Bloopers:

 We read and re-read the manuscript until we were cross-eyed. All of us. There are still 22 errors that slipped through the cracks- especially since it took Amy a long time to finally get some good reading glasses. Here are a few errors we (luckily!) caught before the book was printed.

 Mealtime on Iwalani isn't a pretty site.     Not many sights were pretty- either.

 Not a sole, nor a croc, could be found   No, I wasn't talking about shoes.

 "Where to?" Phil hollers to me as I cling to his waste. (Editor's comment in the corner of the manuscript was "Yuck!")

 A loan rooster continues to crow far up in the hills while the rhythmic squeak of our oarlocks provides the only response.                        Gotta watch out for loan roosters they are almost as bad as loan sharks.

 He raises his flipper up to reach mine.       Funny, I didn't realize I had flippers too!

 The lock line handler walks to the end of the canal holding the end of the messenger line  what?

 Even talking words are shortened.           Damn those  talking words

 Deleted scenes:

Following is a chapter that told of the beauty of the French and introduced the concept of infidelity. This was brought into play with a whole section on Amy's parent's divorce- that section ended upon the editing room floor and will not be included here…This section was deleted back when the whole book was still in past tense.

 The following day I began the long process of trying to answer e-mails to world voyagers.com. Maybe it was the books on the holocaust from Farmer Bob, the loss of Isi, the fact that our trip was coming to an end, the war in Iraq, or hate mail from Phil's ex-wife, but I reached a hormonal nadir. Even the pain au chocolat did little to lift my spirits.

                A French man named Marc, came to our boat. Iwalani attracted all sorts of visitors, while we were in Martinique, as she stood out form the crowd of white sloops with blue sail covers. We ended up talking long into the night, eating, drinking and telling him about our trip. He invited us to his boat for dinner over the weekend. He was a physical therapist and was living on board, with a dog and cat, while his wife—a physician was back in France. 

                We went down below while he poured us some wine. He had a large plate of olives and pickled beans laid out which we daintily picked from.

                "You know," Marc said while sipping his wine, "Not too many Americans are coming to the French territories, because of our differences over the war."

                "I know we are vaguely aware of the anti-French sentiment. We heard about the "freedom fry" thing. I am sure it all just a joke. I don't blame your president at all, for not wanting to blow Sadam out of the sand. Iraq owes you and the Russian government a lot of money. The French will never get repaid now," I said.

                "But the French territories are still the best," Phil said.

                "Why is that?"

                "For many reasons, but mostly because there isn't a big discrepancy between the haves and have-nots. People are happier, there is a more homogeneous population, more of a middle class."

                "That is because we fooked them."

                "You what? What is fook?"

                "F-U-C-K."

                "Oh I see. I get it." I said.

                "No, the British they fooked people too, but not the same way. We French, we loved people, saw them as people, not as pawns to win a battle."

                "That's it! I love the Brits for their tea rituals and composure. I used to be more of an anglophile, but I have joined the ranks of Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson- and have become more of a Francophile. Where the Brits have been, they have left a lot of strife."

                "I don't think my people are without fault."

                "No especially with nuclear testing in the Tuomotos. No country is perfect. Some are just less imperfect than others," Phil said.

"Vive la France," I said raising my glass into the air. "Thank you for helping us kick out the British, thanks for the Statue of Liberty too. We should also toast Paul Revere."

"Paul Revere? Who was he?"

"He was the unsung hero of our start for independence from Britain. He was responsible for warning the colonists that the British soldiers were on their way to destroy the supplies of gun powder and weapons stored in the towns around Boston. Today he would probably be considered a terrorist."

"To Paul Revere!"

Marc got another bottle of wine from the bilge.

"Do you know much about French wine?"

"Not really."

"This is another from the Bordeaux part of France. Wine is like women, each one very different, even if they grow on the same soil, not far from one another."

                "I have to tell you honestly, I have taste buds like cement blocks, I can't tell the difference between any make of beer or wine. Maybe for the first millisecond and then nothing," I said.

                "Like anything else, it requires training. You must nurture the flavor on your tongue, like you nurture a relationship with a woman."

                "Oh brother, Marc, you sound like the typical Frenchman. But I can see where you are coming from. Some wines do not like me and hit me hard on the head, even if I only drink one sip. I can not drink any wine from California- they all hit me hard. Just like Phil's ex-wife. She can knock me down, even from the other side of the planet."

                "Ah yes. I was married once before too. We all make mistakes when we are young. What was the downfall of your marriage?" he leaned back against the settee and looked at Phil.

                "We started out ok." Phil said while eating a piece of blue cheese. "In fact I could not have found another woman who would have moved to the middle of the blueberry barrens in Maine, where there were no roads, and helped build a log cabin, with no electricity, no running water; living off the land for as long as we did."

                "Then what happened?"

                "I was not making her happy. She started by having affairs with other men, one of whom was a student of mine. Then it was others, while she was going to school to get her doctorate. I forgave her for the first two, but not the third."

                "See you Americans make too much a big deal about loving one person only. You are forsaking god, by not acting on desire."

