Life-changing events prompt author’s book

“No one can do anything lasting for Long Island who has not lived there, who does not know and love its geology, topography, its waters and its people, who is unacquainted with its history as well as its immediate past.” — Robert Moses’ remarks at a conference at Hofstra University in 1955.
 
Now why would someone spend three decades researching a couple of forgotten shipwrecks that occurred off the South Shore of Long Island more than 170 years ago, and a mass grave in Lynbrook for the victims? 
For me the search for the facts behind the tragedies was more than an academic exercise. Largely, this is because I have always been connected to the waters around Long Island. I have owned a boat (usually more than one) ever since I was twelve, when I built my first one. In the past sixty years I have spear-fished, sailed, swum, canoed, fished, and clammed most of Long Island’s waters, and motorcycled almost every road on the Island.  I also served in the U.S. Naval Reserve out of the Freeport and Whitestone stations, crossed the Atlantic on destroyers, and sailed a tall ship from New York to Cape May and Provincetown. But it was two personal, traumatic experiences that made the two shipwrecks truly my story.
  In the summer of 1972, three life-changing events occurred:  I moved with my wife and baby daughter to Lynbrook. That same week my sister, Irene Bates, then twenty-three, drowned in the wreck of her restored, nineteenth-century, tall-ship, the Lefteria (“freedom” in Greek). It happened in a nighttime collision with a French weather ship, France II, in the Bay of Biscay. Later that year I happened upon a mass grave and monument in Lynbrook.