e complicated
lanyard knots and the making of various kinds of sennit and rope-mats.
The point of all of which is that it is by means of small-boat sailing
that the real sailor is best schooled.

And if a man is a born sailor, and has gone to the school of the sea,
never in all his life can he get away from the sea again. The salt of it
is in his bones as well as his nostrils, and the sea will call to him
until he dies. Of late years, I have found easier ways of earning a
living. I have quit the forecastle for keeps, but always I come back to
the sea. In my case it is usually San Francisco Bay, than which no
lustier, tougher, sheet of water can be found for small-boat sailing.

It really blows on San Francisco Bay. During the winter, which is the
best cruising season, we have southeasters, southwesters, and occasional
howling northers. Throughout the summer we have what we call the "sea-
breeze," an unfailing wind off the Pacific that on most afternoons in the
week blows what the Atlantic Coast yachtsmen would name a gale. They are
always surprised by the small spread of canvas our yachts carry. Some of
them, with schooners they have sailed around the Horn, have looked
proudly at their own lofty sticks and huge spreads, then patronisingly
and even pityingly at ours. Then, perchance, they have joined in a club
cruise from San Francisco to Mare Island. They found the morning run up
the Bay delightful. In the afternoon, when the brave west wind ramped
across San Pablo Bay and they faced it on the long beat home, things were
somewhat different. One by one, like a flight of swallows, our more
meagrely sparred and canvassed yachts went by, leaving them wallowing and
dead and shortening down in what they called a gale but which we called a
dandy sailing breeze. The next time they came out, we would notice their
sticks cut down, their booms shortened, and their after-leeches nearer
the luffs by whole cloths.

As for excitement, there is all the difference in the world between a
ship in trouble at sea, and a small boat in trouble on land-locked water.
Yet for genuine excitement and thrill, give me the small boat. Things
happen so quickly, and there are always so few to do the work--and hard
work, too, as the small-boat sailor knows. I have toiled all night, both
watches on deck, in a typhoon off the coast of Japan, and been less
exhausted than by two hours' work at reefing down a thirty-foot sloop and
heaving up