I remember one morning, a few years ago, when I felt as happy and free as I ever have. It was early May, I was alone in the Hebrides, and had launched my small wooden boat into the quiet waters of a loch on the east coast of Harris. The boat itself was a perfect thing, sixteen feet long, wide in the beam, with a hull made of larch boards on an oak frame. It had a single dipping lugsail whose ocher fabric, when the wind filled it, stretched from the bow almost to the stern in one long sickle-curve above me. I could sit there, one hand on the tiller, the other on the mainsheet, and watch this beautiful form driving the boat onward as if by hidden magic.

Setting out to sea in a small sailboat, I taste the liquid freedom that Homer extolled.