Part 4. Cast and Crew We were five aboard Restive, four old friends, the fifth picked up from an Internet site, a seafarers’ match.com where captains look for crew and sailors look for boats.

• George: the captain. A veteran sailor with years at the helm and many Bermuda races in his topsiders. Had lovingly overseen every aspect of Restive’s design, construction and launching in 2006. Calm, focused, confident, a skipper’s traits, and ones that had enabled him to build the boat in the first place. Born: 1945. Friends since 1955.
• David: a Marine combat engineer in Vietnam who spent his subsequent career with a large construction company. A keen mechanical aptitude and a fascination with deciphering how things work. An unruffled sailor, he innately grasped Restive’s nuts and bolts. An indifferent swimmer. Born: 1945. Friends since 1958.
• Fred: a man of remarkable physical strength and unflagging good humor (except when reading my blog). A tough and fearless seaman – also the cook, although rough seas limited his culinary creativity. Born: 1945. Friends since 1963.
• Dave: an MIT-trained engineer. Built his first boat from a kit at the age of nine and has been sailing ever since. A genius at determining what was wrong and fixing it. A generation younger. Friends since the night before we sailed.
• Your scribe: a rookie. Born: 1945.
• Restive: A wooden 48-foot sloop, both seaworthy and beautiful. Built more perhaps for seafaring than comfort. But, hey, we were ancient mariners.

As we set off, we little knew how critical these attributes would soon prove – especially the personal ones.