Somewhere on the Water Paperback – July 22, 2025

It began with an article in the Lincoln News of November 11, 1993, after Don and Joanne Ramsay began their first long voyage on a newly-acquired trawler, Ram-Sea. Thirty-five days into the trip Don sent some day-to-day highlights to the Lincoln News, which combined them into one piece.That initial submission developed into a series of columns, about 50 altogether, called “Somewhere on the Water.” Don wrote of their cruises up and down the U.S. East Coast, its ports-of-call, ibays and inlets, Intra-coastal Waterway, and off-shore islands they visited.In too brief a time cancer took Joanne’s life. A couple years before that, cancer had also claimed their friend Alton Pickering, who, along with his wife, Betty, is mentioned in these pages. After Joanne’s passing Betty Pickering became a crew member on the Ram-Sea, and the cruises, along with the newspaper columns, resumed until 2015, when Betty’s health began failing.Before the journeys aboard the Ram-Sea, Don Ramsay had a welding and metal-fabrication business in Lincoln, Maine. For reasons that he reveals in these pages he and his wife, Joanne, began boating along the Atlantic coast in 1993. Don, however, was tormented by Maya Angelou’s sentiment that “There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you.” Don couldn’t let the stories of Ram-Sea’s cruises fade like the wake behind the boat. He also understood that boating, with its unpredictabilities and inherent dangers, would surely provide some challenges. He faced these eventualities with this: “[T]he difference between an ordeal and an adventure is attitude,” (from the chapter “Single Again.”)And he had a gift for expressing things, great and small, for instance, “…the brick streets lined with palm trees have a number of small stores [and] specialty shops, where much more than time can be spent.” Or consider this, from the chapter, Anchorage off Bottle Key:“It’s quiet here in the aft cabin, very quiet. Not only in sound, but also in water motion. The ticking of the clock and Betty’s breathing are all that breaks the silence. There’s no wave action or I would be able to hear the dinghy, which is trailing off the swim platform. We’re anchored off a small uninhabited key in Florida Bay, away from those Keys that are connected to each other by Highway U.S. 1 — far enough off so that the lights and noise of civilization do not reach us… It will be an hour or so before sunrise. That’s enough time to get up, build a pot of Maxwell House, and be up on the aft deck to greet the first light of the day. Good idea! I make my way easily in the dark. From the aft cabin by the foot of the bed I take the four steps up to the main cabin, then five steps across that room and four steps down, then turn left into the galley. There is a light over the stove and another over the sink, neither of which will shine into the aft cabin. If I had known last evening that I would be making coffee this early I would have had the pot ready and sitting on the stove now. That way I could avoid the sounds of the water pump and all the noise associated with that stainless steel coffee pot.”With self-deprecating humor, keen timing, nautical expertise, and a solid grasp of American history, Don wrote dozens of day-by-day articles while cruising or tied up somewhere on the water. These pieces were written as they took place, often in the present tense. Most were printed (some under the byline, Don and Joanne Ramsay) in the Lincoln News, and Don took pains in each article to be clear. He didn’t assume, for instance, that someone seeing the current article had read the one of the previous week. Therefore there is some recapitulation from story to story.These stories have now been brought together in one volume, under the title given to all his Lincoln News articles: Somewhere on the Water Read more