Time

What you might call our schedule, our use of time on Galactic, is taking on two different characters here at the Navadra anchorage.

On one hand, we're feeling the pull of the season. Other boats we know are still enjoying Fiji, happy to put off the passage to New Zealand until late November or even December. Without thinking it through very much, we've decided that this season has been great, and it's time to think about the next one. I like to flatter myself by thinking that we are feeling the same ineluctable urge to travel that motivates migrating birds - it's just getting to be time to go, and we're getting restless.

We're now checking the weather between Fiji and New Zealand twice a day.

Our day-to-day routine, though quite full, is somehow less pressing than this seasonal concern. I haven't worn a watch since I returned from the marine science conference in Canada. I get up when I get up - sometimes when the boys wake me just after sunrise, sometimes on my own, before dawn, to work on a pressing science task.

Our days pass by: breakfast, three hours of school for Alisa and Elias while I work and Eric plays, then lunch and a swim and perhaps some coconut picking on the beach, back to the boat for Eric's nap and Elias' quiet time while I take a swim or clean off the bottom of the boat, then back to work for me until dinner, a session of reading The Sword in the Stone to Elias after dinner, then more work for me after the boys are asleep while Alisa finishes her long day of cooking and caring for the boys with a round of dinner dishes, and then perhaps we have a drink under the stars.

It's a delight, of course. And as much as anything, I'm revelling in the absence of any outside deadlines in our daily life, the way we decide ourselves how to go about getting the work, and the joy, of each day done.

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