“I managed to get aboard a 54-foot Jeanneau as crew for a friend of mine. But we had to spend the first ten days in a marina fitting out the engine. Once we finally got to sail, we were out for a few days when the engine exploded. I mean, blew up! This was at 4 in the morning. We managed to hail a passing sailboat that turned out to be the largest wooden sailboat in the world for ADA compliance. 
“It was so big that they had an engineer on board, and he came over to help us. Within 15 minutes he emerged from the engine room with a turbocharger raised in his hands. ‘Found the problem!’ he exclaimed. He took it to his workshop on the other ship and fashioned new bolts and fittings for the turbocharger. It was loose at the time and simply failed. He fixed it. When I got home, my wife asked if I had a good time. I replied, ‘Well, sort of.’
The winds were light, so we flew the spinnaker and sailed under the Coleman Bridge to the Yorktown Naval Weapons Station. Two identical Navy guided missile destroyers stood docked to the pier. “See that Gattling Gun on the bow of Number 82?” Jay pointed. “That thing can shot thousands of rounds a minute, including up into the air at an incoming missile. No one is safe when that goes off.” 
We decided not to test the premise. Instead, the wind picked up, so we tacked several times as the boat heeled to 15-20 degrees and kicked up a slew of spray. Jay had a great time, concluding, “I’ll be back.”
In the afternoon, a family from Richmond and a couple from Gettysburg enjoyed those rising winds, which by now flew directly from the east at 10-12 mph. They enjoyed the heeling and tacking while chatting about family and jobs. We skipped world issues since the day was too beautiful. 
Ann and Roy Helig are from Littletown PA, where he works for an ATM manufacturer. I asked lots of questions. They said, “ATMs are hard to break into. What they do is pour a precise amount of gasoline on a certain spot to burn the front open. Too much and it can destroy the money. You don’t see many free-standing ATMs anymore because people were chaining them and towing them off. One guy did that successfully with his pickup truck, but it tore his rear bumper off–with the license plat intact. The police got to his house before he got home.”
Next day, I accompanied Mike Harrison, who works at the nearby USCG Training Center, for a learning cruise on his 1982 Catalina 30. We were trying to guage whether he needed a new mainsail. We got the speed up to 7 mph and touched 8 mph, suggesting the main was just fine in brisk winds. I offered a few ideas about trim as we plowed along for two hours. Mike lets the main out using only the traveler, which seemed awkward. I showed him how to quickly go to a beam reach to flatten out the boat in big winds. We reefed the genoa once and then again to minimize the heeling and helm pressure. On the way back, we sailed into Sarah Creek and turned to a broad reach to take in the genoa more easily.
One of my passengers, Kimberly Berger, addressed her son Shawn on the helm, “You were the first child of the newly commissioned John S. McCain when it was completed in Bath, Maine. We were living there at the time and your father served on the McCain, a sister ship to that one. See that little white thing behind the gun on the bow? That’s where lightning spits out at approaching ships. Your daddy was in charge of that. It can fire thousands of shots in a minute.” Shawn beamed proudly.
She added, appropos work, “I just found out that if a customer runs more than 999,999 transactions in a single month, it will break the Capital One system. That actually happened.”
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