On Our Feet

Transient dock, Honokohau Harbor

Just a note to say that we have absolutely landed on our feet in Hawai'i.

The Mothership is in a transient slip that is operated by the State of Hawai'i and costs us all of $8 USD a day. Granted that we had to bring our own yacht, but aside from that I can't imagine a better deal for a waterfront holiday home in Hawai'i.

There is a little beach on one side of the marina, and a bigger beach on the other side, liberally sprinkled with basking green turtles, that is a part of a National Historical Park.

We have had a series of great interactions with very friendly locals - people coming down to the boat with produce from their gardens, or offering us rides, or just to chat.

It's been a great place to make our first tentative dip into the home country.

Now if we could only figure out that pesky detail of foreign interference in our elections...

The Way Forward

Well, I'm back to the boat.

And what a visit to the home country that turned out to be!

The only good part of being in the US when the White Power candidate was elected to the highest office of the land was that on election night I happened to be in the company of the best man from my wedding. He and I went out and got drunk, both thoroughly and publicly.

It didn't make me feel any better, really.

So that hopeful feeling about returning to the home country? That has been replaced by something much more wary.

We do all have Australian passports, of course. And a boat that experience tells us is probably adequate to the task of sailing back to Hobart.

I remember going through the "we're outta here" phase on election night. I think it was mostly between drinks number six and nine. I found myself declaiming, to anyone who would listen, "I hope that works out for all y'all!"

But the draw of Alaska is strong.  There is also the thing about not wanting to be driven out of your country, but I find that consideration works on me only when Alaska is part of the equation. Without the Great Land, I think I'd prefer to go and be middle class in Oz, thanks much.

So, when we exit the Panama Canal early next year (everything going to plan), we expect to turn right for Hawai'i, rather than left for Fatu Hiva. Unless the Pussy Grabber In Chief has managed to start a particularly egregious war in the first couple months of his administration.

The year so far, as seen by the Caribbean Safety and Security Net

So. That leaves us in the Caribbean for a couple more months. It seems like a pretty trivial concern at this point, but we have so far completely failed to see the magic of the Caribbean. Our loathing for crowds and very low tolerance for crime risk are a tough combo here. See the map of reported thefts, assaults, and general non-fun sailor moments above.

We had thought about heading up to Cuba, but a chance comment from some Canadian friends about how Cuba wasn't such a fascination for them as it was for American sailors resonated with me. I had a visit to Cuba with that same best man about 19 years ago, and it was great. I don't think I really need to go again.

We thought about Guatemala as well, but very little research told us that it was the kind of place where sailors lock themselves into their boats at night behind stainless steel bars. Not the Galactic way, that.

So for now it looks like we're bound for Colombia.

Stay tuned.

Hiatus

That's us Galactics. We're in the US and on hiatus from the sailing life.

For me, that means a period of immersion in the science life (above).

I've been thinking a lot about the practice of science.

Like the difference between skepticism and conservatism in science - the former is the foundation of our approach, but it can too easily transform into the latter, in which we're skeptical about everything but the status quo paradigm.

I've been thinking about how our current understanding of the problems I work on is fundamentally wrong in some way. That error will be painfully obvious in the future, but it is so hard for us to see the error now.

I've been thinking about the paths that a scientist can take in their career. You can contribute to the incremental progress of the larger community, which is guaranteed to produce results over time - a safer approach. Or you can step back and try to see a path that everyone else has missed, and which might give a shortcut that can bypass a decade of more incremental work - a much riskier approach!

And I've been thinking about how difficult it is to make a really useful contribution in a field where there are a lot of really smart people working really hard on the same questions.

Science, like sailing, rewards the state of being all-in.

In between science meetings and time spent navel-gazing on the questions above, I have a two-week break in which I've joined Alisa and the boys as we catch up with our State-side loved ones.

We've been having a great time.

Siblings!

A dry run for their first Halloween. Tintin and Captain Haddock.

The Home Country

 I'm writing this as we're about to fly back to Chile.

We started in Puerto Williams...

...then took the flight to Punta Arenas...

...then, magically, landed in summer in the suburbs.  The kids
didn't comment on the transition at all

We've just spent five weeks visiting both of our families in the US.

A need to renew a couple of  passports got Eric and Alisa and
me a day trip Manhattan to visit the Australian consulate 

Our perspective on this country is now firmly expatriate.  We've never lived as a family in the US.  Even though the focus of this trip was entirely on seeing our extended families, our visit also gave us a chance to catch up on how things are going with the 4% of the world population that lives in America.

