Two more circles

I've been thinking more about circles.  How we've been going long enough to close a loop here or there; with boats, or people, or the things that we do again and again.  Also - how we might eventually close the loop on our meanderings and find ourselves back in Kodiak…

Here's a circle that we closed in New Zealand - you probably remember Pajé, who danced with a reef in Tonga in the middle of the night:

One of the first sights to greet us when we motored up the Hatea River was the same Pajé, up on the hard in Whangarei.  You can see how the aluminum hull got beat in around the frames while she was on the reef.

And check out the rudder.

There was also a big split in the skeg that was looks like it was patched up in Tonga.  It must have taken a bit of courage to tackle the passage from Tonga to New Zealand with the boat in that state, wondering if anything else was going to break…

I haven't seen the owners.  I hope everything is going ok for them.

And a happier, ritual-of-our-lives circle: Alisa just now, at about 2230, finished the annual service to our seventh and last winch, completing the week-long circle that takes her all the way around the cockpit and out to the mast and back - a journey of stripping winches down, scrubbing all the parts with turpentine, re-greasing and reassembling without dropping a single little bit overboard…

She fits all this in to little bits of time when Eric is sleeping and Elias is reading, or after they're in bed and the dishes are washed.  I'll know our sailing days are over if there ever comes a year when Alisa isn't determined to get the winches done by some self-imposed deadline...