Sailing the Baltic with a Shakespearean Sensibility

By Maggie Hirt

Sailing is filled with high highs and low lows just like William Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies. At different points of everyday, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a sailor can feel “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet/ Are of imagination all compact” (V:1 7-8). The lunatic perhaps embodies all sailors as they endeavor out, the lover embodies the couples or teams that dare it, and the poet is those of us that try to communicate what is almost impossible to put into words—sailing.

In January 2019, my husband, Nick and I, with our four children, float in our 49 foot W...