In other words: visiting the home country is a travel experience for us.

But the US is big enough, and fractured enough by its various tribalisms (red state/blue state, the race hierarchy) that you don't need to be an expat to find terra incognita in the country: there are plenty of good travel experiences available for resident Americans in America.

To whit: one of the things that is impossible to miss is how segregated America continues to be.  My extended family is racially mixed, but when it comes to integrated situations with strangers - in the milieu that we inhabit, those most often occur when black service workers are interacting with white customers.  After a lifetime of being American, I have yet to have a black American friend.  I'm reading Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie just now and she has a great humorous take on that state of affairs.  Don't blame the white American liberal, says a character.  Of course they don't have black friends.  There just aren't enough middle-class blacks in the country to go around.

So one of my ideas for a travel experience on this visit to the US?  To take the boys to Hot Sauce Williams, the barbecue place around the corner from an apartment I rented in the late 1980s.

Without doing something self-conscious like that, my boys wouldn't know what it's like to be in a black neighborhood.

But, as things worked out, we never made it there...

Not that my boys would have necessarily taken much notice of being in a black neighborhood.  I don't spend time thinking about the good and bad things that they have missed by growing up on a boat.  But if I did,  the soul-corroding exposure to racism would be on the list of things they've been lucky to miss so far.  At one point on the visit, I forget where, Eric looked around and said, "There's a lot of dark-skinned people here!"

I think that most white American five year olds have already learned that race is a taboo subject that can't be referred to in a public setting in that way.  They've picked up the strange white American habit of insisting that they don't see race.  (Or am I wrong?  Are land-based five-year-old Americans still innocent of the weight of our cultural preoccupation with race?  If so, let me know.)

In general, spending time in a majority black setting is one of the finest travel experiences going for white Americans.  I got a lot of that in New Orleans, in the early 1990s, when a friend of mine was in the Little Rascals Brass Band and I got to tag along to the second line.  At that point the social aid and pleasure clubs and second lines were getting exactly no notice from outside their native neighborhoods, and my memory is that we sometimes went the whole afternoon, in a crowd of thousands of people, without seeing a white person we hadn't come with.

Which is a very powerful experience for a white American.

Especially if you can imagine an alternate universe in which all those black people are the ones doing the hiring, except that they don't like to hire people with non-traditional names like "Mike".

 After we were done at the consulate we stopped at the Museum of Modern Art to take in the iconic works.  And there we discovered a new trend in cultural consumerism.  People just walk up to the iconic treasures of western culture, snap a picture on their phones, and then walk over to the next iconic treasure to snap another picture.  Surely the point is to take a moment to enjoy the original, rather than making yet another reproduction of these paintings?

Eric and Marc Chagall

But all of this is a very long digression on one small part of our experience of coming back to America.

This is a sailing blog, of course.  But if you sail the world long enough your relationship with the place you left becomes part of the story.

Taking the subway downtown

Can you hear it?  

You must take the A Train

To go to Sugar Hill way up in Harlem

We also took in Elias' first-ever baseball game

And went walking in mountain meadows in the Rockies.  Lucky us...

We've enjoyed every day of our stay here in the heart of the northern summer.  But now that we're returning, I think we'll also be glad to resume our life aboard Galactic.

Uttermost

Was it all a dream?  Or a giant conspiracy, featuring photos shot on a sound stage, like the moon landing?

Not just another marina experience

 Every trail comes to an end.  For our first season in Chile, the trail's end was Puerto Williams.

Looking past the armada dock, over the Beagle Channel to Argentina

Puerto Williams is the southernmost town in the world - 65 nautical miles north of Cape Horn, on the Beagle Channel.  The "yacht club" there is a very famous place in the very obscure world of everyday people who like to do adventurous things funded out of their own pockets on their own boats.  The club consists of the Micalvi, a 1920s freighter that has been scuttled in a little inlet to make a structure for visiting boats to raft to.

Since Patagonia is "the uttermost place in the world", the Micalvi is by extension the uttermost yacht club in the world.  We hear that it can be a bit hectic in the summer when the charter boats are loading and unloading passengers.  But when Galactic arrived we swelled the population to six crewed yachts.  The large majority of the boats were empty, their owners elsewhere for the austral winter.

