"We are having a gale all night and a beauty too. The waves are lashing about us at a desperate rate, even against my window at times away up on the upper deck, but they can't drive us off our course. I go to bed at night, I fully expect to find myself on the floor in the morning. Please have a cradle for me when I get home so that I may be rocked to sleep. I am sure I could not sleep without it. O, what a mariner I have become! Also have a machine of some sort that will imitate the roaring of the wind and waves, and if you can find a picture anywhere of Captain Cuttle hang it on the parlor bulkhead. Feed me on seafood and put racks on the table when you do so that I may be able to live a land-lubber's life.''

So wrote my great-grandfather in his diary in 1900 as he plied through Japan's Seto Inland Sea on a U.S. Army transport ship.

Yet I, 104 years later, doing the same trip on a 40-foot (12-meter) yacht, could have written nearly the same entry in my diary. The sea is timeless.