The Foreign Service Journal, May 2016

the Foreign Service journal | may 2016 45 finally, in 2014, the eastern Med to our second home in Cyprus. The challenges fromweather, waves, navigation, cooking, heads, coral reefs and more were constant and varied. Costs also added up: I stopped calculating in dollars, and adopted “boat units” ($1,000) as currency. What rewards could justify the costs? First, the satisfaction of following a challenging career with a challenging retirement. Declining the safe and comfortable in favor of calculated risk and mastering, or at least surviving, elemental nature and ever-changing problems with sails, lines, engines and electronics. Second, my passages offered opportuni- ties to former State colleagues, family members and friends. That crew not only enabled my passages, but also created a camarade- rie that substituted well for the rush of a country team in crisis. Edmund J. Hull served as ambassador in Yemen (2001-2004) and as Princeton University’s first diplomat-in-residence (2005-2007). His book, High-Value Target: Countering Al-Qaeda in Yemen won the American Academy of Diplomacy’s Dillon Award for Distinguished Writing on American Diplomacy in 2011. Blue Water Sailing magazine published his article, “An Ionian Passage: A Cruising Dream Realized in the Wake of Odysseus” in April 2015. Finding the Perfect Retirement Work By Sonny Low R etirement started for us on July 5, 2005, when we boarded a flight to London to start a “Grand European Tour” for three weeks. The tour took us from England to France, Monaco, Swit- zerland, Austria, Italy, Germany and back to Washington, D.C.