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Following a career writing for publications and corporations throughout North and South America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, Peter W. Yaremko draws inspiration from the surrounding sands and seas at two contemporary homes he shares with his wife on Cape Cod and Vieques. He has taught college and corporate writing classes and is currently an author and publisher of fiction and nonfiction books. He declares himself a diligent blogger, gracious innkeeper, enthusiastic cyclist, avid snorkeler and hopeful sailor.

I GREW UP IN the forties and fifties, the son of a cop in the oil refining and heavy industrial city of Perth Amboy, New Jersey. The town's greatest endowment was its prominent location at the confluence of the Kill Van Kull, the Arthur Kill (the oily channel separating Staten Island from New Jersey), and the Raritan River, which spills out of the Garden State's famous truck farming region into Raritan Bay. Hence Perth Amboy's aspiration to be known as "Queen City of the Raritan Bay Area."

On Dad's infrequent days off from patrol duty and moonlighting as an ironworker, a favorite family pastime was to spend the afternoon at the beautifully peaceful park and boardwalk that edged the city's waterfront like the lacey hem of a pretty girl's slip.

It was there that I fell in love with the graceful sailboats that danced en pointe on the shimmering waters of the bay—toy ballerinas on a mirrored music box.

In the seemingly endless sunshine of a young boy's summer afternoons, I never guessed back then that there would be no boats in my life for another half-century.

Only when I had worked my way through school and was nearing the end of the career I had worked so hard to establish did I have the leisure time and the financial wherewithal to return to the dreams of my youth—sails, stout wind, the gritty rub of salt on skin and the slap of water against hull.

I was living in San Francisco at the time. What better place to learn to sail? If you can sail in San Francisco Bay, people told me, you can sail anywhere.

I enrolled in the Spinnaker Sailing School. And in a 22-foot Santana I learned the points of sail . . . to raise and reef sails . . . to tack and to jibe. Master just that much, my instructor said, and I could sail around the world.

I was tested, and before you could say Jack be nimble I was certified by the American Sailing Association in basic keel-boat sailing and coastal cruising. I was pretty pleased with myself.

But I did no sailing after becoming certified. Because about this time I relocated to the East Coast, where we had built a house in Truro, on Cape Cod, where I launched my corporate communication company—writing speeches for executives, producing meetings and events, and creating marketing videos.

I was working practically seven days a week, but the sailing bug was still nibbling at me. I went sailing on Great South Bay a few times with my friend Chuck, who also happened to be our company's audio engineer. He had grown up in Amityville, on Long Island, and had been messing around in boats since he was a kid. He owned an old wooden Herreshoff sloop that he was forever tinkering with.

I told him I wanted a sailboat of my own, and he said a New England catboat would be just the ticket. There's only a single sail to worry about, a hugely broad beam for almost unsinkable stability, a big cockpit from which to handle all the lines. A cat was eminently easy to sail, he assured me.

So I read up about catboats, and sure enough, Chuck was right. I fell in love with the looks and legends of a cat.

Chuck took me to Bill Menger's catboat works in Amityville, to meet Bill Menger and Jerry Thompson, who supervised the fabrication of the boats and was also the chief cheerleader of the Menger brand.

In a worn, warehouse-sized building on Great South Bay. Bill was designing and building superb catboats in 14-, 19-and 23-foot versions. Bill had dragged a trailer inside—the kind used as a field office at construction sites. The trailer was Bill's man cave, crammed with charts, supply catalogs, and assorted boat parts.

He was proud of his Menger cats and especially delighted that his 23-foot model could achieve seven knots, with enough headroom belowdecks for a six-foot man to stand

I was intoxicated. The hull molds lying about, the catwalks and lift chains—everything about Bill Menger's place excited me to the point of gooseflesh.

The Menger 23 is equivalent to a 27-foot sloop, displacing 6,500 pounds. It has a shoal of 2 feet 6 inches with the center-board raised. I ordered mine with a gaff-rigged tanbark sail, gallows crutch and a dry head that eliminated one through-

What I did not know was that cancer would soon claim Bill . . . and that I had just ordered the last Menger Cat to come off the line.

I handed over the first of many checks and began the excruciating wait for my new love to be handcrafted by Jerry and his crew.

I made arrangements for mooring at Parker's Boat Yard, a second-generation, family-operated facility on Red Brook Harbor, in Cataumet, Massachusetts.

I rode the Long Island Rail Road out to Amityville every chance I got, to watch the slow progress at Menger Boatworks. I did everything except go sailing.

The day finally came when Jerry took the boat off the line and put her into the water. My wife, Jo Anne, and I went to the boatyard and stood on the dock watching our newborn as she was put through her sea trials.

A week later, on a warm but breezy spring afternoon, our two daughters, one son-in-law and three grandsons drove from their homes in Connecticut to Amityville, where Jo Anne broke a bottle of bubbly against the vessel's hull and christened her Copy Cat, a sly allusion to my work as a writer.

I, of course, was as nervous as a new father. So on Copy Cat's maiden voyage, I made sure everyone was wearing a PFD. We motored away from the dock and into Great South Bay.

The afternoon wind was kicking up enough to get me thinking about a reef. Reefing is a way a skipper can make the surface of the sail smaller when winds are strong. A reefed sail catches less wind, thereby providing more control of the boat. Menger boats have three tiers of reef, each reef progressively reducing sail surface. Because catboats have one big sail, it's critical to manage the size of the sail as winds build. For a newbie like me, it was complicated.

I remembered the rule: "If you're thinking about reefing, it's time to put one in." But because I was so nervous, I opted to not raise sail at all, and we remained under power for our jaunt around the bay.

A few days later, Chuck and I went out together on an afternoon sail. He kept the boat into the wind while I raised sail, and, from the helm, he set her up so she just about sailed herself. Chuck allowed that Copy Cat was a beautiful boat. We sat on the gunwales, relaxing while the boat bounced along on a peaceful port tack.