Is This One That We Won't Want To End?

Seven-year-old Eric to me the other day, in conversation: "Dad, when you're sailing, it's like you're smiling and frowning at the same time."

So...that's me saved the trouble of writing the next book!

It is indeed like smiling and frowning at the same time, this business of sailing the world with my family.

On one hand, the highs are Olympian - the sun-drenched, champagne-sailing, endless days with nothing but the clouds and the birds and the horizon and ourselves for company.

And even the everyday, less-than-peak moments make me smile. Like when I realize how many hours a day I manage to spend with my children on average through the year.

And yes, there are the frowns. For anyone who thinks that we take unreasonable risks by taking children on ocean crossings: believe me, you haven't even begun to consider the risks in the depth that Alisa and I have considered them. We've lived those risks, really, for the last decade - evaluating them, and evaluating our ability to evaluate them, and coming to grips with our own set of best practices for managing them. I don't know how Alisa feels about it, but it's enough to keep a furrow on my brow at sea. And also enough to set me into a flurry of parental over-reaction when the boys do something boyish like mucking around on our steep companionway ladder.

Besides those big-picture frowns, there is also that everyday background frown that comes from sharing space with Eric when he just needs to get off the boat and go for a run already, and I just need to catch up on my fractured sleep.

If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you know that my own personal sailing frown/smile equation balances out at just this side of rapture. Chucking it all to set out while our oldest son was still too young to walk turned out to be the most worthwhile hare-brained undertaking that I can imagine.

And so now, as we return to the Rock (Kodiak's nickname for itself) from whence we set out, I have found myself wondering if we'll pull a Moitessier. Will we reach one of those blissful end-of-passage states that we sometimes achieve and decide to just keep sailing until we find ourselves anchored once again off the Iluka pub?

Don't bet on it. We are the do what we set out to do crowd, Alisa and I, and in this instance we set our minds on what we might rediscover in the place we used to call home.

Meanwhile, here's some of the more quotidian details of the passage as it stands...

We showered in the sun on the back deck yesterday, and spent today in thermals and rain gear, even though we are still south of the latitude of San Francisco. Just now we're trying to keep a low from running us over, and then we hope to harvest a day or two more of southerly winds from that system, keeping us pumping along in more or less the right direction. It's been a fiddly passage, as befits one mostly outside of the trades. I feel like I'm forever trying to eke a few more degrees out of whatever setup we're using, trying to fall off or come up just a bit more without poling out the jib or taking the pole down or gybing. We have spent barely any time at all aiming right at Kodiak, and are meandering back and forth across the North Pacific in more or less the right direction.

And, our real news: for several days now we've been seeing albatross. Mostly black-footed, and a few Laysan.

We do love the tropics, but those oceans where the albatross roam might be our true home.

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This post was sent via our high-frequency radio as we're far from internet range. Pictures to follow when we reach internet again. We can't respond to comments for now, though we do see them all!

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