FLYING BLIND

It was a dark night, utterly black. Any light was blanketed by the fog. My chartplotter was night-blinding me. I looked at the Navionics map on my phone, waited half a second for my eyes to adjust and then looked at the depthsounder. After that I looked ahead to where Laura was on the bow of Starboard Tack, my Pearson 385, searching for the next day mark with her flashlight, then down at my compass. Again and again, I found myself searching this way every five seconds, inevitably steering off course in the process. of local knowledge. That, in addition to the fact we

It was a trip that had begun easily enough, but didn’t stay that way for long. Hours earlier, we’d had a nice, light breeze out of the south as we made our way down Florida’s Gulf Coast from Boca Ceiga Bay toward Venice Beach. It was going to be a long trip, about