I FIRST SAW HER moored in Stornoway harbor on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. She looked like a dinghy or a dory, but she was a lug-rigged open boat whose hull was of Scottish larch. She was called Broad Bay, and from stem to stern she measured shorter than three men lying head to toe.

She was two years short of her century, and two of us were going to sail her south for several days through the Minch, the fierce, deep-water sea channel that separates the Outer Hebrides, a chain of islands...