Forty hours out of Sant Carles Marina and already a thunderstorm, a building sea, and two thirds of the crew hanging over the leeward rail. Nobody asked my opinion on the forecast, which is typical, and nobody has thanked me for it since, which is not.

Wind and weather used to be mine to argue with. A Klabautermann who knew his trade could read a sky the way you lot read that glowing oracle box bolted at the chart table, and more than one ship in my long acquaintance owed her safe arrival to a knock on the hull an hour before the squall hit. Nobody knocked on anything this time. The forecast said ten knots and a meter of chop. What arrived was twenty, gusting worse, with St. Elmo’s fire crawling up the backstay like it owned the place. I take a certain professional satisfaction in that, if I’m honest. The sea does not read forecasts either.

Two of the three aboard learned some humility about it. The boat, to her credit, did not. She took the rough weather the way she takes everything these days: without complaint, without me, and without so much as a creak to let anyone know she’d noticed. An aluminum hull does not groan. I miss the groaning.

We are anchored off Andratx now, and there was a very large lunch, and I could have eaten my full share of it too, being quite capable of eating, drinking, and smoking my pipe same as any of you. Nobody sets a place for someone they cannot see, though, invisible being my usual state of affairs and not, whatever the crew seems to believe, a euphemism for absent. Fine. I’ll write about it instead.