As soon as we decided that buying a sailboat might be a good idea, we started looking at want ads in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Before long we saw an ad for a relatively new O'Day 27, which was for sale across the Delaware River in New Jersey. We went over, looked at the boat,  went out for sail on it, and negotiated a contract to buy it. We named it the Felipe, which had become Phillip’s nickname by then.

In preparation for taking delivery, we signed up for a long weekend course at Annapolis Sailing School. The course involved a full day of classroom instruction and a day on the water. Our young on-the-water instructor was very enthusiastic and coached us emphatically that sailors must never take the initiative in waving to motor boaters. “It's all right to wave back if they wave at you first,” he said, “but you must never wave first.”

We graduated, got back, and took delivery of the Felipe. We sailed as much as we could up and down the Delaware River. It was beginning to get cold, however. During the winter we decided that we should move the boat to the Chesapeake Bay, and found a slip at Sailing Associates in Georgetown, MD, on the Sassafras River.

I spent hours planning the journey down the Delaware River to the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, through the canal to the Chesapeake Bay, and then down to the Sassafras River. The plan was to stop overnight at the midpoint of the canal, in Chesapeake City, Delaware.

We recruited two of our gay friends to fill out the crew, and got up well before dawn so we could be underway as soon as it was light. The Delaware River has substantial tidal influence. Although I did the best I could in estimating the tidal currents, we were way behind schedule by the time we were abeam Chester, Pennsylvania. I was quite concerned that we would not make it to the canal before nightfall, and there was nowhere to tie up along the Delaware River in that area. My concern about this was punctuated by a fire that broke out on the alcohol stove on which Mitchell and one of our crew members were making breakfast. They extinguished it without too much trouble with the fire extinguisher, but it was alarming while it blazed and they were screaming.

We made it to Chesapeake City before nightfall and all of us had interesting cases of sea legs when we went ashore, having spent all day on the boat. The next day we made it without incident to the slip at Sailing Associates.

We spent that season enjoying the wider opportunities on the Chesapeake Bay. We drove down every weekend, with Philip in tow, whenever it was Mitchell's turn to have him. We always took our boxer, Butzer.

After about two years with the Felipe, we were ready for an upgrade. We started shopping around for something around 34 feet long and ended up buying a Catalina 34 from a boatyard in Havre de Grace, Maryland. We got it for about $85,000, as I recall. On the sail back to Sailing Associates from Havre de Grace, the engine quit just after we entered the mouth of the Sassafras River. We called Sailing Associates on the radio and Patrick brought the launch out and towed us in. It was 4 July weekend and we had plans to meet some friends in St. Michaels. Somehow we induced a boat mechanic to come out. It was unbearably hot, but he crawled under into the lazarette and found an air leak in the fuel line, which is causing the problem. He fixed it, and we had no more troubles that weekend.

The first time we went through the drawbridge under US route 50 across Kent Narrows was an adventure. I had looked at the weekday schedule rather than the weekend schedule and discovered my error, just as we were about to enter the hair-raising set of twists and turns approaching the drawbridge. There were no more openings scheduled for that day. Mitchell was furious and ranted and raved. Finally I said, “If you don't stop carrying on like that, you can just sail the damn boat wherever you want. He finally calmed down, and we put the boat into a slip and got a motel room for the night. I was up at about three the next morning for 6 AM bridge opening to make sure we didn't miss that one.

After about three years of Sailing Associates, we decided to move the boat to Rock Hall, MD, which was a little further down the bay and thus gave us more convenient access to places we liked to go, such as Annapolis and St. Michaels.

We rented a slip at Haven Harbor, on Swan Creek. It was a bit bigger than Sailing Associates. One of my law students and her husband had their boat there as well and so we spent lots of time together at the marina and at destinations we agreed on. This marina was a good solid two hours from Philadelphai, and so we went down every Friday afternoon come back late Sunday, always with Phillip, when he was with us, and always with Butzer, and then a second boxer, George Newpup.

After a year or two in Rock Hall, Mitchell suggested that we look at some houses in Rock Hall. I was a little worried about whether we could afford it, but we started looking and ended up buying a little house at 5878 Beach Rd. The screened porch on the rear was about 15 yards from the edge of the Chesapeake Bay. The view across the Bay of the lights of Baltimore Harbor were spectacular at night.

I decided to become a member of the Maryland bar, consistent with a kind of fantasy that I would set up a law practice in Rock Hall. I took the abbreviated Maryland Bar exam, required of lawyers who were already admitted of the states, rented a PO Box, and started calling on people who might be clients, such as the sheriff of Kent County, and a major landowner in the area who lived in Washington.

Nothing really came of the law practice idea, but it indirectly led to Project Bosnia and Operation Kosovo when Stu Ingis was not interested in helping me develop a Maryland law practice, but was very interested in helping the Bosniaks with information technology.

For two or three summers in the mid-1990s, Philip enrolled in the Annapolis Sailing School Summer Camp. He, Mitchell, and I would take the boat down to Annapolis, put in the slip for a week, Mitchell would go back to Philadelphia to go to work and Philip and I would commute in the sailboat dinghy twice a across Back Creek from the Mears Marina to his camp. We had a great time walking and bicycling into Annapolis each night for dinner. On one occasion, we accidentally ordered two dozen escargot when we misunderstood the quantities. We ate so many of them but neither of us still can tolerate the thought of an escargot.