Those five other crews, not surprisingly, provided us with the society of some ridiculously simpatico people.  Those who winter in the far south - that would be our crowd.  The people to whom we have to explain nothing.

Alisa, the master at figuring out any provisioning situation

But now we've left that crowd behind.  We set out north - first on the hour-long flight to Punta Arenas, then the next day the flight up to Santiago and then the red-eye to JFK.  And we landed in the delights of the boreal summer, and the company of our families.

We'll be going back to Williams soon.  When we get there it won't be our first season in Patagonia any more.  And we'll have a new season to make the most of.

The Tropics Await

There's one thing about having kids - they make it harder to tell lies when you're entering a country.

We arrived at the Auckland airport completely over it - 22 hours from Cleveland, both kids sick when the trip began, and a three and a half hour drive up to Opua still ahead of us.

Before the drive, though, we had to get our fishing gear and dirty boots (and the eagle feathers that Alisa hadn't told me about) through biosecurity and into the country.

When the quarantine officer asked if we had mostly been fishing in saltwater while in Alaska, I answered, "yes".

That is, I, the professional biologist with a strong awareness of the danger posed to island ecosystems by introduced organisms, went along with the quarantine guy's suggestion that we had been fishing in saltwater.  This was because I knew that he would be most concerned about the possibility of introducing freshwater organisms, and that saltwater gear wouldn't get much attention.

At that point in the trip I would have done anything to make the process go a little faster.

And that, of course, is when Elias piped up.  "Most of our time wasn't in saltwater, Dad.  Remember the Dollies?  That was freshwater."

The quarantine guy ended up scrubbing the soles on all of our boots while we tried, in vain, to keep Eric from running all over the place.  When he was done scrubbing our boots, he took the eagle feathers.

And then, when he was done with all that, a light went on in that part of his Kiwi brain that is set aside for friendly Kiwi chats.  After noticing that we had put down Opua Marina as our address in New Zealand, he started telling us about his grandmother's lodge in nearby Russell.

Only in New Zealand would a quarantine guy decide to extend his interaction with a tired family and their cranky kids (at six am local time, no less) just to pass the time of day more pleasantly.

Aunt Noerena did the first leg of the trip with us, to LA. 

The view from deck upon arrival.

We arrived back in Opua, where we had left Galactic more than a month earlier, and found the season well and truly changed.  Nearly all of the traveling boats are gone, and the foreign-flagged boats that are still around have a buttoned-up look that tells the story of owners gone back to their home countries for the season.  The morning session with other yachts on the VHF radio, which was both helpful and also annoyingly identical, in spirit, phrasing and substance, to every other English-language "cruiser's net" from here to La Paz, has gone quiet.  Everyone is gone up to the tropics for the winter.

We're soon behind them.  Though not too soon - there would be a weather window for us to leave this weekend, but we're not even close to ready for that.  The kids both have hacking coughs that put us in mind of the respiratory infection that landed Elias in hospital last year, there are a few days of boat jobs ahead of us, and I spent the first full day back making revisions to a scientific paper, as always putting off boat tasks to do the research work that keeps us going.  Winter is here and there are big systems going past New Zealand.  We've read accounts from friends who have already made the trip north and were caught out by passing fronts.  So although we're ready for the tropics, though we can feel the turquoise water and taste the coconuts, we're back into yachtie-patient mode, content to wait for the proper moment to head north.

Meanwhile we're home again, and getting used to sharing the confined space of the boat with two little ones.  We got a sense, spending time with our siblings and friends back in North America, of just how different our lives have become from the lives of our peers during the five years and 361 days that we've spent living afloat.  Splashing back into the world of steady work and daily/weekly/monthly schedules and smartphones and driving places reminded us, over and over, of just how completely different our everyday concerns and routines are.  Comparisons are odious, and we didn't spend the trip keeping mental checklists of how we were glad we were to avoid this or that everyday annoyance by living on a sailboat.  But once we were back on Galactic and I'd had a good sleep, I kept remarking to Alisa just how generally happy I was just to be living on the boat with the family in this dreary little out-of-season yacht harbor.

