Whistling in the Dark

G. Henry Steges dedication to sailing was a natural development. Raised on the Connecticut shore of Long Island Sound, he followed a career in international marketing while sailing a series of boats from dinghies to several larger craft:a family cruiser named Starduster, then a successful one-ton ocean racing yacht named Stegosaurus, and finally a fifty-foot cutter named Stegosaurus II. After earning his Coast Guard Captains license and PADI Divemaster certification, he and his wife teamed up to operate Stegosaurus II as a charter yacht. Over a twelve year period they sailed more than 22,000 ocean miles commuting between Connecticut and the Virgin Islands, and approximately 4,000 miles running charters through the Virgins and various Windward Islands of the Caribbean.. His experiences formed the basis for two volumes of verse: Whistling in the Dark and Singing in the Sun, each of about 145 poems. They earned him the selfappointed title of Underwater Poet. Ashore following the sale of Stegosaurus II, he extrapolated his sailing life into two novels: Wings of Morning and Hurry Sunrise, following an earlier work, unrelated to the ocean, titled Season of the Fireflies. Sadly, Stegosaurus II was sunk by her new owner 200 miles south of Haiti during a singlehanded winter passage from Florida to Aruba. He survived. The boat did not.