I had accepted the deanship at Chicago-Kent shortly before the sailing camp in 1997. We took the boat down as usual, and then I went through the Annapolis Yellow Pages looking for boat transporters. I called one, and the very first one said. “We're looking to fill a back haul to the Midwest. Can you have the boat ready for pick up at Chesapeake Bay Beach Marina, right at the eastern end of the Bay Bridge,  by the end of the week?”

Realizing there was no point in taking the boat back to Rock Hall and then back down the bay, I said, “yes,” arranged for Mitchell to pick us up at the marina, and Philip, when he was done with his camp activities, and I sailed across the bay and put the boat in the slip from where it would be picked up.

The boat beat us to Illinois. Initially, we rented a slip in the Waukegan Marina and sailed out of there for what remained of the 1997 season, but Waukegan was a grimy, oily, workboat operation. We look around and discovered beautiful North Point Marina a little further north in Windsor Harbor. It was embedded in Illinois State Park and abutted a now decommissioned nuclear plant, the Zion nuclear plant. We took the boat there to the 1998 season and sailed out of that marina for several seasons. It was beautiful, but a bit far from Chicago when crew members from Chicago wanted to come up.

After my congressional candidacy in 2002, Mitchell said that he was not going up to Winthrop Harbor any more to go sailing, but that if we move the boat downtown he would come more often. One of Mitchell’s drinking buddies had a slip in Burnham harbor, but no boat. There were long waiting list for slips in all of the downtown marinas, and current subfolders were not allowed to let anyone else use their slips, but Mitchell’s friend, Robert, and I did it anyway. We kept the boat in Burnham Harbor for three or four seasons, but I was always looking over my shoulder fearing discovery and eviction by the very bureaucratic and rule-oriented contractor that operated the city marinas.

With the great recession of 2008, slips became available, and I obtained one at Belmont Harbor, and moved the boat there. That was a much nicer place. The workers had a better attitude, and I was more comfortable being legit under the rules

In all four of these marinas, I regularly invited my law students to come out sailing. Especially after Mitchell stopped going, it was a rare weekend when I did not have at least one, and often several law students, on the boat. Chris Cue was a regular, so much so that I designated him as the informal “first mate,” because he sailed with me so often and became so proficient a crew member.

When the boat was that Winthrop Harbor, we took it up to Racine each fall and brought it back each spring. Once we were in Burnham Harbor, we made the bridge run in Chicago twice a year. The bridge run involves going under some 27 draw bridges on the Chicago Rivers which the city of Chicago opens sequentially for sailboats making the trip to or from their marinas to or from their winter boatyards twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. The bridge runs were always exciting—and provided an unparalleled water-level view of Chicago’s famous architecture. I regularly tried to be the first to call bridge operations on the radio so the Accomplish could be the “lead boat,” in charge of corralling the upwards of 30 sailboats making each run.

On two occasions, we took another boat that was having mechanical difficulties undertow. Towing another sailboat in the close confines of the Chicago River between two draw bridges in the down position tested my boathandling skills, but we did so well on these occasions that I got a round of applause from the other boats one season when we reached the lake. One time we were towing another boat when my engine started overheat – a recurring problem when debris got sucked into the fresh water intake for cooling. If one did not shut the engine down, or free the clog, it would burn up. The other boat took us under tow, then having repaired his own engine

After a few seasons I discovered that I could fix the clogged intake myself by taking the bilge pump for the dinghy and squirting a very strong stream of water down through the throughhull to expel the debris that was clogging it.

In the last season before I moved to Charlottesville I had three students on the boat we planned to pick Chris and his date up from the seawall outside Belmont Harbor, because he could not arrive at the same time as the others. One of my students was at the helm, and I was coaching him on how to make the approach to pick up Chris and his date. The charts showed nothing about any underwater obstructions in the vicinity.  We were making 3 or 4 knots--a pretty good clip under sail, when bang! We hit something hard. My first instinct after we ran aground was to have the crew check for whether we were taking on water. We weren’t.

It took considerable effort to get off the grounding, because something seem to be wrong with the steering. After we got away from the shoreline, I discovered that the boat would only turn left; that the helm would not come past midship to turn right. So we made a series of left circles back up to the entrance of Belmont Harbor and called the dock master on the radio for a tow. The dock master refused. We contacted Boat US, a commercial towing service, and they said it would be a couple of hours before they could get to us. Eventually, we waved vigorously at a small launch coming out from one of the sailing clubs across the harbor and he came over and towed us in to the gas dock. The singularly unhelpful dockmaster told us we had to move the boat to  the slip. I said, “We’re not moving the boat until we get a mechanic to look at it. It will stay exactly where it is unless you can tow it into the slip. The standoff continued until Boat US finally showed up and pushed us into the slip.

I found a mechanic who also was a diver, who came to look at the boat. The rudder was jammed against the rudder stop, and there was a huge gouge out of the front of the keel. It was inadvisable to sail the boat until we got it fixed. I found a captain for hire, who took the boat down to Crowley’s Boatyard for repairs. The first mechanic had unjammed the rudder, so was possible to turn the boat.

By the time it was fixed, I had decided to move to Charlottesville and, sadly, put the Accomplished up for sale.