Fellow Travellers

There are thousands and thousands of sailboats out traveling the world at any one time, and their movements follow very definite seasonal patterns.  Right now nearly all the travelling boats in the Southern Hemisphere are moving into the tropics to enjoy the new cyclone-free season and to avoid the rigours of a winter spent at the more dreary latitudes.

We, of course, are sitting out this season.  And while it's not the kind of thing that we think about much, I think that we are missing the company of other travelling sailors.  There's a very special bond that we feel with other people who cross oceans in their own boats.

So it was a great treat to have our friends Rex and Louise on Six Pack just down the dock from us for the last few days.

We first met Rex and Louise in Tonga, almost four years ago.  Then, a year or two later, we crossed paths with them in Mooloolaba, just at the right time for them to be the honored guests at Elias' third birthday party.  And now they've turned up four pens over from us on BB dock.  It's a classic sort of history to have with other sailors - fun meetings, widely spaced.

Six Pack is the size that cruising boats used to be twenty or thirty years ago, before everyone decided that passagemaking boats had to be floating castles.  These guys have been at it for decades, have sailed an amazing amount, and are low-key and understated about it all, in the way that the most accomplished sailors seem to be.

Alisa and I were particularly interested in the winter that they spent in Patagonia on Six Pack, and we peppered them with questions about their experiences there.

Nothing like the promise of future adventure to excite sailors in port...

Going Home

Galactic snugged up at the dock.  Tarp over the cockpit, 

Arctic entry over the back of the dodger, going nowhere.

Sitting still for a season makes sense to us - Eric can get a little older before we go sailing again, Elias can do a year in school, and Alisa and I can take a breather from the constant movement that dominated our life in 2011.

But there's a discontent that comes to a sailor in port.  You want to be going, you want to feel that energy that only comes when you're setting off for somewhere new.  Strangely, though, at the same time that you miss the excitement of long passages, getting moving again seems improbably difficult - it's a far-off state, that existence of constant travel, and when you're sitting all the difficulties in the life afloat suddenly seem so substantial.

So, this season at the dock in Tasmania has given Alisa and me ample time to mull over the future.  One of the things that we've realised is that we need to cook up a new plan.  When we first left Kodiak, we had a very concrete goal - to sail to Australia.  Then, when we bought Galactic last year, we had a new plan - to sail across the Pacific again, get back to Tassie and catch our breath.

Now that we look back on all that, we have heaps of great memories, but it also feels like we've been repeating ourselves a bit, trodding already-known paths.  And, as the five-year anniversary of leaving home in Kodiak approaches (how did that happen?), the question of how long we'll be living afloat is raised - is this a particular phase in our lives, or are we settling in to being permanent vagabonds?

As we've been thinking about our plans for the coming years, we've been thinking explicitly about the answers to big questions like that.  What we've come up with can be summarised generally with three points: First, it's time to start visiting new places.  Our time in Australia has been great, but it's been enough for now.  Second, if we can help it, we won't spend this long sitting still again - while we're travelling, we'd like to keep moving.  And third, it's time to start heading home to Alaska.  It might be five or six years until we get there, but we need to figure out what parts of the world we want to see while we're out sailing, and work them into an itinerary that will take us back.

So, inshallah, when we head off to New Zealand next summer, we'll be starting a new season in our voyaging that will eventually see us closing the circle back at the dock in Kodiak.  

ABC Local Radio

Well, late notice, but I'll be interviewed about South From Alaska on Hobart ABC local radio tomorrow - Sunday - around 1030 in the morning Hobart time.  That's 936 AM in Hobart, or listen online if you're outside of Hobart.