custom build was a big strike against her in a lender's book. Boat lenders, like banks, look for "comparables" when you're applying for a mortgage. Obviously, if you're not getting a brand-name boat that thousands of other people also own, the lender doesn't have any similar boats to evaluate it against.