Alfred chuckled. "Well, the place we're going now is the Sanditon Resort," he explained. "The owner is a friend of mine, and I fixed up some of the sailboats there when I first got back to England, so he lets me take them out whenever I like." Whenever I like might have been a slight exaggeration; it probably depended a good deal on how busy the resort was. Alfred knew better than to show up and take business away from the Fudges, though, and it was unlikely that anyone was renting the sailboats in early March, much less a significant number of them.

"He's got a weather charm up around the Resort that makes it always nice and sunny, and the wind just right for sailing," he continued. "So it's a good place to learn. But if you go sailing somewhere else, they're usually called docks."