Should Have Burned It

Into the dumpster, ignomiously.

We bought a new jib in South Africa. Raised it to the masthead and gave it a try, but then found to our horror that we somehow chafed a hole into the sun protection on the leech.

So the old jib came out of the forward head an saw us, with a few fairly major sewing sessions, all the way back home to Alaska.

This morning, in the midst of prep for our biology work on the boat, and irked at the idea of moving the new jib from one place to another as we re-organized down below, we once again bent the new sail.

This time we're committed. The old jib went into the dumpster.

We put 50,000 miles on the thing.

"Damn," Alisa said. "We should have burned the thing. Had a proper bier. Showed some respect, instead of just putting it in the dumpster."

Elias on the old jib, when it was down for repairs between Panama and Hawai'i.

Good sailing writing should make you do what?

Wet your pants with laughter, that's what.

At least, that was the reaction that both A. and I had when we read this reflection on a dream well lived, written by our good friend Melissa Beit.

Extra credit: explain why these kinds of shenanigans, in the company of children, are a fine idea.

If you can't, you're likely a Dock Queen, or a landlubber, or are simply cursed with more good sense than our favorite sorts of people seem to be.

What's In a Name?

Two good boat names

We are officially done with boat swaps. We've done it once, with an infant and a four-year-old, and we're not doing it again. Galactic is a fine boat for us, able to do most anything we'd care to do under sail.

But...maybe there's always a future boat in a sailor's imagination. Some idealized craft that can take you from the careworn reality of actual ownership of an actual boat. Or (forbid!), some daydream to assuage a sailor who has found himself on the beach, without a vessel to call his own.

When Alisa and I daydream about a boat, it's something a bit smaller than Galactic that might carry us away from land life after our two cabin boys are launched on their own life voyages and are no longer following us to every port.

We don't get into the details of what another boat might look like. As I noted, we're very happy with Galactic.

The kind of idle daydreaming we do occasionally indulge in is to think of possible names for a future boat. Naming a boat is a serious undertaking when you are confronted with a blank space on the hull, waiting to be emblazoned with your choice moniker. But it's harmless fun when you're just playing what-if.

To whit, here are our leading choices for that boat-to-be-someday:

Small Axe - You know, as in the Bob Marley song. This one goes with the idealized smallish unpainted aluminum French cruising boat that A. and I see ourselves in as we while away our golden years.

Tall Cotton - I had a rock climbing partner from the American South who used to shout up at me when I was on lead, "Just make that one more move, Mike, and you'll be in tall cotton!". Always seemed like a perfect name for a sailboat to me. You know, the image of towering white sails, billowing over the water and all. Alisa has never been convinced.

Ramble - This one is a recent favorite of mine. Reminds me of Bill Tilman's famous Mischief. Nice play-in with Alisa's nickname from decades ago, the Arab Rose, and her time, also decades ago, as a Deadhead. You know, "Ramblin' Rose"? I guess dubious hippy music plays into our choices.

Titanic - My absolute favorite. Reason 1, we would be guaranteed to be the only Titanic in the world. And reason 2, it would be an absolute declaration of liberation from maritime superstition. Poor Alisa - she's pretty sure I'm joking about this one, but can't quite be sure. After all these years together, she still can't tell.

This Peripatetic Life

We were at a party last night in Kodiak, and someone asked me about the friends we'd made during our grand tour.

"Yep," I answered. "The way we look at it is, we got to know some of the most fantastic people that you could ever imagine. And most of them we'll likely never see again."

Elias and Eric had certainly picked up on the transitory nature of sailing friendships. As we were counting down our last year before returning to our home port, I once asked them what they were looking forward to about being ashore. "We can have friends!" was their immediate, and enthusiastic, answer.

Most of the time in the life afloat, you meet people, hit it off, and then sail away from each other, never again to cross paths. If you're on the same route, say sailing across the Pacific, you're likely to run into people over and over during the season. But then the season ends, and you inevitably go your separate ways. 

A very few times, though, we've been lucky enough to run into simpatico yachties during more than one season.

A couple memorable examples are illustrated below. There was Six Pack, with Rex and Louise aboard, whom we met in Tonga, saw again a year later in Queensland, and then saw again a couple years after that in Tasmania.

And there was Thélème, the long-term floating home of wonder couple Richard and Michele, delightful holdovers from the good old days when sailing wasn't so darn serious, and sailors were a lot more fun. That's Thélème tied next to Galactic in Whangarei, New Zealand.

