But later, before she vanished into her weekend, she scooped us up onto a boat in the old town harbor captained by Beppe Martelli (a distant cousin), and off we scudded to see the Punta Mesca, at the western tip of Monterosso, just north of the public beach at Fegina, where a massive statue of Neptune called "Il Gigante" looms over the bay, clinging to a boulder.
Outside the harbor, the captain of Al Iradah 6, Saif Nasser, said something else propelled him, too — the sense of self-respect and self-determination that came with rising up.
Mainly we drove from Manchester, England, across the Yorkshire Moors to Whitby, that ancient little port where the ruins of the abbey perch high on the East Cliff, dominating the harbor whence Captain Cook set forth to discover Australia, and where Bram Stoker wrote and set "Dracula".
"We don't keep statistics on these things, but we certainly feel there are more arrests for things that have to do with too much drinking -- fights and the like -- when the weather is bad," said Stone Harbor Police Captain Larry Wilson.
"He is not going to be the captain of a ship, he's going to be a harbor master, and the harbor has 1,100 or 1,200 different ships, some of which are doing well, and some of which are floundering," said Diane Ravitch, a research professor at New York University.
The harbor master declares that the responsibility of the accident rests entirely with the Kurland's captain.
The venue was Captain Harbor, a beach club that flooded when the superstorm surged up the coast.
"I was stunned such a beautiful planet could harbor such bad things," Captain Brown wrote.
ReCAAP and the maritime bureau in Malaysia issued alerts to ship captains and harbor masters in the region, and the boat was found three weeks later in Thailand.
It was modeled after the pilot boats that carried 19th-century ship captains and harbor pilots to oceangoing vessels anchored offshore.
