It Happens

Yes, it happens - the annual trip to the boat yard.

Hauling out Galactic always feels so odd - the family home/mothership/repository of all our hopes and dreams is suddenly parked on some obscure patch of gravel and taken all to pieces, and the long uphill journey to getting back into the water begins.

There's a funny transition where you go from being the master of your own ocean-going vessel, in your own watery realm, to being a mere rent payer in someone else's domain.  The yard guys know more about hauling your vessel than you do - they do it all the time, after all.  But you've also got to watch every decision they make, since you'll be living with their mistakes.  A funny transition.

And there's also the funny transition where you start thinking exclusively about the things that are wrong with the boat, and need to be set right.  This begins to open the door to self-doubt.  Who are you to be sailing the world with a boat that isn't absolutely perfect?

Everything will be fine once you get in the water again, and you retain a faint memory of how good it will feel to really shove off and point the bow to somewhere a hundred times farther than you can see.  But to get there you've got to put in the boat yard time.

Our bed, disassembled in order to drop the rudder out of the boat - for the second year in a row!

Of course, any fool could take care of a simple haul-out if that were all they were doing.  But I'm also coming up on the one month mark until the PhD thesis is due, I've got a brand-new biology project beginning this month, and we're now less than two months away from the day when we'd "like" to be ready for Rapa.

I feel strangely calm - is this a bad sign?