Status Check

Bring it.

The rig - it checks out

The times come when I'm swept away by the excitement of what we're up to.

All the mundane concerns of boat and life drop away and I think of the names.  Rapa Iti!  Rapa Nui!  Pitcairn!  Puerto Natales!

All of it is legendary to me.  All of it.  Places I never thought I'd see, as much as I might dream.

I consider what we're about and I upgrade the Galactic status meter -  from "Viva!" to "F*ck Aye!"

The only higher level on the meter is "Getting Jiggy With It".

We've been there before. And it's a wonderful place to be.

Stars in my eyes…And the family home at anchor

Alisa is back to nearly 100% of her considerable pre-shingles strength.

No matter how many little jobs I find to worry away at, the boat is about as ready for sea as we could want.

We are thoroughly provisioned.  One vast locker has been reserved for six months' worth of duty-free beer.  And the weather forecast promises a spell of settled westerlies.  Our departure cannot be far away.

We cannot prepare to sail without going sailing.  A two-reef day in the Bay of Islands served nicely

There are a lot of other things that I think about when I'm not feeling expansive and making jokes to Alisa about the Galactic status meter.

But the internet is not the place for too much honesty.  The Rebel Heart blog taught us that, if we didn't already know.

A seven-year-old can fit in my beer locker

The real stuff, the deep stuff, the stuff that can't be splashed on a Facebook "status update" with a trio of exclamation points - that stuff needs to be digested, to be worked through for a time, and then written in a book, meticulous draft after meticulous draft, until you're sure that you've got it as near to right…as you can.

Enough to say that I have the concerns of a father, and when I get tired of thinking of those I can always contemplate the divine mystery of how in the hell we might some day end this long long long sailing vacation and come to rest somewhere ashore, in some semblance of a stable life for the second half of the boys' childhood.

There have been sleepless nights.

My consolation, aside from the endless hours that I get to spend with my boys, and my wife, day after day, is that my motives are the purest imaginable  - I operate out of an enduring, and unshakeable, confusion about what life is, and what we're meant to do with it.  So I just operate on instinct, and Alisa and I decide that being sedentary is not what we want to do with this gift of being human...

The cognoscenti will recognize this as a starter motor.  The truly "switched on" will see that two of the three bolts holding it in place have given up their posts and gone home to the oily pan beneath the engine, where they seem to believe that they belong, and left their old friend the starter motor hanging by a few threads of the third, and last, bolt.  This is demonstably not a blog about boat maintenance, but really, you have to wonder.  Why do gremlins like this make their appearance just prior to a big passage?  And what does it mean?