In the spring of 1981 I decided I had to have a piano of my own. I hied myself off to a local piano warehouse, spent hours noodling, and finally selected the piano I had to have. On my way to the Credit Union, it occurred to me that for what I was about to pay for a piano I could buy a sailboat. So I went to a marina instead.

Months earlier I had remarked to my mother that I was thinking of buying a sailboat, and her properly motherly response was "Don't you think you should try sailing first?" The next thing I knew, she had enrolled both of us in a three-day basic course at The Annapolis Sailing School. On the way back to Baltimore, we stopped in a Montgomery Ward's and bought The Snark - on sale for $299. The Snark was eleven feet of Styrofoam with a single sail and a centerboard. In toto, it weighed just forty pounds. I slung it on top of my VW Rabbit and sailed every piece of water I could find, from Pennsylvania reservoirs to the Chesapeake Bay to Delaware Bay to the Atlantic Ocean off Ocean City, Maryland. It was a great little boat; but it was definitely a little boat.