                "Whoa, wait a minute. Don't you think somehow you get elevated to a higher level by curbing a desire?"

                "Non! It is all the same-god, sex, love. You are forsaking god not to act upon a desire if it is given to you. Why else would there be desire? You Americans are a funny bunch, you think you are better because you don't act upon a gift that is given to you by god."

                "A surge in hormones is a gift from god?"

                "Yes, it was made by god, no one else."

                "Well would you lie about it?"

                "I would, if I thought it was going to cause a person pain. Being able to lie is also a gift from god. Look at all the species that survive on deceit- the killdeer faking the broken wing and luring predators away from the nest, the butterflies that mimic poisonous butterflies, a puffer fish blowing itself up into something it is not. These are all lies, and god does not punish."

                "Well you may be right. My ex-wife certainly wasn't punished. She was rewarded by getting custody of my sons."

                "I don't know Marc. Don't get us wrong, we can see where you are coming from, but if everyone acted on their desires America would be one huge mess-"

                "Certainly not- it would be more like France!"

 I deleted a whole chapter from the "World Voyagers" book. It was about my parents-mostly my father's infidelity and the ruination of my grandfather Paul Cabot's good name and the charitable fund he started, which was ravaged by his son, (my uncle), Paul C. Cabot Jr. This was going to tie in to the above Francophilic section with Marc. While this was a voyage into a different world, I deleted it from the book. I am not even including it here because it is still too combustible. The New Yorker magazine was interested in this piece, if I added more dirt.  I reluctantly chose not to have them print it either.

*****

But the worst smell at sea is the smell of diesel exhaust. Often we smelled ships before they appeared on radar. Sometimes we smelled men's cologne. A half hour later a ship will appear with the freshly shaved crew hanging off the leeward side of the ship hoping for a glimpse of the nonexistent bikini clad babe on our boat.

*****

 In college I was accused of being "grossly anthropomorphic". In fact, I won an award for it. My argument in college, for which I paid dearly, is that the very word anthropomorphic is anthropomorphic. For humans to think that our feelings and traits are ours alone is absurd. The emotions and fears we have were not handed out to just humans on a silver platter. God didn't just say, "Ok people, I am giving you love, hatred, pain, jealousy, greed and compassion. You alone will have these traits". Spending time in the very spot the "Beagle" sailed, seeing and hearing all that Darwin observed, has made me realize there are no "human" traits I can think of that aren't shared by some member of the animal or plant community.

Evolution and natural selection. We all evolved. Darwin wasn't just talking about phenotypic characteristics- beaks, wings and fingers. Social structure, how we think, our actions- are all passed on to future generations either through learning or genes.

 The other night we heard a sea lion swimming around the boats in the anchorage, calling for someone called "Baaauh". To hear the fear and panic in the sealion's voice as he tried to find this "Baaauh' was chilling. It stirred all the maternal instincts I have long suppressed as I realized this was a mother desperately searching for her offspring.

*****

I have also been keeping a record of the sea birds we encountered on the passage from Cape Town, a request made over the radio nets for a researcher who is studying pelagic birds on St Helena. The officials take our data and promise to give it to the researcher. The South Atlantic did seem to have more bird life than areas far out at sea in the Indian and Pacific Ocean. In the Pacific, especially, we would go many days without seeing anything, be it jellyfish, flying fish, bird or man. Phil and I had been diligently recorded the date, time, species and sea conditions of each bird we encountered, but I question the validity of our data. For example, shearwater, especially, tended to fly alongside the boat for a while, then would land in the water to rest while we sailed on ahead. When they became just a small speck far astern, they would fly to catch up to us and go through the whole process again. I am sure we were counting the same bird many times over. Sometimes we would come to an area where another shearwater took over, and the first shearwater would not pursue us, while the second one did. It was almost as if each bird had a predefined, invisible territory staked out, or was part of a mysterious relay team.

*****

Phil fires up his computer. It doesn't work. I had just used it a half-hour before to download EGC's from the Inmarsat and get our position, which I wrote in the logbook. I haven't yet plotted our position on the chart.

"What did you do to it?" Phil asks.

"Honest, I didn't do anything. It wouldn't shut down properly the first night out, but I haven't gotten any error messages since then."

Phil jiggles the cables and finally gets it to work. "We've had relative humidity of 90% for the last two days. We haven't seen humidity that high in a long time. I think we should keep it on all the time now. It's probably the dampness affecting it. Either that, or the hinge cables to the screen are going."

"The patch on the flexible water tank is holding, speaking of dampness."

"Good. No time like the present to make water," Phil says getting up from the nav station and heading into the engine room to turn on the watermaker.

I can hear a lot of swearing. "Problems?" I yell into him.

"Water rationing from here on," he says. "The spool drive assembly is leaking again."

*****

"How far away?" Phil asks.

"One quarter mile."

"I see it. It's a fishing boat."

"If he is trying to head for the inbound lane, he's going to hit us."

"It actually looks like he is fishing," Phil responds.

"In the New York shipping lanes?"

" ‘Fraid so," Phil says.

"Does he have the right of way because he's fishing?" I ask.

" ‘Fraid so."