Thirty-six hours on the helm to Isla Cedros. After three days at anchor in a sheltered cove on the mainland I ventured across: the trip took two full days on either side of a long night of stars and clouds and a quarter-moon that came up very late after bright Venus had fallen below the horizon, and then a blue dawn that infused everything—the rocks of the island, Cormorant’s sails and equipment—with an azure haze. My watercolor was a tribute to solidity, to life in community, and to the fact that although the sea calls to us, we are yet terrestrial creatures.

And so with fixed gaze, the island a distant silhouette, I sailed hour after hour in prayerful meditation, calling upon Saint Brendan, who’d done far greater than I, sailing the Atlantic in his first-millennium curragh of wood frame and hides, and on Saint Francis too, because his love of animals and of Creation resonates with me, and puts me in mind of simply being a part of everything and therefore less likely somehow to be driven under, or swept away.

Reefing the main, 35-miles into the 55-mile crossing. The sheer insignificance of an 18-foot boat on the open sea—three-eighths of an inch of marine ply separating the pilot from the vastness—brings the recognition that moving through the world can be a tenuous proposition.