Yes to the first and no to the second: it was near midnight. I showed her the shower (my addition), put out sheets for the hide-a-bed, and turned in, not without noting the level in that Beefeater bottle, which I deliberately neglected to put away. Jeannine gave me a daughterly kiss good night and thanked me without fuss. She doubted she’d go back to that Farm except to collect her belongings; she had no further use for Reg Prinz, she thought; she would consider my other advice seriously.

I fell asleep listening to her shower and thinking, inevitably, of Jane. Some time in the night the telephone rang me up from sweet depths; before I was collected enough to get it (I’d not bothered to move it from the living room to the bedroom jack), Jeannine had answered and been hung up on. Not a word, she said from her bed edge, fetching in her summer nightie, her hair unbound. She’d lit a cigarette, but I was pleased to see that the bottle hadn’t been moved or, evidently, touched. Some fucking drunk, she guessed with a wry chuckle: many’s the time. Nighty-night.

Next morning was a bright one, unusual for August, a good dry high come down from Canada with a light northwesterly. More and more pleased, I found Jeannine up and perky, in cut-off jeans and T-shirt, the hide-a-bed stripped and stowed, the gin bottle unselfconsciously returned to the bar cabinet, its level undisturbed (of course I hadn’t checked the other bottles), coffee brewed and breakfast standing by. She gave the skipper a good-morning peck, asked him how he liked his eggs, predicted that the breeze would freshen enough by noon to make even that clunker of a skipjack move, and declared that such late-night no-response phone calls made her homesick for NYC: nothing missing but the heavy breath. Did they happen often?

Fact is, Dad, it was the first such ever, in my memory; outside the cities such annoyances are rare. He’d said nothing? Not a syllable, either apologetic, explanatory, or obscene. That in that case our attribution of gender was presumptive didn’t occur to me till the evening, 2200 hours, as I made the day’s final entry in the ship’s log. I was after all a lawyer on vacation, eagerer by far than I’d expected to get O.J. loaded and under way.

Jeannine was a delight: her complexion fresher, eyes brighter, spirits higher than I’d seen them since her first divorce. She took my car to fetch the last of the groceries and the first of the ice while I topped up the water tanks, loaded and stowed, closed the cottage, singled up the dock lines, and started the diesel to kick us out into sailing room. We went over the checklists together — a disingenuous tête-à-tête which Jeannine smartly called me on by blowing her breath in my face. Cigarettes, coffee, and toothpaste, okay? No booze till the hook goes down.

I kissed her forehead; we raised the sails, cast off, and for the sport of it (but with the engine idling in neutral in case the breeze set us too far shoreward), fetched out to deep water under sail alone, close-hauled on a tricky port tack, by lee-bowing the outrunning tide to offset our leeway and lowering the big centerboard inch by inch as we beat out of shoal water. A neat bit of seamanship, landlubberly Father, which brought a cheer from the crew when we cleared our mark — a particular brush-topped stake on the last three-foot spot before good sea-room — by no more than that same three feet. Jeannine bounced happily back to the wheel from her watch at the bowsprit (those breasts bounced too, under that T-shirt, a man could not but notice with pleasure, whatever the possible consanguinity) to hug me (Ah) and take the helm while I cut the engine and made the first log entry: Day 1 (Sat 819): Choptank R. 1030: Last Cruise off to good beginning.

But even as I went on to log our weather, speed, heading, and trim, I decided to take no further chances that day. Tempting as it was, in that breeze from that quarter, to come about and close-reach straight into the Bay, we crossed the wide river-mouth instead, tacked up Broad Creek, anchored for lunch and a cautious dip off Hambledon Island (sea nettles, like a gross of old condoms, everywhere one looked). Then we ran back down again, banged out past Cooks Point to the Sharps Island Light to get a taste of open Bay and a bit of spray in our faces, and back into the Choptank and up Harris Creek to Dun Cove. The rationale was to get a good anchoring spot for the night before the weekend fleet piled in from the western shore — there’d be 50 boats by nightfall in that first snug anchorage on the Choptank. But we were also, as Jeannine airily observed, only eight nautical miles from home in case I wanted rid of her in the morning.

