tide, nearly turned a side somersault down the bank. In a stark calm and
heavy tide in the Carquinez Straits, where anchors skate on the channel-
scoured bottom, we were sucked against a big dock and smashed and bumped
down a quarter of a mile of its length before we could get clear. Two
hours afterward, on San Pablo Bay, the wind was piping up and we were
reefing down. It is no fun to pick up a skiff adrift in a heavy sea and
gale. That was our next task, for our skiff, swamping, parted both
towing painters we had bent on. Before we recovered it we had nearly
killed ourselves with exhaustion, and we certainly had strained the sloop
in every part from keelson to truck. And to cap it all, coming into our
home port, beating up the narrowest part of the San Antonio Estuary, we
had a shave of inches from collision with a big ship in tow of a tug. I
have sailed the ocean in far larger craft a year at a time, in which
period occurred no such chapter of moving incident.

After all, the mishaps are almost the best part of small-boat sailing.
Looking back, they prove to be punctuations of joy. At the time they try
your mettle and your vocabulary, and may make you so pessimistic as to
believe that God has a grudge against you--but afterward, ah, afterward,
with what pleasure you remember them and with what gusto do you relate
them to your brother skippers in the fellowhood of small-boat sailing!

A narrow, winding slough; a half tide, exposing mud surfaced with
gangrenous slime; the water itself filthy and discoloured by the waste
from the vats of a near-by tannery; the marsh grass on either side
mottled with all the shades of a decaying orchid; a crazy, ramshackled,
ancient wharf; and at the end of the wharf a small, white-painted sloop.
Nothing romantic about it. No hint of adventure. A splendid pictorial
argument against the alleged joys of small-boat sailing. Possibly that
is what Cloudesley and I thought, that sombre, leaden morning as we