Sept. 26 -- Sunday
Back in the water since yesterday, bottom clean. Wind ENE 10-12. Seas 2-3. Guests: 0. Location: a barstool.

An e-mail came Friday from a man I used to sit across a conference table from for fourteen years. He wanted me to know the firm is merging, that my old office now belongs to a twenty-nine-year-old who "has your drive," and that everyone asks after me. He signed it "Living the dream yet?"

I didn't answer for two days, because I didn't know.

This afternoon I was at the bar in Cruz Bay with the other skippers who aren't working (all of us), and the TV was showing the Ryder Cup from outside Boston, and the Americans were down going into the last day and then they simply weren't. The place went off like a bottle rocket. A dive instructor from Ohio bought the house a round and couldn't pay for it and nobody minded.

I walked back to the dinghy dock around six. The water in the harbor was that color you can't photograph; I've tried. Somebody's dog was swimming after a mullet it will never catch. My feet hurt, my back hurts, my bank balance hurts. And I realized I was whistling.

So, to answer the question: Not the dream, exactly. But I'm awake for it. I think that's what I came for.

Sept. 22 -- Wednesday
Out of the water. On the hard at the yard, St. Thomas. Guests: 0. Blisters: 4.

September is haul-out month for anybody who can afford it and a lot of people who can't. The yard's lift picked Sine Die up in two slings Monday morning like a stork carrying a very large, very dirty baby, and set her down on stands in the gravel between a charter cat and a fishing boat that has been "almost finished" since, I'm told, Hurricane Marilyn.

A boat out of water looks all wrong. Too tall. Her bottom is a garden: barnacles, weed, a small civilization. I've been at it with a scraper and a sander for three days in a Tyvek suit that fills up with sweat until I slosh when I walk.

The yard bill so far: haul, pressure wash, stands, bottom paint (which costs about what a good bottle of scotch did in my old life, per quart), and a new cutless bearing I didn't know I needed until a man named Clive wiggled the propeller shaft and made a face. I have been a lawyer. I know what that face costs.

I sleep aboard, up a ladder, twelve feet off the ground, in a boat that doesn't move. It's the strangest night's sleep I get all year.

Sept. 18 -- Saturday
Wind light. Rain showers. Guests: 0.

Cleaned the boat, packed for the yard, ate a whole can of chili standing up over the galley sink. I am the color of a clay flowerpot. Nothing else to report.

Sept. 12 -- Sunday
Wind NE 20, gusty, easing. Big swell out of the north. Location: Hurricane Hole. Guests: 0.

Floyd went by to the north of us, well to the north, and we got a stiff breeze and a lot of swell and that's all. The Weather Channel is showing it now as a big white pinwheel headed toward the Bahamas, and every one of us on this side of it feels guilty and relieved in about equal measure.

On Friday, when nobody was sure yet, I took Sine Die around to Hurricane Hole on the east end, where the mangroves come right down into the water, and did what the old-timers showed me: lines out to the mangrove roots in every direction, a spiderweb of them, two anchors down, chafe gear on everything. There were maybe forty boats in there doing the same, people I've seen at the dock all year and never talked to, all of us passing lines and handing out beers and swapping the latest from the radio. A retired pilot from Maine lent me thirty feet of line and wouldn't take it back.

I slept aboard Friday and Saturday. The wind hummed in the rigging all night. I lay there thinking about Anders, and about the fact that if this had come straight at us I would have been one middle-aged man with no crew and a lot of nylon rope.

This is my first season here. The locals measure time from Marilyn, back in '95. "Before Marilyn." "After Marilyn." I would like to never have a storm to measure time by. I understand that is not up to me.

Sept. 9 -- Thursday
Wind E 12. Seas 3-4. Guests: 2 (honeymooners, half-day, tipped in cookies).

There is a new storm out east with a name, Floyd, and the whole island has turned into amateur meteorologists. At the bar, at the grocery, on the ferry dock, the conversation starts the same way: "You see the track?" Everybody saw the track. Everybody has an opinion about the track. The man who sells me ice is sure it's going north. The woman who rents me my mooring is sure it isn't.

My insurance company requires a written hurricane plan. Mine is two pages long. I used to write two-hundred-page merger agreements. The two pages were harder.

The honeymooners today were from Tennessee and very young and asked me if I ever get tired of paradise. I said I'd let them know.

Sept. 1 -- Wednesday
Wind SE 8. Flat calm by afternoon. Guests: 0.

August, by the numbers, because I used to do this for other people:

Trips run: 9
Trips canceled (rain, no-shows): 4
Gross: less than my old monthly parking
Mooring, insurance, fuel, ice, the boat loan, one alternator: more than gross
Check mailed to Evanston for Anders: on time, always

The season here runs roughly Thanksgiving to Easter. In September half the restaurants in Cruz Bay tape a hand-lettered sign in the window, CLOSED TILL OCTOBER, GONE TO SEE MY MOTHER, and go. The cruise ships are gone. The beaches are empty. It's the most beautiful the island ever is and nobody is here to pay for it.

I have enough in savings to get to December. I did that math on the back of a fuel receipt. It checks out if nothing breaks, and something always breaks.

My last billable rate was $325 an hour. Today I spent four hours rebuilding a head. I will not describe the head.

Aug. 22 -- Sunday
Wind E 15. Seas 4. Guests: 0. Crew: 0 (as of 11:40 a.m.)

Put Anders on the ferry to St. Thomas this morning to catch his flight. I rode over with him and walked him to the airport curb and he let me hug him in public, briefly, like a man accepting a traffic ticket.

Came back to the boat and found his snorkel mask on the v-berth and a Goo Goo Dolls tape still in the cassette player. He'd played "Iris" something like two hundred times in two weeks. I've been playing it since I got back. Don't write in.

This is the part nobody puts on the postcard. You leave a job, you leave a city, you leave a marriage that had already left you, and you tell yourself it's about freedom. And then your son gets on a ferry and you are standing on a dock in paradise with nobody to make a sandwich for.

Aug. 14 -- Saturday
Wind E 12-15. Seas 3. Crew: 1 (Anders, 15, deckhand, unpaid, vocal about it).

Anders has been here a week. The first three days he was seasick, sunburned, and furious, in rotating order, and spent most of his time lying in the cockpit with a towel over his face listening to his Walkman. He told his mother on the phone that I "live in a floating closet," which is accurate.

On Wednesday I needed a hand with the jib and he took the wheel without being asked, and something changed. He was good at it. Good instincts, light hands; he feels the boat. By Friday he was running the morning trip to Waterlemon Cay with me as crew, telling a family from New Jersey where the fish would be. A big green turtle came up to breathe right next to the boat and he forgot to be fifteen for about a minute. His face did what it used to do when he was five and saw a fire truck.

We eat dinner in the cockpit. We don't talk about the divorce. We talk about the Cubs, which is worse. It's the best week I've had since I got here.