I threw down an anchor, and it stopped me 100 yards shorts of the rocks. But how long in that open, unprotected anchorage would it be before I was on the rocks, a pulverized pile of fiberglass?

OK, hotshot single-hander. OK, Mr. Macho know-it-all. What are you going to do now? How are you going to get yourself out of this?

I am hard pressed to tell you when I first started dreaming about sailing off alone into the sunset. A long time ago. One other marriage, four other towns, five other jobs ago. The dream was like an infection, and once it started growing there was no killing it.

Many who take to the sea in this way are driven by motives so gloomy I hate to write about them: antisocial types with hostilities even they can't clearly define. People fleeing unfortunate alimony settlements. People fleeing from their consciences and fleeing from the IRS (thank you, Jimmy Buffet).

I'm not one of those. I offer you a model of social adjustment, a perfectly healthy, fully integrated, well-adjusted, certifiably normal human being. I'm happily married (she and my son are flying down to join me), and I liked my job. (I will say there were days when being associate news director at the San Francisco TV station with the smallest news audience was not one unending laugh. But it was fun nine days out of 10, and how many people can say that about their jobs?)

No, I wasn't lighting out for the territories because I was unhappy where I was. It was something else. I was fleeing the dreary prospect of a tombstone reading, "Here lies Robert Hodierne. He never missed a day of work."

A million times, people asked my why I hoped to sail solo across the Pacific. For the first few years I quoted George Mallory and said simply, "Because it's there." When I got tired of that, I started telling people, "Look, when I'm 90 years old sitting in my rocking chair on the front porch of some retirement home, I want to be able to say, 'I once sailed a small boat across a big ocean by myself.'" Let's see the other old codgers top that one.

But neither answer was complete. (Though I must admit that old Mallory was probably onto something. Anyone who has to ask why you'd want to be the first man to climb the tallest mountain in the world is not going to understand any answer, so give him short rations and move on.)

This is a search for adventure in an era short on adventure, even, it seems, an era intentionally made hard on adventure. This is a time, after all, when we are so protected from ourselves that even the prosaic step ladder contains warnings so obvious that only a moron could benefit from them.

And not just any adventure will do. Our lives have become such cooperative ventures that it's hard anymore to point to any one thing and say, "I accomplished that. Alone, unassisted." Not since I was a war photographer in Vietnam have I had the unadulterated pleasure of individual accomplishment. Or the excitement of risk that cannot be shared. ("OK, it's agreed; we'll share this: You'll be half dead; I'll be half dead.")

Since then there has always been the taint of others: He got good editing; his assistant did most of the work. I wanted an adventure that would be mine alone. This is an ego trip.

All adventures carry a price. And the price of this one goes well beyond the cost of the boat.

My wife, Lisa, and I started paying the price from the time we moved from the dreaming to planning stage almost five years ago.

Part of the price is the forfeiture of things. Being one of those who came of age after John Kennedy and before Richard Nixon there was a part of me that believed an emotional attachment to things was unacceptably bourgeois. It should therefore be easy to strip things away. And yet …

Years ago, when I was just starting up a life after Vietnam, I had no furniture and little money. I built my own sofa. It was a sturdy, durable piece of furniture whose chief (perhaps only) charm was that I'd made it myself. I sold it and felt a moment of disloyalty to that earlier me.

Like many urban dwellers, my home had once been burglarized. The thief took the Nikons and Leicas that for 2 1/2 years I had lugged through the rice paddies and highlands of Vietnam, cameras to which I had a vast, illogical emotional attachment. With the insurance money from those cameras I'd splurged impulsively on an extravagant stereo. I sold the stereo and felt again the loss of the cameras.

And the books. About 800 of them. I don't think I'd ever sold, thrown away or given away any book I'd ever owned. I had books I'd never read, nor ever planned to read. I had books I'd read but never planned to read again. I had books in languages I can't read. It was as if mere possession of these books meant I possessed their knowledge. It was comforting to know that Camus was there if ever I was ready to risk that trough, that Hesse was there in German to humble me, and that Thucydides was there to settle any dinner arguments that might come up about the Peloponnesian wars.

I sold what I could, tried to palm off others on my friends and ended up giving most of them to the Salvation Army. The rest of my things went out the door without a whimper: prints, bedroom suite, kitchen appliances. Things. It hardly hurt at all. There was in fact something giddy about stripping down to essentials, I thought at the time.

What folly. No one buying a boat has stripped down to essentials. He has traded one set of things for another. There is probably no other hobby where there are more things to buy. Gadgets abound.

The biggest gadget of all is the boat itself. And buying a boat, especially your first boat, is a daunting experience. Just as in buying a house, most people deal with brokers. On a morality scale I'd say boat brokers rank above TV evangelists, dope peddlers and pornographers, but there are those who would argue the point. Let's not quibble.

Our boat hunt began early one winter. An especially wet winter. Lisa and I spent every weekend that season sloshing through sodden boat yards and marinas, in and out of boats. A scene that repeated itself time and again: Lisa and I standing on some rickety dock, cold rain streaming down our faces, our shoes soaked, looking at some derelict boat that we're assured needs only a little cosmetic work to be able to withstand the worst hurricane. "Hey, it's best to look at these in the rain," the brokers inevitably said. "Then you know if it leaks."

We found the boat we wanted. And eventually we bought it. But it wasn't easy. The low point of the whole episode found me on the phone to the owner who had failed to show up for the closing. It was a problem with brokers, he explained. I was so mad that in the middle of my newsroom, phone jammed in my ear, I rose to my feet, screamed at the poor man at the top of my lungs and, to the applause of my transfixed colleagues, slammed the phone down.

Ah, yes, life was getting simpler and calmer already; and we didn't have the boat yet. The happy ending in my tale is that the brokers ended up in court at each other's throats like a pack of pariah dogs fighting over table scraps.

