My first date with Wayne was an almost-2,000-mile passage from Fiji to Majuro in the Marshall Islands. I had met him virtually when he posted a question on my blog back in 2013. We were both single-handers and liveaboards, with me on my Caliber 33 Talespinner in Florida and Wayne on Learnativity, his 52-foot Kristen steel cutter, in Fiji. When I flew out to meet him after four weeks of emails and video chats, we figured that after the passage, we’d either never want to see each other again, or we’d sell one of the boats.
During that passage, the bolts holding the lower end of the rudder shaft sheared off, leaving us with no steering. Wayne had to dive down and lash the rudder amidships. We steered with the sails for the last 375 miles to Majuro, entering the atoll’s pass without assistance and sailing right up to the mooring ball.
Three months later, I sold and moved aboard . It was a little more than a year later, on the passage back south to Fiji, that Wayne handed me an e-reader and suggested that I might like the book . As a hardened sailor with some 40 years of experience, I started reading Robert