The very champion example of ships we meet more than once, though, is our friend Leiv on Peregrine. We met in Tasmania, saw him again in the Falklands, and just now had a great summer with him in Kodiak.

Leiv and Elias, high above Kodiak

But these things of course come to an end. Leiv buggered off a few weeks ago, chasing rumors of cheap sandblasting in Mexico, and ultimately headed back home to the Falklands.

I've gotten very used to quick goodbyes. In fact, the practiced way that sailors make quick work of goodbyes is one of the many things find attractive about that wonderful tribe of hybrid dreamer-doers.

So it was Alisa who really marked the moment for us when Leiv dropped by Galactic to say farewell. When the hell would we ever see each other again, she wondered aloud.

When indeed.

Farewell, mate.

You're Not A High Latitude Sailor Until...

You know the saying from the old days - "you're not a cruiser until you've towed the Pardeys into port!"

(That's just a delightful bon mot from an earlier and much more innocent era in the sailing game, and not at all a dig at the Pardeys, who, when we met them in New Zealand, were more than kind and hospitable.)

But, having heard that joke from the past recently, I was inspired to coin my own variation: "You're not a real high latitude sailor until you've had Jérôme Poncet on board for dinner!"

We Galactics were recently privileged enough to do just that.

Our mate Leiv Poncet has been operating his sailboat Peregrine out of the Kodiak this summer, and his dad, Jérôme, came to Kodiak from the Falklands for a bit of a sailing holiday with his son. Having been hanging out with Leiv every chance we got this summer, we naturally also got to hang out with his dad while he was here.

In the world of high-latitude sailing, Jérôme is just about as big a deal as there is.

Consider this: his first boat Damien, which he co-owned with Gérard Janichon, sits right next to Bernard Moitessier's Joshua in the Musée Maritime de la Rochelle. Damien was a 10-meter, cold-molded sailboat that more than once went as far or farther than any small sailboat had before. After the Damien days there were the even more groundbreaking days in Damien II with Sally and their kids, and after that the professional years in the Golden Fleece.

It's all quite a record of achievement and derring-do, more wonderful and detailed than what I can do justice to here.

The great part, though, is that all of that means nothing when you're talking with him. Jérôme comes across as a normal guy who happens to be extremely authoritative about high-latitude sailing. He was tremendously kind and interested about our boat and our infinitely more modest sailing ventures. He reminded me of a truism that we first recognized from observing commercial fishing boat captains in Alaska: the very best and most skilled mariners have no need to show off or brag about what they have done.

There was this one difference between Jérôme and commercial fishermen of our acquaintance, though - the commercial fishermen don't have anything like the irrepressible gleam that Jérôme carries around in his eye.

The Gales of...August

The winds of August. Those big islands are the Kodiak archipelago, just off the Alaska Peninsula.

So...Alaska weather is a funny thing, at least as it pertains to sailing.

For much of the summer, when the days are long and the temperatures are high, the Gulf of Alaska is a complete millpond. No wind at all for weeks and weeks, a veritable ashes and sackcloth land of the damned when it comes to getting anywhere under sail.

Then there's a transition period, towards the end of summer, when the winds start to pick up, but aren't yet gales. Experience says that this period lasts for about...two days.

Then, some time in September, the bounds of polite restraint are cast off, and Kodiakers start dreaming about time shares in Arizona.

This year, the first really good blow arrived at the tail end of August - that's the forecast for today (above).

Tonight, as we listen to the rigging hum, we are reminded...while the Falklands and such places might beat us for year around winds, there are few places that can compete with Kodiak when it comes to plain old crap weather.

But the diesel heater is warm, and we're snug at the dock, and as happy to be on Galactic as we could be anywhere.

The Abyss of Time

Tufted puffin - the baddest seabird of the North Pacific

Idyll underway. If the kids are safely tucked away in a book, all is well with our world.

The miraculous Pacific halibut - they're nearly all meat.

The pics above are from our recent biological sampling trip around Kodiak.

It was...great. A detailed report soon, as soon as I get enough free time from science to tell the story.

But for now, I want to consider two other pictures.

The first image is from Long Island - our very first-ever anchorage after we left Kodiak. That's our Pelagic in the background, and of course cabin boy #1 Elias on my back.

And we were just back in Long Island on this last jaunt of ours, ten years and two months after the picture above was taken.

