Caught by the Sea by Gary Paulsen Page A

about self. And almost every boat I have had has taught me something.
    My second was an awful sailboat built by a power-boat company, the only vessel I could afford at the time. I tried to make it do until one day, sailing back from Santa Cruz, an island off the California coast, I hit two basking sharks, which tore the rudder off and left a large hole in the stern. This ultimately meant the end of the boat, which wasn’t worth fixing.
    And then I took about ten years off from sailing while I fell in love with sled dogs. All that time away from the sea it was always in the back of my mind. And one day my heart blew on me, and I couldn’t run dogs any longer.
    Then, finally, there was only the sea. I took on an old boat, a Hans Christian that needed lots of work but was a good sea boat. She was very, very slow but sure and steady in foul weather. I fixed her up and wanted to do a passage across to the South Pacific because it is there the sea calls to me most somehow.
    But I had books to write.
    Instead I took her down Baja and did southern Mexico for a year and a half, plodding at five knots, always five knots, five knots downwind, five knots upwind, five knots surfing down a wave, five knots even falling off a cliff—although I did not get her up into the Sea of Cortez and only saw the ocean from Puerto Vallarta south.
    Then the North called again and I took her up the West Coast, slamming into huge seas and some stout wind for days and then weeks until we pulled into the Strait of Juan de Fuca and over to the Inside Passage and worked our way north to Alaska, north to Juneau through beauty that literally cannot be imagined, has to be seen, has to be lived, or you will simply not be complete.
    We sat there anchored in the always-daylight while humpback whales fed around the boat, so close they could be touched, turning gently so that their flukes would not hit the boat, missing by inches, with killer whales mugging and fighting and playing around the boat in the clear, cold water, the humpbacks never . . . quite . . . hitting the boat but always coming close and closer.
    Then we sailed back down the West Coast. There we found that the sea gods, as always, are perverse. The wind and seas had reversed and we had to buck the huge waves now coming out of the south. As we sailed I always had the feeling that the sea is not right unless it is crossed; sailing is not enough without a passage.
    Then came the cat—the catamaran. She was for sale in Ventura, looking fast and wild even when she sat at the brokerage dock, looking as if she could do all the South Pacific in a week, like a cross between a rocket ship and a boat. I couldn’t afford her, and I knew all the stories about catamarans: “They flip, you know,” all the wannabe dock sailors told me. “They’re not safe, you know, they flip. . . .”
    As if my whole life up to that time had somehow been safe and now I would ruin all that because, you know, catamarans flip over.
    Well, that’s true. If you do things wrong they flip over and there you are. But on the upside, they don’t sink, as do keeled boats, because they do not have ballast and the hulls are made of foam that floats. If they flip you wind up with an enormous, really stable life raft, so in the end it’s still all a compromise and you give on one side to gain on the other.
    But the truth was, the arguments didn’t matter. You would have had to shoot me in the head to keep me from the cat. The boat called to me; sitting there, it screamed to me, as a boat must or you will never buy it and never know the sea. I sold the boat I had and I bought the cat. I pulled the mainsail up and unrolled the furled jib and felt the boat surge just as I’d once felt the wind take the first boat I ever sailed on the sea.
    Lord, she jumped out, seemed to leap forward with me. The boat I’d just sold made five knots; the cat started there and soon was at ten, then twelve and finally fourteen screaming knots, jumping