It was a beautiful Saturday night in early spring, perfect for a late dinner in Sausalito by the dock of the bay. The last ferry had sailed, and the moon had come up. San Francisco glittered across the bay. So, I thought to myself, why not make the evening last? Maybe I’ll spend the night on the boat.
There’s something about staying aboard a boat all night even if it is tied to the dock. It was as if the boat were expecting you. Jack London and his wife, Charmian, kept a 30-foot sailboat named Roamer on the Napa River, and toward the end of Jack’s life it was a refuge.
By then he was rich and famous and lived and wrote on a fabulous ranch in the Valley of the Moon. But sometimes life ashore was too much. He thought of himself as a sailor on horseback, and he missed the sea. “I began to grow restless,” he wrote in a short essay on small boat sailing…