My last day of the sailing trip was like a scene from the movie “Trains, Planes & Automobiles.”

It’s been a while since I’ve written, and Bryan is now safely back home after he dropped me off in Portland Maine and continued on solo to Long Island.  My two-month sailing trip was cut some days shorter by a memorial service for a longtime friend in Downers Grove, Illinois, and I arranged to stay there an extra week and a half to help out my parents while my sister and brother-in-law were away. Onboard Avocet, I played my last notes on the fiddle that Cathy Chiavola loaned me, which Bryan so lovingly let me try to learn onboard… although he did often put tissue paper in his ears.

I packed up two small suitcases, my harp guitar and rolling backpack and left the good ship Avocet in our little dinghy. Bryan rowed me to the closest beach where we planned to meet a friend to drive me to the Portland airport. It was high tide and the angle of the beach was rather steep. As we approached the beach a large wave from the wake of a motorboat swamped the dinghy. I leaned way over to keep the boat from capsizing, but another wave came behind the first. Bryan said “get out of the boat!” With waves hitting nearly waist high, holding my backpack with computer over my head and got it to shore. However, my theory that the carbon fiber harp guitar doubles as a flotation device turned out not to be true, since it was only in a cloth gig bag, it was up to its sound hole in water. Both suitcases were also soaked, and all of the clothes I packed were quite wet. I laid everything out on a picknick table, poured the water out of the harp guitar and removed the seaweed from the strings. Fortunately, I had left one pair of dress jeans on the sailboat, and found one pair of underwear and one t shirt that was dry. I sent Bryan back to retrieve the dry clothes, while I found a nearby college cafeteria who supplied us with large trash bags to put my wet clothes in, and repacked the bags to go on the airplane. We had gotten a call from our friend who was going to give me a lift that his car engine was up in smoke, so I called an Uber and got to the airport just in time. Fortunately my phone lasted long enough for me to do that, but soon stopped working altogether. Of course the two-year warrantee had just expired. Between flights a very nice man allowed me to use his phone in Baltimore to call Verizon and try to arrange to get it fixed although to no avail. When I arrived at the airport in Chicago, my ride forgot to pick me up, as he was watching the game, and I didn’t have a phone to call him. Finally, we hooked up and I arrived safely although somewhat late at my parents’ house. My carbon fiber guitar itself was fine, but the electronics suffered some. When I plug it in it sizzles a bit and sounds like it’s under water.