Hello Sailor

I love to sail, but when my reckless, trust-fund-baby boyfriend suggested a 12-day sailing trip in August from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to Penobscot Bay, Maine, aboard his 40-foot wooden yacht, I was understandably skittish. August is high fog season, and he had recently been kicked out of the sailboat racing league for cutting in front of a tanker during a race. Against my better judgment, I went anyway.

We left the mouth of the Piscataqua and ran smack into a wall of fog so thick we couldn't see the dinghy. He immediately got seasick. Since wooden boats don't show up well on radar, no ships could see us, and I spent the first five days on the bow of the boat, honking an air horn, then banging a metal pot and spoon when the air horn ran out, scanning the milky fog for oncoming prows. Twice, we came within feet of being rammed.

I was also in charge of navigation, which was fine until the third day, when some angry fishermen blew up the loran station in Nova Scotia and made our navigational system useless. That was the day I learned to navigate from one buoy to another using a compass and chart -- a technique known, ominously, as dead reckoning. We reached our destination, finally, where we hosted one annoying group of his friends after another for a week. On the return trip, right in front of me he blatantly hit on one of the nubile young female guests. I left him shortly thereafter.

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