​If you're young and male and highly educated, you've inevitably viewed the sea as a potential testing ground, an antidote of sorts to the education you didn't receive. And most likely, you chickened out, or we'd have read about it, because nearly every piece of literature about an intellectual picking up an oar has been a tremendous success: Richard Henry Dana, Jr.'s Two Years Before the Mast, Melville's Typee, Joshua Slocum's Sailing Alone Around the World, Robert Stone's Outerbridge Reach,