That's Galactic in the background below. Elias has been promoted to AB, but he's still on my back. And cabin boy #2 is very much in the picture, both actually and metaphorically.

As any parent of young children will tell you - the days are endless, and the years go so fast. As I view the progression that is captured by these pics, I am reminded to drink up every minute of time that I have with these two pre-adolescent sons of ours. Nothing could be sweeter than what we have, right now, as a family.

And...it's reassuring to see that Long Island has gotten sunnier over the last 10 years!

From this first step...

...we hope that great things might come!

So, now that we have sailed back to Alaska, what's the status of our sailing life?

Well, we're back to the dreaming stage.

As a part of our move back to Alaska, I've taken a research faculty job at the University of Alaska, based in Kodiak.

One of the things that I hope to do in this new job is field research from the decks of Galactic. For years and years, Alisa and I have shared a daydream that goes something like, "We're two marine biologists who operate their own boat. Surely there's some niche of useful research that we would be poised to fill?"

Well, I'm happy to note that we have taken our first tentative step in that direction. We have four days of sampling scheduled from Galactic over this week and next, supporting a study of the dynamics affecting juvenile cod survival.

It's a funny place to be back in, dreaming about our next sailing step, rather than living it. So I'm very happy that we have a little biology work from the boat so soon after we returned.

Details to follow!

A beach seine, used for sampling the rich nearshore piscifauna. It should fit nicely on Galactic!

The Best Help That Money Can't Buy

Now, I know that plenty of people raise well-adjusted children ashore.

And we only have the two examples of Galactic's own AB and Cabin Boy to go on, so our inference will suffer from some pretty severe sample size problems.

But with those caveats in mind, I have to say that if you want to raise kids who, if nothing else, are generally game to lend a hand when there is work to be done, raising them on a traveling boat is the way to go.

For example, consider these shots from our recent haulout.

We have been through every stage of out of the water maintenance with a young family. In the early days this entailed Alisa looking after the kids while I humped it like a convict in the boatyard.

Occasionally in more recent years it has involved Alisa getting a babysitter to look after the kids while she helped me paint, and then feeling afterwards like it made no sense to pay someone twenty dollars, or whatever, just so she could sprint over to the yard to slap on paint for a couple hours.

But now, our kids are suddenly old enough that not only do they not need constant minding, they are actually clamoring to get in the yard and help, too.

Elias begged insistently enough that we let him suit up and paint a bit on this last haulout. And these pictures show just how proud he was to be lending a hand.

And the wattage of those smiles also reminds me of how much joy kids can make out of tasks that adults see as drudgery, and just how easy it can be to salvage a moment or two of fun when the right kid is around.  

Speck 'dat

Did you read Barbarian Days? You really should. "Speck 'dat" is my memory of William Finnegan's rendering of Hawai'i slang of the sixties for "check that out!"

Admission: I read very very few sailing blogs. I suppose that if I'm doing it myself full time, I don't feel the need to go online to read about someone else's experience afloat.

But though I don't read them in quantity, I have tremendously enjoyed a few blogs over the years, mostly written by erudite friends of ours. (Shout-out to you, Enki!)

So check this out: the sailing blog of Pandion. This is the real-time memoir of some great friends of ours, from our own barbarian days in Iluka. These people are switched on, in the Australian parlance, and though they are only just getting going, I reckon they'll be well worth following over time. So get in on the ground floor!

Alisa and part of team Pandion on board Galactic, back in the day.

Boat Not For Sale

The Land of Fire in winter

Over the years we've seen a lot of friends and acquaintances reaching the end of their dream cruise, and a unifying feature is that the sailboat in question usually goes on the block immediately. Or sooner - often a cruising boat is listed for sale while the final homeward passage is uncompleted.

This only makes sense. A well-found traveling boat represents a lot of capital, and demands a lot of upkeep. If you're not using the beast, there's little point in keeping it.

Plus, as Paul Beatty points out in The Sellout, having a yacht that you never use is a signifier of the second level of white privilege. And who would want to go there?

We've just completed our first haulout since South Africa. And while Kodiak is a great place to work on the boat out of the water, that doesn't mean it's cheap. When you're living on the boat and traveling widely, that sort of expense just feels like the price of the ticket. But it feels very different when you're back in your home port and looking for a house. What felt like the price of the ticket can start to feel more like a frivolous outlay of cash.

But for all that, we have no immediate plans to sell Galactic. And that has to do with our current vision/dream for what the next stage of our sailing lives will look like.

