conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Mile, P>"A, STEWART with the genre: Sports & Outdoors, Water Sports?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'A Mile Down'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A Mile Down
  I didn't share these thoughts with Bobby, of course. But I realized that even if I succeeded wildly in this business, it still fundamentally wouldn't mean anything to me except financial freedom. It wasn't how I measured who I was, and it never would be. I would always feel somewhat alienated in this role of captain or small business owner. I was a writer and a teacher. That's who I was. I needed to start writing again soon.
  The second charter was easy, a fun ten days. I practiced my skills as a bartender, enjoying it, and the kids performed skits at night on the large aft deck area, their parents lounging on the cushioned poop deck. Everyone called me "Captain Dave." It didn't feel like a job at all.
  Immediately after this charter, however, when we went into the clearinghouse office in Roadtown to pick up our mail and news, we learned that a hurricane was headed our way. It would probably pass south of us, but it could swing north.
  This presented an uncomfortable situation. We were too late to run away from it, and we didn't have good options for weathering a hurricane in the Virgin Islands.
  I finally decided to anchor in North Sound on Virgin Gorda. The sound is expansive and almost fully enclosed, like a big lake, most of it forty-five to sixty feet deep. We'd be completely exposed to wind, but we'd be protected from big waves, and we could drag on our anchor all over that bay and not hit anything.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: He let out line for a while, getting farther away from us, then caught up the slack and pulled us with a jerk, our bow tipping sideways and coming around fast in an extreme yaw to port then back to starboard. We kept going to starboard, like a waterskier going for outside the wake, leaning away from the tow boat, and I tried to correct with the rudder, which had some effect but not much. The cutter's solution was to speed up. We whipped back and forth but mostly to starboard, and the captain said he was letting out more line, finding the proper tow length so we'd be in sync on the swells, and the tow did become a bit smoother, if too fast for my tastes, but then the line broke.
  Their boat receded, we slowed, and I called on the radio to notify them. We were in a heavy squall, over forty knots of wind blowing buckets of rain into our pilothouse from behind, so that even twenty feet into the pilothouse, the ceiling was wet. The rain was cold, too. This was definitely a northern storm that had come down into the Caribbean. I went forward on deck and pulled up their tow line, about fifty feet, which meant it hadn't been severed by any chafing on our end.
  I stood there for a while staring absentmindedly at the green light shining through the messy pile of their heaving line. I was drenched in the rain, and only my hand on a stanchion was keeping me from being thrown overboard. We would have to catch their line again. I wanted to sleep. I wondered why I persisted in this whole boating thing.
  One thing about being at sea is that you don't really get to stop. You can never say, "Okay, to hell with this, I've had enough, I'm outta here." Until you arrive in port, you're stuck, and conditions can always worsen, the boat can always break in new ways, whether you're prepared or not. Even in port, you can slip anchor, blow against other anchored boats in crosswinds and currents, or run aground. In a marina, battering, chafing, and electrolysis are still possible, as are propane explosion, electrical fire, sinking through siphoning and all the hazards of docking, all the expensive things you can run into and crush. A boat simply does not allow for genuine rest. Its essential nature is peril, held in check only through enormous effort and expense.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Swap the first and the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Its essential nature is peril, held in check only through enormous effort and expense. We kept going to starboard, like a waterskier going for outside the wake, leaning away from the tow boat, and I tried to correct with the rudder, which had some effect but not much. The cutter's solution was to speed up. We whipped back and forth but mostly to starboard, and the captain said he was letting out more line, finding the proper tow length so we'd be in sync on the swells, and the tow did become a bit smoother, if too fast for my tastes, but then the line broke.
  Their boat receded, we slowed, and I called on the radio to notify them. We were in a heavy squall, over forty knots of wind blowing buckets of rain into our pilothouse from behind, so that even twenty feet into the pilothouse, the ceiling was wet. The rain was cold, too. This was definitely a northern storm that had come down into the Caribbean. I went forward on deck and pulled up their tow line, about fifty feet, which meant it hadn't been severed by any chafing on our end.
  I stood there for a while staring absentmindedly at the green light shining through the messy pile of their heaving line. I was drenched in the rain, and only my hand on a stanchion was keeping me from being thrown overboard. We would have to catch their line again. I wanted to sleep. I wondered why I persisted in this whole boating thing.
  One thing about being at sea is that you don't really get to stop. You can never say, "Okay, to hell with this, I've had enough, I'm outta here." Until you arrive in port, you're stuck, and conditions can always worsen, the boat can always break in new ways, whether you're prepared or not. Even in port, you can slip anchor, blow against other anchored boats in crosswinds and currents, or run aground. In a marina, battering, chafing, and electrolysis are still possible, as are propane explosion, electrical fire, sinking through siphoning and all the hazards of docking, all the expensive things you can run into and crush. A boat simply does not allow for genuine rest.He let out line for a while, getting farther away from us, then caught up the slack and pulled us with a jerk, our bow tipping sideways and coming around fast in an extreme yaw to port then back to starboard.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: One is the mystery of his life and suicide, sealed forever. The other, abiding in each of us who loved him, is the impossibility of knowing or living the life we would have had without his suicide. Would I have thrown away my academic career—and, for a time, my writing—for boats and the sea if my father had not killed himself? Have I built boats out of love or obedience? The questions are impossible to answer. My own reasons are an opaque sea, my own dreams and desires things I can never fully know. I can only hope that my entire life hasn't been a plaything of his abrupt end.
  A year ago, even before we had welded the first plates, I could see it three-dimensionally in my head, from any vantage, from within any stateroom. Its flybridge, open to the sun and stars, has teak deck and more than two hundred square feet of cushions. This is the excitement for me, the creation of something from nothing, the pre-existence of form, and the constant modification, also, the reshaping every day as I refine the design. Even metal is as malleable as a manuscript.
  The boat is unique. It will be the largest sailing catamaran based in the Virgin Islands, and it is one of the largest ever built in the United States. Inspected and certified by the Coast Guard, it far exceeds even their regulations, with each hull divided into nine separate watertight compartments. There have been many hassles during construction, and no doubt these will continue, but in three weeks we will launch, and a week later I will sail with Nancy and my uncle and friends from San Francisco to Panama and then to the Virgin Islands on a ship of my own creation, a beautiful bird with wings.
  A life can be like a work of art, constantly melted away and reshaped. The imagining and remaking is itself a form of satisfaction, especially when I'm dreaming together with Nancy. And this is what I wish my father had known. Many of his dreams ended in ruin, but his mistake was in not waiting for the new dreams to arrive, and in not realizing that those dreams were to be shared. He could have been nearly anything, his life reshapeable in thousands of ways, none of which he, or those of us who still love him, will ever know.