Milestones

We've noted a couple of milestones this week. First, we've passed solstice, so the shortest day of winter is behind us; though we may still be getting shorter daylight as we continue to move south.

Second, we've seen the eighth anniversary of our departure from Kodiak. We only lived in Kodiak for seven years, and I'm sure that neither Alisa nor I expected to be gone so long when we set out on Pelagic. Alisa made pudding for dinner on the anniversary night and Elias asked everyone to share their favorite place of the trip. I came up with Hobart, as that's where we brought Eric into the world and into the crew. Hobart would have scored high points with everyone regardless. And as for some of our other favorites, they underscored the vastness of the South Pacific. How do you evaluate Iluka, New South Wales and Rapa, the Austral Islands, on the same scale?

And now, improbably enough, we find ourselves just north of the Straits of Magellan.

We need the weather to play nice when we enter the Straits, as they funnel and accelerate the prevailing westerlies. We're getting a very nice break between two lows just now, but most of the good weather arrived at night, and we weren't willing to leave this anchorage in the dark. So we'll check the updated forecast just now, but based on the forecast that we saw yesterday we expect it to be blowing a gale by this afternoon.

We operate on the border of feeling that if we wait for perfect weather we'll never move and not wanting to get caught out in really bad conditions. For the day that takes us into the Straits, we're leaning towards the latter. So we'll likely be waiting here for several days for another chance.

When it's beautiful here it's really beautiful; when it blows it really blows; and when it rains it really rains.

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We got no internet, no no.
We're as out of touch as we can be,
Yes, yes.

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