We've spent the last 10 years as all-in, full-time sailors. No house ashore waiting for us, no vehicles, no furniture in storage save my grandmother's rocking chair and my grandfather's work bench. That's the Fatty and Carolyn Goodlander style of sailing. No compromise to dirt dwelling made, and a sailor sleeps on his/her boat every night of their life.

But over the last few years of our sailing we became more and more aware of another way to pursue decades-long sailing odysseys. We can call it the "home base" model.

When Lin and Larry Pardey very generously opened their home to us on Kawau Island for their annual Thanksgiving dinner, we realized their was a home base for them, and had been for decades, if I'm not mistaken. It certainly makes years of tromping around in very small sailboats easier if you have a small house and a big shed waiting for you somewhere, patiently holding your stuff.

Likewise for the fantastic time that Leiv Poncet showed us at his family's place on Beaver Island, in the Falklands. Leiv's parents are pioneers of far southern sailing, and have decades and decades of sailing achievements behind them, but they didn't do it while using the yacht as the exclusive family home. Even 50-foot Damien II would get pretty small for a family of five during a Falklands winter.

And so for us, we hope. We're stopping the all-in part of our sailing both because being full-time sailors doesn't encompass everything that we want to do in our lives, and because we wouldn't mind having more of a home base than our uninsured sailboat. Our sights aren't set nearly as high as Kawau or Beaver Islands, but I'm sure we'll be able to find something cozy in Kodiak, with a shed as a part of the deal.

And, in our case, as I've written in this space before, we hope to transition to a more purposeful sort of sailing, and start using Galactic as the platform for our marine biology research. No telling how the funding gods will view that idea, but we have plans to submit two research proposals along those lines this year.

And in the meantime, we will continue to live with the maintenance list that comes with Galactic, and work to keep her in good shape for whatever it is we end up doing. We love sailing as much as we ever have, perhaps more than we ever have. And after 10 years all-in, we're as good at sailing as we are at anything else in life. So we're daring fate by hoping that we might be lucky enough to keep the magic going for a few more years in this new way.

This is a good excuse to dig out old Kawau and Beaver Island shots. Here are the crew, in a much younger state of being, in front of Taleisin.

Here and below - Thanksgiving dinner.

I think the guy to my right was spinning a real line of bull...

Leiv and the boys lighting a fire on Beaver Island, to roast... 

...Beaver Island mutton chops. 

Alisa and Leiv canning meat for ship's stores on Peregrine and Galactic

Better Than Real

Her: I'm so glad to be back in Kodiak.

Me: I know. It's such a real-world place.

*Thoughtful pause*

Her: It's better than real.

Metaphor alert! Stepping off the boat...

I'll begin with a note on congruence between life on a traveling boat and life in Alaska. They're both all about the people.

We have been met by our old crowd in Kodiak with typical understated Alaskan hospitality. Friends met us at the dock with ice cream and beer and home-cooked treats. In the days when we were freshly back, people stopped by the boat to give us halibut and salmon.

Friends who are off the island offered up a truck that we could drive for a month while we were looking for our own vehicle (thanks so much, Heather & Pete!). And friends who were going to the Lower 48 for a family visit kindly offered up their house as a place we could stay if we wanted to get off the boat.

We didn't really want to get off the boat - except.

Except that the middle of summer is the perfect time to haul out a boat in Kodiak. The days are super-long, the temperatures are conducive to painting, and the yard is mostly empty, as Kodiak's working fleet is out working. We always prefer to move off the boat when she's in the yard. So, we took the opportunity of a place to stay (thanks, Sara and Ian!) and hauled.

Real help: Joe and I watch the slings come off.

Pretend help: Eric pressure washing.

Fuller's boat yard is part of the "delightfully real" aspect of Kodiak that Alisa and I were commenting on. At most yards where we've hauled through the years, there is a driver for the travelift and a yard worker or two who pressure wash your boat and position the jack stands. In Kodiak, there are first of all no jack stands - those tall boat stands for sailboats. Commercial fishing boats don't use them, so Fuller's doesn't have them. We had a set of our own ordered and waiting at Kodiak Marine Supply when we sailed into town.

And, as for the yard workers who pressure wash and set up the stands, that would be the crew of the boat being hauled. Who also have to provide their own pressure washer (thanks, Debra!).

Another friend, who just happens to be the second owner of Hawk, which he took through the Northwest Passage, stopped by at just the right moment to give us a hand with the stands.

