a storm can drive anyone mad. The wind screams through the rigging; the flapping edges of the sails boom like thunderclaps; the fiberglass hulls twist under stress, creaking and popping like joints in old age. A boat is as serene as a sleeping duck when she’s in port, but in a maelstrom, she groans and growls as if every seam were coming undone. When I turned 40, I took a yea-rlong break from writing novels and built a catamaran on the southern tip of Africa, a boat that I would then take across the Atlantic and the Pacific to Fiji and beyond. It’d been my dream to sail around the world since I was young. Growing up in North Carolina, I learned to sail soon after I learned to walk, then lived on a boat while I was in college in Charleston. After
