You're reading a lot in preparation for the 2007 voyage, and for trustee work. What about for pleasure?

Sometimes, just to get to sleep, I'll grab things that I want to know about. I have "The Palau Islands" by Mandy Thyssen. It's related to the voyage, but I'm reading it more for pleasure and because I've always wanted to dive Palau. I may grab a magazine on boat designs, because I like boats. Things that help me rest my thinking.

You seem to seek texts that help you see better, and you've said before that you most feared the blindness of the doldrums during your first voyage; your father also suffered a loss of vision — is there a connection?

I hadn't thought about that. But it's interesting you say that about seeing. All this stuff that we're doing, all this reading that we're doing, all this does is prepare us to explore. It sets the appropriate framework for us to go explore, and exploration is about reaching out and learning, but it's also about seeing. If anybody was influential in making me understand the power of vision it was my father, because he was shot in the invasion of Europe in World War II and he lost his left eye. He would tell me that time of blindness is when he understood the power of vision and being able to see your future.

Then reading is a way to see where you're going?

Absolutely. It's preparing ourselves to explore, it's preparing ourselves to see the destination that we're actually trying to seek. In many ways, reading is part of the process of fulfilling the purpose and the mission of what we are trying to accomplish.