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that my “sail” boat needed nearly a gale to get it moving. We drifted and I ate beans and thought of myself as pretty much the sailorman until we were about halfway down Baja, near a large island named Cedros.
    Then it all came at once, without warning.
    Squall upon squall, with fifty- and sixty-knot gusts of wind that knocked the boat down one way, then another, building large confused waves that would come over the stern, then sweep the boat from the side, then the bow, then the side, then the stern again—a roar of water and noise and cracks of thunder and bright light as lightning slashed the water all around the boat like incoming artillery. The bolts tore the water, exploded it into steam so that a geyser shot into the air higher than the mast.
    I tried to ignore the lightning but I could not forget the story I’d heard of the boat on the way from San Diego to Hawaii with four people aboard, the boat that got hit by lightning, which struck the aluminum mast and traveled down the stainless steel rigging to the inside of the boat, where it slashed back and forth, striking all four people with secondary bursts of energy. Three of them were killed outright and the fourth, injured, man had to sail the boat more than a thousand miles to Hawaii while dealing with three bodies that had once been his close friends and were now fast decomposing. The radio had been knocked out in the storm, but the story is that at last the man got the radio working and the Coast Guard came out with a helicopter to recover the bodies. The Coast Guard takes a dim view of dumping bodies because there have been several instances of men “losing” their wives off the stern in the night. One man “lost” three wives in this way before the authorities got wise and investigated him for murder.
    I could not stop thinking about the Hawaiian boat as the bolts struck the water around me, so close that I could smell the ozone. To this day, I can’t understand why the lightning did not hit the boat. I had absolutely no control of the situation and in the end all I could do was sit and let the boat be slammed around by the wind and waves and try not to touch anything metal—a completely passive approach to staying alive. The boat did fine. Because the wind was so around-the-clock, even though it came in mighty bursts the waves did not get big enough to endanger the boat.
    That would come a year later, when I was sailing from Mexico to California.
    I hit weather then that makes me shudder still. We look back on things and try to find sense in them by remembering exactly how they came about.
    One morning in March I headed north from San Diego on
Felicity,
singlehanded, off to a late start because I’d waited to buy some oil for my engine. There was almost no wind but the barometer was dropping.
    It was the first warning. The barometer almost never drops significantly in southern California. I ignored it, thinking it was a small front moving through.
    It was seventy-five miles up to Catalina and then another seventy-five to Ventura, where I was going to work on my boat, getting it ready for a passage to Hawaii. I was actually looking forward to the overnight run north.
    Usually on that particular run if you’re single-handing you stop in Catalina. But I had spent many nights alone running dogs and was used to not sleeping for a night or two. At night on the sea the sound of the waves comes alive and their whitecaps show in the dark. I enjoyed this kind of sailing. So I decided to keep going all night and get to Ventura just after dawn.
    Since I was a little late getting started it was evening when I got to the southeast end of Catalina and came upon the second and third warnings.
    For one thing, the sea was literally covered with birds. Gulls and others I didn’t recognize rafted up, great shoals of birds covering the water and moving away as I cut through them, heading north. I had never seen so many in one place and marveled at the sight, but I