An Embarrassment of Mangoes Read Online Free PDF

but also strong and heavy, built for the ocean. She inexplicably gives me confidence—a word previously nonexistent in any sentence that also contained the words “Ann” and “sailboat.”
    I am still nervous in any wind much stronger than a zephyr, have never handled any boat larger than a dinghy by myself, have never spent more than two consecutive weeks living on a sailboat—and have never
ever
sailed at night. All of which makes me an extremely unlikely candidate for a two-person, two-year sailing trip. But here we are in Maine, soon to make an offer on a sailboat to do exactly that.
     
    T he Tartan Marine Company produced thirty-four 42-foot sailboats between 1980 and 1984; the one in Maine is hull number 14, and the name emblazoned on her narrow transom is
Diara J
. Sailing lore is unequivocal in the matter of boat names: It’s bad luck to change them. But we have no connection with
Diara J
—a conflation of the names of the first owner’s children, the boat broker told us. The J is an ugly visual afterthought—a child who must have arrived after the boat—and particularly offensive to Steve. Perhaps we would have stuck with the name anyway, though, had we not heard the guys around the boatyard talking. “That pretty boat,” they’d say as they climbed the ladder before the sale to add yet another coat of varnish to the gleaming woodwork, “that pretty boat with a name that looks like ‘diarrhea.’ ”
    Receta
—pronounced with two short e’s—means recipe in Spanish. “Because she has all the right ingredients,” I tell everyone who asks. But there’s more to it than that: I love to cook. Even after—or especially after—my most grueling days at work, I make dinner from scratch, to relax. I’m always playing in the kitchen, trying new recipes, experimenting, and Steve is a willing subject. We both
love
to eat.
    When
Receta
arrives in Toronto on a truck from Maine, we add two more years to the Five-Year Plan. After all, we need time to get to know each other. And make (and pay for) all those easy changes.
     
    T he first 844 miles of our trip to the Caribbean—from Toronto to the southern end of Chesapeake Bay—are a relentless barrage of new places, new people, and new problems. Every day, in fact, brings a new situation to be tackled, something that didn’t previously exist in my limited repertoire of boating skills. “How about a day that qualifies as quiet and uneventful?” I complain to my journal. We seem to have merely replaced our work pressures with a new set of stresses. Still, something is changing: My daily coffee intake has plummeted to one small cup before we get underway each morning instead of the maybe eight hefty mugs I used to consume each day. The stimulation of the new is replacing caffeine.
    We’re not only expending huge amounts of mental energy, but also doing
much
more physical, burn-the-calories type work. Two weeks after we started out, I had stepped on the scales at a yacht club where we stopped and discovered that without even trying I weighed less—by a good five pounds—than I had at any time in my adult life. Skinny-to-start-with Steve has had to punch another hole in his belt to hold his slumping jeans around his narrowing waist.
    Maneuvering the boat through the twenty-nine locks of the New York State Canal System and the one federal lock connecting Lake Ontario to the Hudson River was the first new-to-both-of-us challenge, complicated by a 65-foot-long battering ram overhanging
Receta
by 10 feet at the bow and stern: Since sailboats can’t go through the canal with their masts up, we are carrying it on deck. The trick is to avoid shish-kebabing other boats while keeping clear of the rough lock walls. “I guess you want me to do the driving,” Steve says, knowing full well what my response will be. I’ve yet to maneuver
Receta
in close quarters, and I figure a crowded, concrete chamber coated in black-green slime is no place to start. We pick up