I am sailing with Robin Lee Graham, but there is no wind. It’s a hot day in July and Montana’s Flathead Lake is glass. The mountains around us are blurred by haze. A wildfire burns to our east. Robin’s blue eyes light up—he’s spotted catspaws ahead. The little puff fills our sails just briefly and we glide on the momentum. We are sailing Magnolia, a 20-foot mahogany knockabout that Robin meticulously restored.
Robin is used to sailing alone. We know him from National Geographic covers in the ’70s, or The Boy Who Sailed Around the World Alone on childhood book-shelves, or Dove, the memoir and the movie. In 1965, when he was 16 years old, Robin Lee Graham left southern California to sail around the world alone. On that voyage, which took five years, two boats, and three masts, he met Patti. They married in South Africa, halfway through the circumnavigation. They have now been married for 55 years.
We haven’t traveled far from the dock, where Patti and their daughter Quimby still stand. Robin’s grandchildren, Isaiah and Annika, are aboard with us. Unfazed, they watch their grandfather bounce around us to adjust a halyard, a sheet, the tiller. I am blinking harder and more often than usual to make sure I’m awake. I am sailing with Robin Lee Graham. He asks if I want to take the tiller, adding bashfully, “I know this is no transatlantic.”
I grew up with stories of ocean crossings. My mother sailed across the Atlantic with her family in 1978, when she was 13. On the shelf by her bunk was , with a photo of a young Robin Lee Graham across the cover. She flipped through it on their 26-day passage from Maine to Ireland, amazed that a kid could do this by themselves. That book sat on my shelf on our family’s Chris-Craft, the motorboat we