In the long view, one obvious difference between our lives and the lives of people our age back ashore is just how much wealth some of our peers seem to be accumulating as they proceed through their forties.  People are paying off mortgages and buying bigger houses and getting more pay and filling up their investment accounts.  I don't even let myself think facile yachtie phrases like "they're spending their time accumulating possessions; we're spending our time living life."  I think that, in the really important things, life afloat and life ashore are the same thing.  We do have the bonus of looking forward to a season in the tropics; in another set of circumstances we would be looking forward to setting ourselves up to retire younger, with a house with a view, in a position to send our kids to a private American university.  This trip back to the US gave me a taste of how much effort it's going to take to plug back into the kind of daily lives that we left behind, and I'm determined, as long as this dream-like (in the sense of not being quite real) life that we're living continues, to not let it get stale, to enjoy these days filled with too much time with my kids and too many ethereal, recurring, always different moments: dawn at sea, making landfall after a week, or finding a friend in an unfamiliar place.

Because when this is all over, it will be well and truly over - we won't take anything away from this part of our lives, except for whatever mark these things that we found worth doing, and seeing, have left on us, and how they've changed, however subtly, who we are.

Today isn't the day to leave - that's the north end of New Zealand at the bottom-center, beneath all the blue and magenta.

Uncle Mike

Though I occasionally stray far off topic, this blog is about sailing and traveling.  In the past few weeks we've been traveling, of course, but traveling back to see our families in Boston and Cleveland, and I haven't felt the need to post to the world about the wonderful, and wonderfully mundane, visits that we've been having.

Soon enough we'll be back in the nautical life.  On Sunday we'll depart Ohio, bound for New Zealand, with an extra piece of luggage crammed full of cheaper-in-America boat parts.  And once we're back, we'll be in the thick of it - a few days of work on the boat, a blast of the science work that I haven't finished up while visiting family, and we'll be looking to catch the first thing smoking, as someone in a different time and different place might have said.  But instead of a train to Chicago, we'll be looking for fair winds to Tonga.

Meanwhile, these pics.  When we were in Boston my Dad and I built a treehouse for my sis and brother-in-law, who have four daughters, and a son soon to arrive.  When my sis asked us to do the job, it seemed like a great way to play the role of visiting Uncle - what better thing to do than leave something semi-permanent and fun behind?  And I was reminded of my Granddad, who always had some big job ready for my Dad and uncles during family visits - he was forever dragging the men out to plant trees around the place.  And there's a certain wisdom to that - banging nails, or planting trees, is a much better way to spend time together, and visit, than just sitting around on the couch, staring at each other.

The Last Australian Frontier

As our time in Australia nears its end, there remains one frontier of cultural understanding that we haven't explored.  As much as we may feel at home in this country, we are completely in the dark when it comes to Australian sports.

So Elias and I pushed back the veil of our ignorance, just a little bit, by attending the third day of the current cricket test match this weekend - Australia vs. Sri Lanka.

It was a great father-son outing.  I found that I could even explain a few things about the game to Elias. At this point, I'm appreciating every moment when I still know more than him about something.

And - I enjoyed the game.  Two Sri Lankans were batting the entire time we were there - the Aussies couldn't get them out - and I appreciated the stately pace of the match as the day went on.

All that - plus there was face painting.

