And though I have sailed my boat hard aground,
O, it was so grand to be sailing!

An alternative — and better — definition of reality can be found by naming some of its components: air, sunlight, wind, water, the motion of waves, the patterns of clouds before a coming storm. These elements, unlike 20th-century office routines, have been here since before life appeared on this planet, and they will continue long after office routines are gone. They are understood by everyone, not just a small segment of a highly advanced society. When considered on purely logical grounds, they are more real than the extremely transitory lifestyles of the modern civilization the depressed ones want to return to.If this is so, then it follows that those who see sailing as an escape from reality have their understanding of sailing and reality backward. Sailing is not an escape, but a return to and a confrontation of a reality from which modern civilization is itself an escape. For centuries, man suffered from the reality of an Earth that was too dark or too hot or too cold for his comfort, and to escape this he invented complex systems of lighting, heating and air conditioning.Sailing rejects these and returns to the old realities of dark and heat and cold. Modern civilization has found radio, television, movies, nightclubs and a huge variety of mechanized entertainment to titillate our senses and help us escape from the apparent boredom of the Earth and the Sun, the wind and the stars. Sailing returns to these ancient realities.

What is more exhilarating than to make your staunch little boat, obedient to your will and muscle, go skimming lightly over glistening, tilting waves, and to feel the steady, imperious surge of the water!

More than anything else, the sensation [of flying] is one of perfect peace mingled with an excitement that strains every nerve to the utmost - if you can conceive of such a combination.

You haven't lived until you've sailed

When the sea is calm, the landscape (seascape) seems simple and even monotonous, sometimes with a distant, sometimes with a close coastline, but usually with no land in sight at all. You feel 'free', not only free of care, but also free of the solidity of the earth's crust. It is a wonderful sensation, feeling the liquidity of the water under the ship. This salutary freedom is constantly present, on deck by day, in bed at nights. The movements of the ship vary from a gentle rocking to swinging and hurtling; you are never motionless while at sea. Then you start to observe and assimilate all these natural phenomena surrounding you: the infinite variety of the waves and the swell of the sea, and for the first time in ages you look again at the heavenly bodies, the sun, the moon and the stars, and you see the living creatures in and over the sea, the fish and the birds.

Which of your experiences best epitomizes the essence of traveling?' To be in a small boat at four in the morning in an ocean, any ocean, but particularly in the South Pacific, and to know that you are on a proper heading for a tropical island, and to watch as light from the still-hidden sun begins to filter into the eastern sky. And then, because you are in the part of the earth where, because of the bulge near the equator, the sun rises and sets with a tremendous crash, to see it suddenly explode into red brilliance, big enough to devour the world. And then to see ahead, its crest inflamed by the sun, the dim outline of the island you have been seeking, and to watch it slowly, magically rise from the sea until it becomes whole, a home for people, a resting place for birds. p136.

I love moving water, I love ships, I love the sharp definition, the concentrated humanity, the sublime solitude of life at sea. The dangers of it only make present to us the peril inherent in all existence, which the stupid, ignorant, untravelled land-worm never discovers; and the art of it, so mathematical, so exact, so rewarding to intelligence, appeals to courage and clears the mind of superstition, while filling it with humility and true religion.

Greatness is not in where we stand but in what direction we are moving. We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it — but sail we must and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense the stirring of a breeze.

Exultation is the going
Of an inland soul to sea
Past the houses, past the headlands
Into deep eternity!
Bred as we, among the mountains
Can the sailor understand
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from land?

The ship is always off course. Anybody who sails knows that. Sailing is being off course and correcting. That gives a sense of what life is about.

To reach a port we must set sail –
Sail, not tie at anchor
Sail, not drift.

Sail far. Sail fast.