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I was so keen to get back to sea. I was rattled.

All loose things seem to drift down to the sea, and so did I.

The best meal I've had was in Tavarua, an island in Fiji. It was just before sunset. A bunch of guys had just caught all this yellow fin tuna; they literally brought this huge wooden table down to the sand, pulled the tuna from the boat, dropped it on top of the table, pulled the skin off and sliced the tuna up.

I've slowly gone back, later on in life, to fish and then chicken and then, last year, red meat.

I missed a tuna-fish sandwich with mayo on toasted wheat bread more than anything. Six months after I went vegan, I snuck into a deli and took one home. And, of course, it wasn't nearly as good as I fantasized. It tasted, well, fishy.

The sea was at the bottom of my road, and I seemed to spend my childhood in it or on it, hearing, tasting, smelling it. Now, still, I need to be near water as often as possible.

On my second swim at Deception Island, the water was very clear and I was looking at hundreds of whale bones beneath me. It was a graveyard from the whaling some time in the 1920s-30s.

I cast my bread on the waters long ago. Now it's time for you to send it back to me - toasted and buttered on both sides.

Was the crew well? Was I not? I had profited in many ways by the voyage. I had even gained flesh, and actually weighed a pound more than when I sailed from Boston.