Dedicated

Alisa trying to nap on our recent passage from Penrhyn to Pago Pago.  You can tell how quiet the kids are being!  Alisa and I were splitting the night into four watches and each getting five hours of sleep.  The days dragged as we adult sleepy-heads tried to shepherd the boys through the everday business of life without too many dramas.  The nightwatches, in comparison, were a piece of cake.

After the first two rowdy days it turned into a quiet, quiet passage.  Look at how calm things are here at breakfast - a full cup of coffee sitting placidly on the table, the banana fritters that Alisa has made behaving themselves and staying on the plate.

It was stinking hot, and bucket showers were very popular as a result.  Elias loved having bucket after bucket of cool ocean water dumped over him.

Alisa baked every other day.

Elias with an old halibut jig that we souped up to catch tuna.  It lasted about four hours in the water, and then disappeared with the first hit.

Dawn on the last day of the passage.  The wind was well below ten knots for four days straight.  We were quite pleased with how Galactic sailed in such light air, but on the last day we fired up the engine to reach Pago Pago before nightfall - the allure of a sound sleep at anchor was too much to resist.

Sailing into Pago Pago Harbor.  We've been very businesslike here, just concentrating on getting errands and boat jobs done so that we can get back to sea.

One of the errands on my list was running out to DHL to pick up advance copies of South From Alaska.  It was great fun to surprise Alisa with a copy (she didn't know they'd be here) and to show her the dedication page, which has her name on it.  She hadn't known that the book was dedicated to her.  Giving her the first copy, and telling her that the book was, in the larger sense, for her, was a moment that lived up to everything I had expected it would be.

The end.