There seems to be a scarcity of great boating tales to tell these days. That's why we see so many recycled boating books, derived either from dusty, leftover manuscripts or pulled together into anthologies like "The Greatest Sea Stories Ever Told" or "Classics of the Deep." Part of the problem may be that boating in the electronic age has become so safe. Sure we can get into trouble, but it's pretty hard to get into so much trouble that we can write a whole book about it.

Cruising at Last Elliott Merrick; The Lyons Press; 288pp; $22.95

Also, the kind of trouble that can create attention-grabbing titles like "A Voyage for Madmen," "Death of the Fantome," "Fastnet, Force 10" or "After the Storm" usually involve death, destruction, terror, and suffering — just the kind of things that most of us try our best to avoid. So we're left with either republishing some manuscript we inherited or trying to spin a 288-page yarn about our voyage up the ICW to Maine. It takes a real pro to pull that off.

Elliott Merrick was just such a pro, an enormously disciplined writer who knew how to carry a literary tune. He was an accomplished author in his time, publishing several books, one of which, "Northern Nurse," spent some time as a New York Times best-seller. He was also widely published by magazines such as The New Yorker, Yachting and Rudder. Apparently he was too busy during his lifetime to pull together a number of short stories he had written about sailing into a cruising narrative, but now Upton Brady has done the job in "Cruising at Last," the story of Merrick's cruise along the U.S. East Coast with his wife in a homemade 20-foot sloop.

The story focuses on the making of a couple of cruisers, Merrick and his wife. OK, two wives, since the span of the short stories upon which the book is based covers two marriages, the first of which ended with the death of his wife. In the book, the two wives are consolidated in a single persona.

No matter — anyone whose relationship with another has developed and grown through shared cruising experiences can relate to the sanctity that the boat develops. "The rubbed mahogany was red and gold in the lamplight, a singularly warm and cozy hue, almost like the glow from a fireplace. Once when Kay looked up from her book, I said, "Imagine, getting here in our own boat!"

"Here" was Maine, the section of the book in which readers of Points East may take the most interest. Not that the trip from South Carolina isn't interesting — it is. From a major ship pile-up within just yards of them on the ICW to lazy days on the Chesapeake, Merrick's spare prose and Brady's tight editing will entertain any mariner, no matter what the homeport.

But readers who know Maine will greet the Merricks' arrival here with the same sigh one lets out when crossing the Piscataqua Bridge on I-95 — "Ahhh, home at last."

Though this was a long time ago, back when a lightship was still stationed off Portland and landfalls were made with the help of a radio direction finder, of course the place names haven't changed. We can still visit Handy Boat in Falmouth with them, tuck into Peaks Island out of the way of the ferry; smell the "fragrant, wild mint in the dewy grass, balsam, clover, violets" on Little Diamond; relish the warmth of a sunny rock after an ice-cold dip at McGlathery Island; delight in the circular talk of a Downeaster, as the Merricks did at tiny Damariscove:

"Poor holding ground where you're lying," a grizzled character told them.

"Is there any better?"

"No."

By the time the Merricks got to Maine, the author writes, they were "getting to be real cruisers at last." With that matriculation had come an understanding of the cruiser's need to revisit those places of earlier voyages, to find reassurance in the solid granite and tall pines.

This is a lovely book, not an exciting one. Oh, there's enough drama to perk us up now and then, but mostly it's a meditation, an attempt — but not too hard an attempt — to understand this thing we call cruising.

"As has been often said," Merrick writes, "cruising is going out in order to come in, and coming in so that you can joyfully go out again."

Sandy Marsters is the Points East editor.