It’s dropping to 70-degrees tonight, could you grab a sweater for me?

Ko Olina Marina, Kapolei, HI, 30-APR-2020 – Well, it’s happened. We’ve acclimated. About the time that I decided we were here and it’s time to connect up Alexa, 70 degrees became sweater weather.

When I was 11 years old, we moved from Toronto to Long Island. I remember the weather from that winter vividly. There was knee-high snow, and the weather for us kids from Toronto was mild. We wore windbreakers with a sweater underneath the entire winter.

The next winter was more typical and milder still. But, by then we had acclimated into winter coats and corduroy trousers.

This morning is breezy through the marina. The sun is rising and the thermometer in the boat and Alexa agree, it is 74 degrees Fahrenheit (22C), but I am chilly. Jennifer drinks her coffee and I drink the hot vanilla milk I have come to drink in the morning.

I’m trying to get into a good work schedule and failing miserably. Parts to work on the boat are not here and I am missing the impetus to work. Despite how much I tell myself that this is the time to do the reading I have always planned to do, reading does not feel like an accomplishment.

In a screwup, Fisheries Supply shipped only one of the boxes in my last order by Priority Mail. The second box, which contains 33 of 34 items in the order, shipped Parcel Post.

While the Fisheries web site says both methods would arrive in three days, Parcel Post Select ships surface (barge) to Hawaii. It could be up to a month before it arrives. This takes us to late May.

If we were to go to Alaska, we would leave in early June.

Where will we go? We wish we knew. We expect that we’ll either leave the boat here for a year or sail to Alaska in June. Other people are telling us they expect to sail to French Polynesia – if it reopens in the fall. Jennifer and I believe there is little chance of that. But no one’s prognostication is worth more than anyone else’s at the moment.

Our marina is our village.

Shopping is a distance away from the marina by bicycle or walking. We can borrow or rent a car, and we do both.

We’re making friends and getting to know our neighbors.

I haven’t been in a place where I would deal with people, any people, really, face-to-face on a day-to-day basis in more than twenty years. I find it difficult to understand that keeping a casual acquaintance with some of my neighbors is the key to peaceable living, that I won’t have huge amounts in common with people across a cultural or generational divide.

Each evening, Jennifer and I take a dock walk. We walk down most of the docks, say hi to everyone and stop to speak with people we have gotten to know.

The early days here were glorious: so many new people to meet on our dock walks. There are thousands of feet of dock space. We have met most people, but we continually meet more and more. We know the outgoing people, like ourselves, and are slowly speaking with and getting to know everyone else.

I haven’t daily gone into a large office since I was 28.

After that, when I worked, my life had a rhythm: work with large groups of people for a short time and then work alone or in a small group for weeks or months. Jennifer and I are often alone together for weeks at a time, each working on our projects, being together and traveling. In the last six years, the trips often require living in 100 sq ft for weeks at a time.

Here everything is the opposite of a tumult. Life proceeds quietly, I see everyone everyday. I struggle with my impulse to invite everyone back to the boat and feel bad when I don’t.

I have three step-children, two with Jennifer, and a third step-child, Samantha whose mother, Bebe, was a lover and then dear friend. Bebe passed seven years ago when Samantha was 19; now we have each other.

As a gig worker, Samantha’s financial world ended with the pandemic. She enjoys, in the true sense of the word enjoy, an itinerant life on the financial edge. I am her backstop, the same way my parents were mine, but her life is not a life I could live. Worry about her is a constant worm in the back of my head.

After finishing her 14-day quarantine upon arriving in Honolulu, Samantha and her friend Michael came to visit.

Michael and Samantha walked the docks with us, as Jennifer and I do. A man on a boat that we pass most days came out of his to bruskly remind us that there is a shelter in place order.

Here in Hawaii, like everywhere else, walking in your neighborhood is fine, just keep your distance. The marina is our neighborhood.

We told the man we wouldn’t walk past his boat and we reversed direction. I’m at a loss to understand the change in behavior. I don’t know. A reason that I want to reject out of hand, sits like a feather on that worry worm in the back of my head: Samantha and Michael are people of color. Jennifer says the man called out to us just because he didn’t know Samantha and Michael. We were nowhere near six feet from him or even his boat and he had to open the cabin door to come out and yell at us.

I’ve been discriminated against because of my ethnicity and where I grew up. I found it fascinating, like discovering an extinct group of early people who mistakenly feel superiority over me because I am an ‘‘other.’’

Their superiority only works if I believe it also; I was never in a position where the discriminators could materially effect me. It is different when the target is someone I protect.

I have no idea if I could be right, but that tickle has not faded.

To catch up on a few things:

• Steve Dracott, who was sailing from Ko Olina Marina to Victoria made it without incident in 20 days. That is an excellent time in his vessel. The Canadians counted his days at sea as quarantine. In Hawaii, they do not.

• My friend John Riley has moved aboard his boat in Gig Harbor. He is currently anchored out. I’ll be using some of my stimulus money to provide a flexible solar panel and controller for the top of his dodger.

• I have almost completed everything for my captain’s license. Drug test results and results of my physical will arrive this week. Then everything is immediately emailed off.

No in-person visits are allowed to the federal office.

• Jennifer built a wind scoop for the front deck hatch, which is a terrific game changer.

The cool air blows through the boat negating the effect of the amazingly hot sun.

• The tomatoes on our tomato plant are ripening as are the peppers on the pepper plant.

We regularly harvest the basil plant. We haven’t eaten any of the nasturtiums.

We’ve seen plants on other boats and now we have plants on Caro Babbo.

Stay well, stay healthy and keep in touch.