At forty, Mary South had a beautiful home, good friends, and a successful career in book publishing. But she couldn't help feeling that she was missing something intangible but essential. So she decided to go looking for it . . . at sea. Six months later she had quit her job, sold the house, and was living aboard a forty-foot, thirty-ton steel trawler she rechristened Bossanova. Despite her total lack of experience, South set out on her maiden voyage — a fifteen-hundred-mile odyssey from Florida to Maine — with her one-man, two-dog crew. But what began as the fulfillment of an idle wish became a crash course in navigating the complicated byways of the self.

It's never too late to be who you might have been.

— George Eliot

Not long ago, I was probably a lot like you. I had a successful career, a pretty home, two dogs and a fairly normal life.

All I kept were the dogs.

Then one day in October 2003, I quit my good job and put my sweet little house on the market. I packed a duffel bag of clothes and everything else I owned went into storage. Within weeks I was the proud owner of an empty bank account and a 40-foot, 30-ton steel trawler that I had no idea how to run. I enrolled in nine weeks of seamanship school, and two weeks after my course ended, I pulled away from the dock on my very first trip: a 1,500-mile journey through the Atlantic from Florida to Maine.

My transformation from regular person to unhinged mariner started casually enough. Lured to Pennsylvania a few years ago by one more step up the book publishing career ladder, I had accepted a job that was editorial, managerial and very dull. I was busy enough at the office but, after work, I didn't know what to do with myself. I cooked, took guitar lessons, went to the gym, drank manhattans, watched movies at home and read books and magazines. But still I faced an abundance of excruciatingly quiet free time. On business trips to the city, I'd stock up on magazines. At first, I read a predictable assortment for a girl in exile from the big city: the New Yorker, New York, New York Review of Books.

Okay, it wasn't all about New York. There was House and Garden, Dwell, Utne Reader, Maisons Côté Ouest, Vogue, Gourmet. I'd read just about anything — which is probably how an occasional Yachting started to find its way into my stockpiles. When I saw Motorboating, Sail and Powerboating at the local supermarket, peeking out from behind the overwhelming number of firearm and bride publications (a combination that captured the flavor of the area all too well), I thought "Why not?" Soon, I had completely given up on literature, current events, even home decor. I started subscriptions to Passagemaker and Soundings, full year-long commitments. From there, it was a scary slide down the slippery slope to more extreme, niche titles (Professional Mariner Magazine, Workboat Magazine, American Tugboat Review) that I just had to have. I was becoming a trawler junky and I wasn't sure why.

But let's backtrack for a moment. I'd better start by admitting I am an optimist — not just your run-of-the-mill, happy-face, Pollyanna-type. I'm Old School — an extreme optimist of the sort that went out of style around the time of Don Quixote.

And like most optimists who regularly suffer the crushing defeats of a world less wonderful than they had imagined, I'm sure I have developed some finely honed coping strategies. (Or denial issues, if you prefer to call the glass half empty — as I obviously do not.) For instance, although I had just arrived at a new job in rural Pennsylvania full of vim and vigor, the deeply repressed realist within me knew almost immediately that I had made a terrible mistake. But there was no way I could admit that — even to myself.

The vocal Optimist in me said: Hey, this is pretty cool. They have an organic café at work and the food's really inexpensive.

But the mute Realist in me knew: Almost all of the food, no matter what it was, tasted weirdly the same, which — let's face it — was not good. At any price.

The Optimist said: Wow. It's so rural out here that you'd never know you were only 100 miles from New York City.

The Realist knew: I did not want to live in a place...

Mary South was a founding editor of Riverhead Books. In the course of her career, she edited an eclectic list of award-winning and bestselling books, including The South Beach Diet. When she is not aboard the Bossanova, South lives in New York City, where she is now senior editor of Yachting magazine.