Elias wore his new Australian Cricket singlet to bed that night.

~~~

Meanwhile, it hasn't escaped our notice that the children killed in Connecticut were Elias' age.

Looking across the Australian/American divide, I can say that things don't have to be that way in America.  Gun control works.  My kid's school in Tasmania doesn't have to practice for mass-shooting incidents the way that American schools do.

The politics of saturating American civil life with guns, like so many of the dark/angry aspects of right-wing politics in America, is a relatively recent phenomenon, dating to the civil rights movement.  Fifty years ago, the NRA was focused on gun safety, and the idea that anyone should be able to own a semi-automatic assault rifle with a large-capacity magazine was completely foreign to American political discourse.

So, this too, will change.  The pendulum will swing.  It will take a generation, and many many more six-year-old children will be shot and killed before change comes, but eventually we will make things better in America.

Thanks

At first we didn't celebrate Thanksgiving in Australia - at the very most, we just went down to the beach wherever we happened to be and threw a few snags on the barbie.

But during our last visit to Tasmania we invited some North American friends over and did the holiday up.  Doing that, we discovered a certain expat delight in Thanksgiving Down Under.  Because the holiday isn't on the radar screen at all for Australians, sharing the meal with other Yanks (and Canadians) turns into a little moment of shared cultural understanding.

We had Thanksgiving on Galactic yesterday.  That's Alisa with a 2.5 kg turkey that she special-ordered from the local butcher.  She also made up 3 kilos of her famous mashed potatoes - turned out to be way too much.

Our friends John and Jenny and their son Rowan shared the meal with us.  Like all of the Galactics, they're dual US-Australian citizens.  Jenny made pumpkin pie.

And, just for some historical reference, here's a shot that I always liked - this is our first-ever Thanksgiving afloat, on Pelagic, as we were sailing down the Big Sur coast.

The Home Country (again)

Well, as you know, this is a blog about our sailing life, not about current events.

But an inescapable part of long-term travel is how it changes your perspective on the home country.  The longer you're away, the stranger that home seems.

Witness, for example, this quote about the latest Colorado mass-casualty incident, from the July 20 New York Times:

That's a widespread opinion in the U.S. - the key to ending gun violence is to make concealed handguns ubiquitous.  It's hard to imagine anything that could be more delusional.  But it is also a completely mainstream political view back home.

So, good luck to ya'll back there.  I can only hope that Alaska is refuge enough for us when we get home.

The Police in Hobart - Found

I didn't get around to posting it yesterday, but I did see a police car as I was driving out to Moonah to buy some tools.  So my traveler's experiment ended at 12 days - that's how long I went in Hobart without seeing any police.  I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who lives in a state capitol in America about how many days they go without seeing any police while going about their daily routine.

So, this topic has been a bit tangential to the blog.  My point is just that an American really notices how lightly-policed Australian society is - I reckon it's one of the salient differences between the two countries.

And, thinking about all this, and looking up incarceration rates on wikipedia, has given me a new rejoinder for when an Australian is causing me grief.  (They're particularly awful at customer service here.)  It used to be that I would get my satisfaction by thinking to myself, "Hey, don't mess with me, I'm American.  We've been to the moon."

But from now on when those situations arise, I reckon I'll say, out loud, "Careful - based on the incarceration rates of our two countries, I am, empirically speaking, five and a half times more likely to be badass than you."

Looking for the Police in Hobart

While I hold both Australian and American citizenship, culturally I'm very much an American.  So the time that we've spent here in Oz has been a chance for me to get to know my other country.  And getting to know the Lucky Country a bit better has in turn informed my perspective on the US.

That's one of the really great things about travel - it lets you see home with new eyes.  And one of the first things I noticed when we came to Oz was how few police there seemed to be.  For all the jokes you can make about Australians' convict ancestors, the contemporary nation appears very lightly policed to American eyes.

When you're spending time in a new place, things that are different appear odd.  Home is your reference for what is normal.  So it seemed odd to see so few coppers out and about in Australian towns.

But we've been in Australia long enough (four months on this visit, and nearly two years on our last) that a lightly-policed society is starting to feel pretty normal.  And that got me thinking about why you see so many police in America.

And the answer, of course, is simple - American society locks up an abnormally high proportion of its citizens.  A higher proportion than any other nation, in fact, and five and a half times the rate of incarceration in Oz.  So, to get all those people in prison, I suppose you have to hire a lot of police to do the arresting.

How few police are around in a more "normal" Western city like Hobart?  Well, I actually remember the last cop car I saw out on the street, because it startled me a bit.  And that was ten days ago.  I'm going to run a traveller's experiment and see how many more days it takes me until I see the next.

Hobart from on high.  (Although we weren't actually up there to look for the police.)

The Home Country

When you've been traveling for long enough, the oddities of the home country really start to stick out on your visits back.

Oddities like these signs in Anchorage.

