I've always loved water - to swim in, to sail on, to paddle on, to look at, even to drink decades before it became fashionable to spend more for a gallon of water than for a gallon of gasoline for the car.

When the family moved back to Mountain Lakes NJ, the town my parents grew up in, we lived only half a block from the boat lot on Mountain Lake. People who didn't have boathouses on their own property kept their boats at the boat lot. People like us who had neither boathouse nor boat used the boat lot as an informal beach despite the mucky bottom of leaves, and that's where my grandfather taught me to swim - the backstroke and the sidestroke; they were the only strokes he knew. It wasn't until I took Advanced Swimming in college that I learned the rest of the strokes.

The public beach was about a mile around the end of the lake; it was a quarter of that across the lake from the boat lot. It wasn't until I became a lifeguard myself years later that I appreciated the anguish behind the frantic whistle-blowing every time I swam home from the beach across the lake instead of making the long hike around.

I was in second grade by then and under strict orders to go along with my little brother on his evening boat-borrowing expeditions. We made a good team. We both loved everything to do with the water but he didn't know how to swim, and I didn't know how to "free" a boat from its abode. (We always put the boats back.) My brother retired from the Air Force and lives in Nebraska where he can canoe on the Missouri River. I ended up in Fells Point, the original port of Baltimore on the Patapsco River of the Chesapeake Bay. Now that I've finally acquiesced to age and arthritis after twenty-some years of sailing and sold the sloop Second Wind, I keep in touch with the water (sometimes literally) with a bright yellow Cobra sit-on-top kayak.

My brother and I "borrowed" a kayak from the boat lot only once. It took him a long time to figure out how to liberate it from its chains on the canoe rack (and almost as long to put it back), and then to "find" a kayak paddle. It didn't take us long at all to learn great respect for the vessel. That lesson has served me well. Paddling a canoe requires finesse but you can learn on the job. Sailing requires patience and alert perseverance; you can learn to sail in a few days and spend the rest of your life getting good at it. Keeping a traditional kayak upright is a state of mind; one moment of doubt and you're in the water. I've done a lot of kayaking in one form or another.