About twenty years ago, enjoying an extra beer after a dinner out, we hatched a crazy plan to someday travel by sailboat. We grabbed a bar napkin and a pen, and we wrote down a five-year plan to actually make it happen. Step One of the plan – learn how to sail.
While our five-year plan eventually turned out to take about fifteen years to complete, we jumped in immediately on the first step and signed up for a sailing and cruising course in Washington’s San Juan Islands.
There were four students aboard Liberte, a Beneteau 361, and our instructor turned out to be a woman named Leslie. She regaled us with stories of her and her husband Bill’s five-year sailing trip to the South Pacific, and she impressed us with her patience and calm as her students repeatedly did their best to drive the boat onto the rocks.
We stayed in touch with Leslie over the years (she and Bill even joined us at our wedding) and learned more about her and her family, including that her sister Stefanie ran a lobster boat on Little Cranberry Island in Maine.
So Leslie put us in touch with Stefanie, and our string of being treated like royalty continued. Stephanie invited us out on her lobster boat, showed us how traps are baited and pulled, how lobsters are sorted and measured, and was amazingly patient with our endless questions about the lobster fishery.
Given the small population of Little Cranberry, knowing one family on the island makes it a small world. But knowing two makes it even smaller.
