I am not a water lover, but my cousin Michael, who lives in Phoenix, is. He retired from aviation after 40+ years with one goal: to have a boat on the Adriatic and spend his summers boating here. Last year he bought an Angel Marine 45, and I just returned from five days of living on it. Considering how much time I spent on a 45’ boat, there’s quite a bit of room, but every step must be calculated, and his advice was “three points of contact” at all times.

Good advice!

His boat, “Cactus,” is at the Bibione Marina, about an hour south of Trieste, and 90 minutes north of Venice, in Italy, and this town is bursting at the seams in summer, but within a few weeks, it will be a ghost town. Just like so many other resort towns. One top of that, last week, the day after I got there, was the Assumption Day holiday, one of the biggest Italian (and Greek) holidays of the year, and it was like the 4th of July in the US—complete with fireworks.

His wife, Cheryl, is a master of creating great meals from a gally the size of our bathroom, and how she did it is STILL a mystery! A place for everything and everything in its place, I guess. Unfortunately, we didn’t take the boat out to the open sea, so I STILL didn’t get a feel of what THAT was like. Even so, the gentle, constant roll of the waves is something that takes getting used to. I was also curious about what people DO all day, but just sitting in the open air and having a meal, is a joy. “Beautifully detached,” is how she described it, which meant, just relaxing and enjoy the joy of doing nothing.

As a “non-sailor,” I have a lot of respect for those of you who ARE, and I’ve seen the movies about people who solo across thousands of miles of open water, and again, I cannot even imagine how they do that. But maybe some of you have. Please share your boating experience, because at some point I DO plan to stay out for a week or more.