The idea that everyone should walk around with loaded pistols hidden in their clothes is ascendant in America.  If you run a bar, or a performing arts center, and you don't want to have people coming in with loaded pistols hidden in their clothes, you have to put up a sign to that effect.

There are all sorts of backstories about the popularity of carrying hidden guns.  Like the enduring racial paranoia behind gun politics in America.  Or the remarkable number of Christians who pack heat on a daily basis.

But people who chuck it all to go live on a sailboat get a pass on thinking about that sort of stuff.  So when I saw these signs sprinkled around 21st century Anchorage, I mostly just thought of the home country's continuing capacity to grow into a strange place.

Clearance Granted

Let me tell you, we're tired.  We're cranky, we're short with each other.  And three of us are sick.

Meanwhile, Eric's piercing scream, which variously means that he's happy, or unhappy, or neither, has gotten so bad that all of the rest of us, Elias included, have begun wearing hearing protection at mealtimes.  Really, it is that bad.

Although we have repeatedly despaired over ever seeing our departure day arrive, the job list is getting short enough that we now realize that the blessed day of sailing away from all this prep work will finally dawn.  And it's close - we have our zarpe, the official clearance out of the country for Galactic, and hurricane season begins in two days.  It's clearly time to be leaving.

We got a huge boost in the form of a recent visit from both of our moms.  They stayed in a hotel right next to the dock and took care of the kids so that we could work on the boat.

Elias got two trips to the San Diego zoo out of the deal.  Here he is with some of his swag.  With boat clutter being the eternal enemy, we make him get rid of something old when new toys like this come aboard.  

And... that's all for now.  I've got to get some sleep.

***

The view from up the stick.

Alisa installing lifeline netting - drill, baby, drill!

Provisioning the boat some time after midnight.

To My Australian Friends

Late last night when Alisa took the rental car to the store to do the final shop for fresh food, I handed her the camera and asked her to take a picture of the beer prices.

I've missed Australia in the time that we've been here in the US.  But I don't miss Australian beer prices.

So, to all my Australian friends - check this out!  A six pack of Guinness for seven dollars! A twelver of Bass Ale for fourteen bucks!  (That's about AUD $13.30.)  At these prices, why would you even consider the twelve pack of Molson Canadian for thirteen dollars?

Are you jealous yet?

And, to make things even sweeter, there's good beer here.  So, if you're feeling cheeky and want to drop nine bucks on a six pack, you can savor an icy Hop Torpedo:

Just the thing when finishing up a pesky electronics installation at one in the morning.  All praise to the Hop Torpedo!

Seasick

April 29th was Eric's first birthday.  We celebrated on the hook in Half Moon Bay.

The next morning we left on the overnight sail to Morro Bay.  The weather we found was like this:

Not really bad, but certainly sloppier than we would have liked.

The boys reacted like this:

Note Eric in particular - completely sacked out.  When he woke up, he ate and vomited.  And then ate and vomited.  Four times all told, completely emptying his stomach each time.  As you might imagine, this was very tough for both parent and child.

It's now apparent that Eric gets seasick.  Given our experience with Elias, this is a possibility that we hadn't even considered.  And it's a development that might have significant implications for our plans.  We have to figure that out very quickly.

Meanwhile, we've had a great twenty hours in Morro Bay.

We're tied up next to the harbor patrol office, where our friend Becka works.  We caught up with her and Mike and their family last night.  Here's the two dads with the combined mob:

And now, we're off for San Diego.  Unfortunately, more sloppy weather is forecast for today and tonight... we'll see how Eric does!

Twenty Miles

Well, we're anchored up in Half Moon Bay, just twenty miles south of San Francisco, waiting out a few days of high winds before we continue south.

We were so happy to finally leave Alameda... Alisa was dancing on the back deck as we motored away from the marina.

We spent the night in Sausalito - our first night at anchor on Galactic.  The next morning we sailed under the Golden Gate bridge - we on Galactic always put our hands in the air when we go under a bridge.

I was a little blasé about catching the flood tide through the Golden Gate, thinking that conditions on the bar would be pretty mellow even if we didn't get the tide right.

Well, I was wrong. We sailed out into a strong breeze with the ebb tide against the swell, which gave us an hour of putting up with steep waves right on the bow.  Elias was happy about the motion, though a little giddy about it all...

Hmmm... If that clip had loaded correctly, you would have noticed that Eric was looking a little groggy.  He was like that for much of the day - soundly asleep, waking only to eat and then vomit.  At one point Alisa got drenched in vomited-up milk - the romance of sailing with small children!

We're a little concerned that he was showing the classic signs of seasickness - Elias has never been seasick, so we never even considered the possibility that Eric would suffer...  Fingers crossed that it was a one-time thing!

It was a blustery day, and we were very happy with the way that the boat sailed.  There were a lot of bugs of course - things came unlashed; the preventer system I had set up wasn't all that hot; the cook, feeling worse for the motion, took forty minutes to produce top ramen for lunch.  And Elias, who of course hasn't sailed in a year, surprised us by being scared by the rolling motion of the boat.  "It's gonna tip!", he kept saying, sounding very much like someone who didn't sail across the equator before he was two.

So it was a slightly frazzled crew that arrived in Half Moon Bay.  But we're loving the feeling, after all the money and effort that we've expended on this new boat, to be living on the water again, heading somewhere far away.