Finding Fortune

Alisa, I'm afraid, will hardly recognize the sentiments that I'm about to express here.

She will be thinking of me as the bloke she has known over the last 24 hours, the one who is feeling a bit worn to the nub by the dual and dueling demands of being a working scientist and a globe-girdling yottie.

But if we look a little further back, say about 72 hours, to the day when I returned to Panama and was reunited with my fellow Galactics, I was feeling anything but overwhelmed by my eternal desire to sit in two seats at once. (I've heard that's a Russian metaphor. It's a good one.) 

Elias in Frisky with Panamanian and Norwegian crew

When I was reunited with the family, and our floating home, my overwhelming feeling was a sense of gratitude.

The boys, they seem to have really hit a great stretch in their young lives. They are quite comfortable in themselves, and our family routine, and their blossoming place in the world.

Alisa and I are banging along quite nicely as well, feeling, bar the occasional meltdown over the chalk-and-cheese mix of science and perpetual independent travel, like we're just hitting our stride in this life afloat. Give us the choice and we just might sign up for another nine and a half years. Without a second thought.

The boys with their great mate, Stan the Norwegian. Did he ever take their Minecraft to the next level

I would call it luck. But I've read enough Hemingway to have taken on that perspective of his that luck is both essential and undependable. It comes. It goes.

Luck is what we fell back on when we left the marina where the barky had been parked during my two weeks off in Alaska and Seattle, makin' a living. The stern went in an unexpected direction when we backed out against the trades, and I fell back on an unplanned all-or-nothing turn in full forward to get us out, living through the sickening moment before we had steerage and were just motoring down on the line of parked yachts before us. There was luck in getting in and out of there unscathed. Lesson - no more tight berths in windy marinas for us.

The Rose

So, rather than luck, I think I've got great good fortune. To be spending all this time together as a family, when everyone involved is happy to do so.

That's about all the fortune that I need, or could really imagine right now.

Luck might pass, and will. But a period of life like we're living through now, and have been for these years - I like to imagine that that is our moveable feast, that these years will have become an inseparable part of each us, and will go with us wherever we go.