Home Stretch

Well, we made it around the south end of New Caledonia last night, and then we were able to finally point the bow just south of west, straight at Bundaberg, our chosen port of entry for Oz. There is a certain amount of excitement on board - what a long way we've come since our first anchorage in Sausalito - and the 800 miles between New Cal and Bundy seem like almost an afterthought. Alisa canvassed the crew as to what sort of foods we were craving after our months of eating boat grub. She is looking forward to that first lamb burger. Elias wants a piece of ham. And I'm just craving some mahi mahi.

We had been hoping to reach Bundaberg in time to clear in on this coming Friday. But the sea, as always, is being free with the lesson of patience, and the winds have died to nearly nothing. Even if we were tempted to just motor through the calms, a coolant leak on the donk has announced itself as the latest entry on our endless list of things to fix, so we'll be traveling at whatever speeds the elements dictate.

And that's not so bad. Eric can run around in the saloon without us having to worry about him falling or puking, and he's much happier for the freedom. Alisa and I have a little more time to digest everything that's happened over the last six months, before we engage with the next phase of being back in Australia, and this whole crossing recedes into memory. And the Pacific is (at least for now) giving us a curtain call of how wonderful everything can be on a small-ish boat far out to sea, with the long swell from some storm far far away lulling us through the day, and the almost-tropical sun dappling the waves, and Eric picking the gibbous moon out of the daytime sky and exclaiming, just as his brother did, a few years ago from the cockpit of another boat on the other side of the Pacific, "muhhh!"