And so it has gone through our time in the yard. People just stop by now and then to talk and look at the boat. It's part of the pace of life in a small town in Alaska. And it's part of the process of our re-integration into this town, one conversation about this and that and nothing at all at a time.

Elias in a triumphant mood.

Allright - listen up you dreamers who want to chuck it all and sail away but don't know much about sailing. Find someone who has a boat and volunteer to help them with their next haulout, start to finish. You'll learn a hundred times more about the sailing life that way than by taking one of those "learn to cruise" classes.

Dependable

Me and mom (and Eric).

Well.  I would count us as lucky.  We have had a life over the last ten years that has been far richer than the life awaiting us in that alternate universe where everyone gets just what they deserve.

Our good fortune has been wonderfully multifaceted, and, I hope, not been taken for granted. (In conversation with Alisa I have started using the shorthand "white privilege goes to sea" to refer to a certain sort of American sailor.) But just now I want to focus on the tremendous good fortune that we had in our shoreside ship's agent during our ten years afloat.

That ship's agent to Galactic would be Joan Litzow. Mom to me, "JoJo" to my kids. (Someone felt too young to be called grandma almost 11 years ago when Elias was born.)

Anyone who has been on an open-ended sailing trip will tell you how important it is to have someone back in the home country to look after your affairs. We Galactics cut the ties more than most. No house or business back in the home country to tie us down. And the internet has of course made the mundane details of life infinitely more tractable for travelers.

But, for all that, if you're going on a years-long trip, you really need someone to help out with practicalities. My mom was set up to sign checks for us and authorized to deal with our credit card companies on our behalf. She could deposit the checks that came in from my science work and my writing for Cruising World, she could let us know when the credit card company was calling to OK the sudden splurge of spending in the final 48 hours before we put to sea from some foreign port. She could sign the annual application to renew our vessel documentation and send us the new paperwork wherever we might be. She could open our mail and pay the occasional bill that, for all our efforts to live cheap, still somehow made its way to us.

For all those years that we were gone, robbing her of easy access to half her grandkids, she kept our affairs in order, and was an absolutely dependable backstop against late fees and unmet obligations on our part. That role she played gave us a tremendous peace of mind when we were off in some atoll, blissfully pretending that the real world did not exist.

So. For playing such an important role in making our voyage a success, and for all the thankless tasks that she pursued on our behalf, I wanted to say a very public and heartfelt "thank you" in this space.

And, don't worry, mom. We just got a post office box of our own.

Symmetry

So...to bed late and up early. That certainly doesn't change.

One difference from a very big day almost 10 years ago is that now we use our internet connection to get a final hi-def weather download onboard before we go.

But aside from that little detail, and bigger details like having a crew of four instead of three, I am very struck by the symmetry of this moment and its bookend.

The prospect of sailing to Alaska is nearly as exciting as the prospect of sailing to Australia.

A Month in Hawai'i

"We just spent a month in Hawai'i," said Alisa. "I think we'll look back at that and be blown away."

And so it is with this nautical existence of ours.

I tend to cast a gimlet eye on sailors' easy talk about "freedom".

But having discretionary time in such quantities that we can spend a month in a place like Kona, meeting the locals and getting a taste of the life, while we're also working on making little contributions to our understanding of the North Pacific (me), or making very big contributions to the education of the next generation (Alisa)...well. That's the thing right there, isn't it?

But this time in Hawai'i has come to an end. Elias has raised the Blue Peter (below), that age-old signal of a ship about to put to sea.

And...I'm feeling the moment. Tomorrow when we wake, we will set sail for Alaska.

This picture and and the one at the top - our good friend Jamie, a long-time Kona connoisseur, turned us onto this great walk south from Honokohau Harbor. It was good fun to discover something like this just off the boat at the very end of our stay.

To Poncet

Long-time readers (my favorite people!) will remember the idyllic Christmas that Galactic enjoyed at our friend Leiv Poncet's family island-farm in the Falklands two and a half years ago.

Left to right: Galactic, Leiv's Peregrine, and the family boat, Damien II

Beaver Island is a very beautiful place (above). And it is an even more practical place (below).

Inside the Beaver Island shed

Leiv's family have been keeping Southern Ocean working boats going for decades, and they are the kind of people who can turn their hands to anything. During our visit we gained a tremendous respect for Leiv's practical skills, and it didn't hurt my estimation of him when he expressed his very laissez-faire attitude towards marine engineering ("Regular engine maintenance is a waste of time.").

