After another peaceful night at anchor, we decided our shakedown cruise in the San Juans had been sufficiently grueling. Everyone was working together just fine and we'd all become familiar enough with the boat and each other, so we decided to head on to Anacortes a day earlier than I'd originally planned.

The deck hands worked together efficiently to weigh anchor and we headed out of Aleck Bay, rounding Point Colville and Watmough Head at the southeast corner of Lopez Island to turn northeast toward Rosario Strait. There was no wind so we were enjoying an effortless motor when I decided to inflict activity upon the crew and hold man overboard drills.

At the risk of scaring my friends and loved ones to death, I understand that a man overboard (MOB) is, more often than not, a tragic event that ends in the victim never being seen again. In the limited expanse of one's line of sight from the deck of a rolling boat, even small ocean waves can perform amazing feats of prestidigitation in hiding the head and shoulders of a wayward sailor from view.

Our circumstances were far from challenging in that regard, with near mirror calm water and virtually unlimited visibility, but just organizing a reasonable recovery routine was nearly our match. The tension level had increased markedly by the time we were done and I called it to conclusion less than an hour later more for that reason than any other.

Mabrouka sports a phalanx of MOB gear: a man overboard pole consisting of a float with a ten foot fiberglass whip sporting a red and yellow flag, a water-activated strobe light, and a yellow horse shoe float tethered to it; a LifeBuoy recovery system comprising a white horseshoe buoy tied to the stern rail with fifty feet of floating line; a man overboard ladder; a recovery hoist; and a DanBuoy self-inflating man overboard marker with its own flag and flashing light.

Even without deploying all this paraphernalia, a man overboard exercise, whether real or staged, lays all sorts of pitfalls for an unpracticed crew. First of all, there's a high likelihood that those still safely aboard might not even know of their missing crew mate until long after he or she has been left far out of sight in the boat's wake. Second, there's the aforementioned difficulty in contending with darkness, waves and distractions to keep eyes on the victim. Assuming you can get back to your friend in time, there's the effort involved in lassoing him, then hoisting what may likely be a couple of hundred pounds of inert human up four feet onto a heaving deck. It hardly helps to mention the process of reviving the poor bloke.

We drilled four or five times, honing our technique with different combinations of crew with one of us playing victim, moaning and crying from the safety of the deck while the others struggled to keep sight of the float we'd thrown overboard as a mock overboardee, steer the boat, and rig equipment. As has become his trademark, Ed provided the most intense histrionics in his overboard role, alternately shouting his disapproval at being missed by the helmsman's maneuvers, then loudly moaning his tragic fate at being left adrift alone in the roiling sea.

After all that, I will assure you that our exercises served as a strong reminder that none of us want to go for an impromptu mid-ocean swim. Policy aboard Mabrouka is that we wear self-inflating life vests and are tied to the boat at all times when it's either dark or the wind is blowing more than about 15 knots. The guys were very good about this through the entire cruise and eagerly reminded those who had the occasional lapse.

With some modifications to our approach and a couple of suggestions for supplementing and/or reorganizing our equipment, we finally called it quits and returned to our course for Anacortes. By that time we'd drifted on the ebb current all the way back to Point Colville and had a mile or so of Rosario Strait to haul back in.

The four of us rotated between lounging and steering as we motored around Fidalgo Island and up Guemes Channel under a slightly cloudy sky that offered only anemic winds that wouldn't carry us against the tide. We pulled into Cap Sante Marina in the early afternoon, a day earlier than my reservation, but there was room at the inn, so all was well. The crew had all gotten transport back to Seattle arranged by the time we'd tied up, so they trundled ashore to the showers, made pretty for their rendezvous with girlfriends, and left me alone on the boat for a couple of days to prep for the real departure.

Maybe you'd expect me to feel neglected at this abandonement, but that was only slightly so. Rather, I realized that this expedition required giving my personal space over to some big personalities for the foreseeable future and I relished recovering a few days of that freedom before the big push southward.