Losing Sight of Shore
I arrived on the docks of Beaufort, North Carolina, in late April with two backpacks filled with new gear—everything I’d need for my first offshore passage. Though I’d been sailing for 16 years, graduating from dinghies to keelboats to a J/122, I’d spent my time racing and, in all those years, had never been out of sight of land. Fortunately for me, time-tested captain Andy Burton was headed home to Newport, Rhode Island, after a season in the Caribbean, and I was to join the delivery crew of his Baltic 47, Masquerade. Perhaps even more serendipitous was the fact Andy is just starting to take paying crew and teach them about passagemaking and seamanship, so I got to be a trial run for him while learning from an expert.
Knowing I would recognize neither boat nor the captain when I arrived, I asked the dockmaster where I could find Masquerade, and he pointed the impressive silhouette out to me. “The white one, she just got in,” he said. And, indeed, springlines were still being cleated off. Andy came up to greet me and soon was both showing me aboard and introducing me to my two fellow crewmembers, Jeff and Rory. We left the boat in search of dinner and as we walked toward shore, Andy paused to look back at Masquerade. “My dad used to say that if you don’t have to look back to admire your boat when you leave her, you have the wrong boat,” he said, the