What a breath of fresh air from the de rigueur anal-retentiveness about maintenance that American yachties so often take as a given. Leiv has a great let's-get-this-boat-ready-for-the-charter-season attitude that has seen him across a lot of oceans. As is ever the case with a sailor, the proof is in the miles he has sailed.

So recently, Alisa and I hit upon the perfect way to distill our appreciation of that wonderful combination of vast ability and relaxed approach.

To whit, we coined a commemorative, eponymous verb: "to Poncet".

Alisa, in the act of Ponceting the main

To Poncet a job is very akin to the "get 'er done" of the American male vernacular, but, well..."get 'er done" somehow doesn't translate to solo Southern Ocean circumnavigations.

With the inaugural, one-boat version of the Kona to Kodiak rally just about to commence, we've had a few jobs to knock off. And...well...the bloom is well off the frantic pre-passage preparation routine. For once we just want to get the damn barky ready and go to sea without any bashed knuckles and late nights.

So, "Poncet it!" has been our rallying cry.

When we got the main down on the deck to attend to its rotten luff, I was at first dour about our chances. I figured the best we could do would be to patch it, nurse it up to Kodiak, and then ship it off to a sailmaker in Seattle over the winter.

But then we got into the job, and got into the spirit of Ponceting it - get it fixed, don't sweat the details, and move on with life.

And...it's a very liberating attitude. After a couple days of working together on the project, we realized that we were doing a fine job. We don't need no stinkin' sailmaker. Give us a floor large enough to lay out the sail this next winter, instead of our cramped foredeck, and we'll be able to finish the job proper.

So here we are...ten years into the life, and just reaching the point where we're really ready to go off and sail the world in our own boat.

Post-Poncet

It Must Be Good

Great friends of ours recently bought their first cruising boat.

In the nautical world, this is recognized as a dark and lamentable turning point in anyone's life.

Just joking.
Sort of.

We spoke with these friends of ours - really some of the most remarkable, steadfast, and simpatico people we have met in our decade afloat - right in that awful extended moment when the depths of their predicament had become fully clear. (Drop us a line, guys! We want to know how it goes.)

Everything on their new boat boat seemed to broken. They were looking at that insurmountable job list that is a part of most stories of how someone acted on the dream and bought their own traveling boat. And, I think, they were trying to figure out if the lake of expense and angst that had suddenly opened at their feet, demanding to be swum, was really going to be worth it.

We talked with these friends, just when they were re-evaluating their view of the sailing life through the new prism of boat ownership. At one point, one of them asked me if I ever got off the boat.

"Sure," I said somewhat defensively. "I get off the boat."

We have just spent a couple weeks anchored in Las Perlas Islands in Panama, poised on the verge of our big jump to Hawai'i.

Granted, I have been pouring heart and soul and considerable time into the scientific research that keeps us going financially, so my time budget would not be representative for most yachties.

But still, a few days ago I looked at Alisa, wiped the dust from my brow, and said to her, "I had my answer wrong. I should have said, 'Get off the boat? Why would I ever want to get off the boat?'"

Because, when I haven't been trying to understand the ecological implications of sea surface temperature-sea level pressure coupling in the North Pacific, I have been pouring heart and soul and discretionary hours into projects like those illustrated above: fixing the wind generator (partly successful) and renewing the nonskid deck paint in crucial areas (generally regarded as a stunning boat maintenance coup).

Meanwhile, our transmission has developed a leak that seems to have eluded my first attempt at a fix. And our busted telescoping whisker pole seems likely to set out for Hawai'i in a still-busted state. This is a really classic boat problem - it was broken when we reached Cape Town, got fixed there, failed nearly immediately on the trip back across the Atlantic, got fixed again at Ascension Island, and then broke immediately again.

So this is us, a decade into the sailing life, on a well-used boat, which are generally less maintenance than the marina-sitters of the world. We're always fixing something.

And yet, for all that effort, we are all four of us completely enthralled with the sailing life. Consider the days we have just spent at Las Perlas, off a deserted beach, in waters thick with life, at a spot that you could only get to your own boat.

See the beach fire pic above from Las Perlas - I expect that our next beach fire will be in Alaska.  See the photos of Eric below, swinging from a halyard.

And see the happy family, very much together, very much in the same boat, below.

Buying your way into that kind of living with some boat maintenance...who wouldn't make that trade?

Brown pelican, catching dinner