I'll skip lightly over the next few years, though they were important to me. I left newspapers, went into television, had a son and consumed endless yellow legal pads figuring out the date at which we'd finally have enough money to quit and leave.

Shortly before last Thanksgiving I went to my boss and gave a month's notice. He was, like many of my friends, incredulous. Not many people quit well-paying jobs three weeks after the birth of their first child. When my wife's maternity leave was up, she quit, too. Gone were steady income, health insurance and pension plans.

Gone, too, was identity. One day shortly after I quit, I was making a small purchase with my MasterCard. Casually, as he was about to ring up the purchase, the clerk asked, "What do you do?"

It caught me off guard. No one had asked that. Indeed, what the hell was I now? "I'm a journalist," I finally said, wanting to avoid a long explanation.

"Oh, yeah?" He brightened. "Where do you work?"

"Well, I'm not working right now," I explained briefly. The clerk smiled a brittle little smile and called to check my credit limit.

Remarkable things start happening in a marina when you begin outfitting for a serious cruise. People you've never met stop by to talk, offer advice and help. In a way you become a celebrity, one who is actually going to live the dreams of almost everyone who has ever owned a sailboat.

Friends who don't own sailboats get caught up in the same spirit. Our downstairs neighbor, a graphic artist named Emily Parker, gave up two days of her Memorial Day weekend to repaint the name on our boat. In-laws helped pack the boat (no inconsiderable task, I might add), took care of our son and loaned us their truck.

For a single-handed passage I was getting an awful lot of help.

One of the most remarkable bits of generosity came from the son of the man whose boat had been tied up next to mine at the marina for four years, a man I barely knew.

Paul Mazza is the kind of person you meet cruising and is one of the best reasons to go cruising. Paul has cruised and raced, and he was quick to notice the gear that was starting to sprout on Yankee Lady -- gear no one who's going to putt around the Bay needs.

One day, when the boat was awash with supplies, Paul overheard Lisa and me; we couldn't find the fishing tackle. He gave us his. He heard us on the phone trying to find someplace that sold canned bacon. He found a place (and bought us a pound to try).

I told him I couldn't find a solar still for turning salt water into fresh in case we ever had to abandon ship and go to the life raft. "You know, I think I have one of those in my truck," he said. I thought he was kidding. He wasn't. And he wouldn't accept a dime for it. (I'd have paid a marine store $50 for one.)

"What kind of medical supplies do you have?" he asked one afternoon.

I launched into a practiced five-minute monologue about what a hypochondriac Lisa is and how we were better stocked than most corner drug stores. He listened and then asked, "Have a catheter kit?"

"Ah, no, I don't think we do as a matter of fact," I answered.

"You get stopped up out there and it could kill you," he said. He handed me a sealed, white plastic box. A catheter kit.

Now I have a hard time imagining catheterizing myself in the relative comfort of my shoreside bathroom. I tried imagining doing it on a moving boat in the middle of the ocean and I blanched.

What on earth was I getting into?

For the first week I measured my progress away from San Francisco by the clothes I took off. After day three I wore the sweater only at night. By day seven I took off the thermal underwear. And by the second week I wore nothing but shorts. I had found the tropics.

By then my days had settled into a peaceful routine. Up at daylight, increase the sails, figure out where I was and then slip into a kind of lethargy that caused one day to blur into another. A long ocean passage, if a sailor is lucky, is a vastly boring affair.

Until the very end, there wasn't a moment of fear. It was not so much a physical adventure as a spiritual one.

I had time and the privacy to spend hours thinking without having to explain to others, without having to apologize. It was a time to sort back through my life. I was able to remember things with a clarity and richness of detail that's simply not possible with telephones and television sets and traffic.

I worked my way through the memories of old loves like a gambler shuffling through a worn and familiar deck of cards. I wept for hours over friends lost in Vietnam and then laughed until I cried again over memories of days and nights together with those old friends, memories that had been lost for years in a brain overflowing with the trivialities we find so essential to keeping our daily lives in order.

I wondered, as I have many times, what my father would have made of this trip and wandered for hours among memories of him, looking for clues that might help me answer that question. I still don't know.

There were voices, of course, but they had little of importance to say. There was a voice in the gurgling cockpit drain that sounded very much like a TV play-by-play announcer and a nagging voice in a squeaking block and tackle whose complaints I ignored. I heard entire conversations as clearly as if heard through a wall, not quite clear enough to follow.

Had I expected more? A confrontation with my dark side where once and for all I vanquished it? Was I to relive those sins in my life and find some cathartic expiation? There were no penetrating visions and hidden truths remain just as hidden.

But I'm a happier man. I've had my adventure. I sailed a small boat alone across a big ocean to a small island. No one can take that away from me.

I was sure the boat was slowly dragging its anchor closer to the rocks. I was sure there was no way I was going to get the engine started before dark. And finally, on my short list of things about which I was sure, I was sure I didn't want to spend the night listening to those waves crash against those rocks.

There seemed little choice for the heroic single-hander. I got on the radio and called for help. And called. And called. After an hour, a Swedish woman in uncertain English asked if I needed a tow. I said that would be nice.

She and her husband, on their way to the next island, delayed their departure to help. I threw them a tow line, and they stood by as I sweated to get up the anchor, which I had thought was dragging but which now perversely refused to give up its hold on the bottom. It took an hour, but the Swedes' patience never flagged.

Yankee Lady was ignobly towed into harbor for all the other boats to see, and somewhere in there is a lesson about vanity and the need for others. I'm not sure just yet what that lesson is, but at least now I have the time to try to figure out what it might be.

This story appeared originally Oct. 18, 1987, in West, the San Jose Mercury's Sunday magazine.