That reader is a friend of mine, and in fact, a non-sailor. She said...

'Tom, I was just reading a review of the book 'Why Homer Matters' by Adam Nicholson and couldn't resist sending this excerpt along':

---the canvas stirs, like a dog in a bed, begins to acquire a form, and the boat gains a sense of purpose, a coherence it had lacked as it slopped in the chop or swell. The wake slowly starts to bubble behind you, “the gleaming wake” that runs behind Homeric ships as a sign of life and excellence, the cockpit drains gurgle . . . and with tiller and sheet in hand you sit up and pick your course across the sea. That is the Odyssean moment, everything liquid but directed, everything mobile but related: the sea itself, your boat in it, the air and its winds, all the possibilities.---