'See, we don't want the mast straight up, but tilted downwind a bit. 'I'm very good ballast,' he says, rocking the boat a little as he moves. Quick shifts in the wind, to which they lean in or out now they're dancing with the wind, as Badim puts it. They shift to the windward side of the cockpit, lean out until they balance the boat against the wind. Their sail catches the bigger wind that rushes across the middle of the lake, which is silvery blue under the gusts. The deciduous trees on the hills are wearing their autumn colors, yellow and orange and scarlet all mixed with the green of the conifers. They can see all the way to the far end of Long Pond, where afternoon haze obscures the wall.

Out there, all of Nova Scotia is visible to them: forested hills around a lake. It takes quite a few tacks to get out of the little bay and into the wider expanse of Long Pond. (SFXFuture Publishing Ltd / Kim Stanley Robinson) It's just big enough for the two of them, and has a single big sail, sleeved over a mast that to Freya looks taller than the boat is long. The little sailboat can't point up into the wind very far, Badim says, and he calls it a tub, but affectionately. The boat leans over and they go right at the tall lake wall until they almost hit it, then Badim exclaims, 'Coming about,' just as he said he would, and Freya swings the tiller hard and ducks to get under the boom as it swings over them, and then they're tacking in the other direction, in a reach across the end of the bay. Freya holds the tiller most firmly, as instructed. So after they've checked out a boat, they have to push it straight off the side of the dock into the wind, Badim jumping in at the last minute, hauling the sail tight until the boat tilts, then aiming it toward the little corniche around the curve of the lakeshore. 'We always catch the brunt of the afternoon wind over the lake.'

The dock has a bunch of little sailboats people can take out, and an onshore wind blows hard almost every afternoon. 'That must be why they call this town the Fetch,' Badim says as they walk down to take out one of these boats.

Their new home is in an apartment building that overlooks a dock on the bay at the west end of Long Pond.

Aurora stanley robinson