We could quit that now, I suggested. It had been a good day’s sail, the better for her having been aboard, and I hoped she’d have a drink with me after we swam. The hook was down in eight feet in the western arm of that roomy cove, off which yet another, lagoonlike little cove makes, too shoal for cruising boats to enter but a fine secluded spot for swimming. The breeze had waned from fifteen knots to near calm; the late afternoon had hazed over and stoked up; furling sail and setting the anchor left us both perspiring. With my permission, not to soak her only pair of shorts (they would never dry out in the overnight damp), Jeannine swam this time bare-assed, her T-shirt pulled demurely but sexily over her hips while she used the boarding ladder. That sort of modesty, she acknowledged, was not her long suit. On a sailboat especially, in her view, clothing was for comfort, protection (including against unwarranted attention), and other folks’ proprieties only. In hot weather, alone or with others, she preferred going naked, and never cared who looked so long as they didn’t care and left her alone.

Mm hm. My sentiments exactly, despite my local fame as a coat-and-tie-skipper in the spring and fall. The fact was, I told her, it was Arrow shirts or nothing, and after half a century of watching our rivers get yearly more crowded, I still found swimsuits unnecessary more often than not when at anchor on our side of the Chesapeake. That ice broken, we dinghied through the nettles to what we now christened Skinny-Dip Cove, where, as we’d hoped, we saw fewer of them; and wary as I was of medusa stings on my privates, at her challenge and example I Took a Chance.

I report to you, Dad, that at age near-70 it is still a pleasure to feel one’s male equipment floating free in the amniotic waters of the Chesapeake, so warm by August that they don’t even tighten the scrotum, and to splash about with a long-legged, suntanned, gold-haired (but, one observed with interest, brown-fleeced), not-at-all-bad-looking woman half one’s age. I had first done Dun Cove in the buff (we called it “buckbathing” back then), crewing for friends, when a woman of 35 was twice my age, and had I looked with awe upon a naked and unattainably mature 21-year-old, the skipper’s girl friend. I had skinny-dipped there in the 1920’s and ’30’s and ’40’s and ’50’s and ’60’s, with friends coeval to each decade. How old Polly, as late as last August, used to love to peel out of her Playtex and leap with a whoop from O.J.‘s bowsprit, nettles be damned! And beautiful Jane, modest Jane, who would strip only at night lest someone see her from the woods alongshore — how she loved the sparkle on us of Dun Cove’s phosphorescing algae, her nipples twinkling before me in Franklin Roosevelt’s second term! My itinerary for the rest of the cruise did not call for another visit to this first of my Favorite Anchorages; I was immensely happy to have a Naked Lady-Friend to swim with on my last stop in Dun Cove.

I told Jeannine so, and some of the above, as she ably rowed us back (there’s a pretty sight, Dad: conjure it, from my perspective in the stern-seat). She wanted to know Had I ever swum there with her mom? I said Sure, and no more. She swapped me some skinny-dipping memories of her own, tending toward the orgiastic and Caribbean but not excluding dear Dun Cove or the innocent pleasure of mere untrammeled wetness. As we toweled off (in the cabin: the fleet was piling in now from Annapolis, Washington, everywhere), we agreed that while solitary anchorages were delicious, the weekend party thing was fun too: rafting together for cocktails, boat-hopping to compare hors d’oeuvres and layouts and rigs both nautical and human. We also inspected each other less surreptitiously, Jeannine supposing, correctly, that her mother had been in better shape at 35, pointing out small striations on her own breasts and thighs and backside, complimenting politely my not-bad-physique-for-a-man-my-age (from the neck down), observing with interest that below the waist I wasn’t gray-haired yet. She liked my invocation of Boccaccio’s leek, white-headed but green-tailed; said she’d known plenty of the opposite kind; wondered if we could stay stripped on deck till the air cooled down, just covering ourselves with beach towels when boats passed close.