Lying comfortably in my bunk in the Nav Station one morning, I was awakened to the sound of a fishing reel, lots of shouting, and, a few minutes later, a very loud gunshot.

Some combination of Frank, Charlie and I stood in the cockpit singing: (to the tune of Maria, from West Side Story)

Charlie got off the ham radio one night and, after telling us the rest of the news from our families, mentioned that “Somebody from the Yankees threw a no-hitter, but I don’t remember who”, leaving both the Mets and Yankees camps on board guessing for the next 3-5 days.

We learned that the number of stars visible from the middle of the ocean is exponentially greater than anything we’d seen before.

Captain Cutmore, while heading up to the cockpit one morning, stopped at the Nav Station to look at charts, across from where I was semi-asleep.  Next thing I knew, the boat rocked a bit, he came barreling back towards my bunk, grumbling "$%^&@# Sailboat" and tried again.  After about three such attempts, he continued to the cockpit and I eventually drifted off to sleep.

We got to tie ourselves to the boat and crawl to the foredeck in high seas to switch the good old-fashioned kind of jib that actually required using the halyard on a regular basis, rather than as an annual commissioning-the-boat event.

Frank came out of his semi-comatose state one day in the cockpit, saying simply "Whale" and pointing.

Charlie and I decided that for the trip back, we would abandon the Loran in favor of a purely celestial trip, figuring that the mainland would be pretty hard to miss, only to be greeted by a solid week of cloudy skies.

Preparing to anchor off of the Statue of Liberty (as we were lacking a functioning engine) when the current and wind both turned in our favor, allowing us to wing-and-wing it up the East River and then under the Whitestone Bridge at dawn.