Bo Bryan's Blog

The sky: cold, flat
Gray as concrete.
Below it: the freezing beach,
Near hard as ice,
The winter ocean,
Sleeping deeply.

Sky of snow clouds
Hanging low,
Frozen raindrops,
Ice crystals,
Geometric miracles,
Bound to fall
As snow

Bright winter light
Delicate as glass
Warm to the eye
Unbroken by the cold

Icy bright
Winter light
Sunshine
Beaming
Clear as crystal
White as snow
Fresh fallen

Winter weather
wears you out.
Dark clouds burden you
Like doubt,
Disturbing sleep.
The cold rain is coming.
If you’re a bird,
f...

I fell in love with Betsy in Jacksonville, Florida, while she was out cold. I never saw anything so beautiful as that brave girl’s face.

It was not the usual thing to allow a father in the operating room for a C-section. The doctor asked me if I had a strong stomach. My wife pleaded with him for me to go in with her. She was terrified of complications. Her first baby, by her first husband, had been still-born. With this pregnancy, she had developed gestational diabetes. Now she had a gigantic fe...

Before my father died, I was never in trouble with the law. Daddy prevented me from making early mistakes large enough to follow me through life. The shortcomings he saw in himself, he determined to eradicate in me. His bad temper for one. So that any sign of anger, let alone rage, was a near hanging offense, and I do not use that term rhetorically.

My father had been a military lawyer in Germany after World War II. He had prosecuted war criminals, demanding the death penalty in numerous cases.

Cruising on a sailboat is like taking care of young children: if you want to enjoy yourself, you learn to put away your own designs and ideas, adapt to conditions as they unfold, otherwise your patience is tested beyond the breaking point sooner or later.

Rarely, but sometimes, you can damage a relationship for life, or sink the boat forever. You always damage yourself allowing anything beyond your control to rob you of patience: the whims of the weather, the desires of a child, the mood swings ...

On my way out of Key West, I stopped and picked up a few groceries. It took a while to decide what to buy. So many small decisions had to be arrived at on dry land. There were complexities here that did not intrude when I sailed alone in deepwater. Out on the ocean, life was supercharged with simplicity and consequences.

Now the boat was tied to a concrete pier at the shoreline of a trailer park on Stock Island, north of Key West. Turkey buzzards and black vultures continually circled Stock Isla...

I navigated for Key West.

Arriving in sight of Mallory Square, I saw several thousand people lining the bulkhead where the cruise ships normally docked. There was some kind of festival event going on. In the channel off Mallory Square, the ocean-going speedboats were running upwards of a hundred miles an hour, their drive gear throwing white-water-rooster-tails.

I radioed the Coast Guard and was told the harbor was closed to incoming traffic. I could not anchor in sheltered water until the first...

Soon as darkness fell, I had a craving to sleep. The day had gone by without a nap, and I was feeling the weight. The wind had quit, the ocean was flat calm, and I was running the engine at full power, motoring behind the Dry Tortugas, headed in for Key West.

Just at nightfall, the running lights of distant shrimp boats came on, and I found myself flanked port and starboard by the shrimpers that operated out of Key West, more of them than you could count, strung out for miles.

Each winter, hundr...

The night of the third day I slept. I meant to be up again in fifteen minutes, but hours elapsed. The deep sleep ended suddenly.

I woke up to a silent boat. No sound of the ocean. No movement, as if Mysterion had settled on a rock.

The silence and the stillness startled me. I launched out and scrambled on deck, and there was the skim-milk whiteness of fog. The ocean greasy calm. The fog was dense. The silence like a helmet enclosing my ears, there was no sound. I hated fog on the ocean. It was t...

The third day. Dead tired, no sleep, dehydrated, seasick, feeling sorry for myself, hating the boat, fearing the mindless ocean. One wrong move, and I could wind up overboard. The boat would sail on with the automatic pilot engaged, and I would be dragged by the life harness—like shark bait—not unlike a husband tethered to a bad marriage, bait for a feeding frenzy of lawyers.

In The Gulf of Mexico, my imagination bullied me— as my wife would, I’m ashamed to say— until I found the courage to chan...

The sun came out like a newborn baby, I was that elated to see it. The night had been pregnant with a new day. The sky was transformed, growing pale blue as a bubble, inside which the wind increased as the cold air warmed. Atop the deepwater swell running south, the surface of the ocean grew choppy, white caps breaking. The sun rose yellow, shimmering; the ocean appeared to boil on the horizon. The wind and wave action increased with the rising temperature. Flying fish swarmed around the boat, a...