Voyage

Twenty-five years ago, I had occasion to sail with some friends from Ft. Myers, Florida to the Dry Tortugas. The boat was a 60-foot sailboat; the trip went from the Ft. Myers to the Dry Tortugas, to Key West, across the Gulf Stream down the Bahama chain, a distance of around 800 miles.When arriving at the Dry Tortugas the morning after an all-night sail, we anchored off Garden Key and took the dinghy ashore to the beach, to visit Fort Jefferson. I gestured to an old wooden rowboat...
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Twenty-five years ago, I had occasion to sail with some friends from Ft. Myers, Florida to the Dry Tortugas. The boat was a 60-foot sailboat; the trip went from the Ft. Myers to the Dry Tortugas, to Key West, across the Gulf Stream down the Bahama chain, a distance of around 800 miles.When arriving at the Dry Tortugas the morning after an all-night sail, we anchored off Garden Key and took the dinghy ashore to the beach, to visit Fort Jefferson. I gestured to an old wooden rowboat pulled up on the sand at the end of the beach."What's the deal with the boat?" I asked."That boat carried six guys escaping from Cuba, here to the US," the ranger said. "I have no way of knowing how they made it, how they found us. Cuba is over a hundred miles away, and they did it in an open boat, in the open sea, over several days."It was a miracle!" he said.This, then, is a story about a similar miracle. The story not only includes an arduous sea voyage, but also a progress of self-enlightenment The voyagers journey from a dark place of bias and prejudice, poverty and fear, to a place of understanding, love, maturity, positive self-worth, and friendship.