I dreamt of skimming across the water last night, cutting through waves as the sails above me filled with the wind and land receded from view.

Writing about the Cleveland Tall Ships Festival that continue through Sunday certainly inspired that dream, but so did my long ago sail on Lake Erie with the HMS Bounty.

The Bounty was supposed to have been at the Tall Ships Festival again this year but she was lost last year off North Carolina as her captain headed out to sea to escape Hurricane Sandy.

 In recalling  my own Bounty voyage from Toledo to Cleveland in 1989 I also remembered when I tried to sign on as crew for the Saga Siglar, a replica Viking knarr built to retrace the long ago route of Leif Ericcson. That was in Newfoundland in 1983 where I went to welcome the ship to L'ans aux Meadows, an ancient Viking community believed to have housed Ericcson and his compatriots around 1000. It had sailed more than 4000 miles passing both Iceland and Greenland, as Ericcson surely did.

I searched out the stories I wrote back then, more than 30 years ago, and the memories came flooding back.

I'm so glad I had those experiences, but I'm not ready to hang it up yet and relegate them to dreams and memories.  I am going to try to return to L'ans aux Meadows again to see how it's fared as a declared historic site and I'm going to try and find the Saga Siglar.

I want to go back to sea again. But now, perhaps, I'll sail on a captained charter in the Virgin Islands -  maybe the Greek Islands I visited last year, or perhaps the Seychelles,  where I've never been.

Perhaps it's my Norwegian ancestry that makes me want to return to the sea.

But  I know deep in my soul we're all defined by our horizons as well as our dreams.