Actually, I'd Rather Be On A Ship

Well, anything that floats would be fine, but since I've become accustomed to cruise ships, they're now my favorite way of traversing the seas.

When you grow up on the water --literally, on the water-- it stays a part of you. I've used old wooden ironing boards as makeshift surfboards (although I never trusted them enough to actually stand; they were just for paddling on). I've been in flat-bottomed row boats, our sea skiff which took us everywhere in all kinds of weather, larger cabin cruisers, and out on the Atlantic in the fishing boat my father worked on.

Never been in anything better than 25' swells, but I'm hoping for something tasty this fall when I'll be passing Cape Hatteras. I really don't care to be on the water and feeling as if we're in a hotel lobby, steady and unmoving. I'd go to a hotel if I wanted that; I want to know I'm on the sea in a floating vessel. I think the best I've seen would be the 12' swells in a whole gale we ran into as we went up the North Atlantic on a New England cruise one time.

On our beach back home, I've seen the moment the tide changed from "going low" to "going high." Just as it reaches the point of perfect low tide, the water shakes ever so imperceptibly and three or four very slight ripples head toward shore. I wonder if that's where the expression "sea change" comes from? The water has to be very calm for you to see this and people from inland seldom believe you when they hear about this.

For those of us who have spent our summers (not to mention springs, falls and winters) on the beach, it has truly been said that, "once you get sand in your shoes, you can never get it out." In more literal terms, I brought some of that sand with me and have it in both my apartment and my radio studio.