This is a post I wrote four years ago that I did not publish. I like it and wanted to share.
Amtrak Train #11, south of Salinas, CA 13-APR-2022 – Once the itch starts it doesn’t leave. Time to leave for Homer is getting closer, the days between now and then are planned and full.
Jennifer and I are in motion, and feel like we will stay in motion until we leave Homer heading west. Yet, somehow, once we’re aboard we don’t feel like we’re in motion anymore. I would say we’re home, Jennifer would say we’re onboard. We’d both say we’re alone, and it’s quiet in both the literal sense and the more abstract.
We drove a truck from Phoenix to Port Townsend, then unpacked the truck; two days later we hopped on this Amtrak.
The day before we left I started caching everything I will take to Homer with me: boots, the repaired Vesper IAS transceivers.
Most years I, (one) post a picture of everything we’re taking, and (two) have time to give thought to what I am taking. I have a list of things that I started last year there hasn’t been the mental space to visualize what I need. Perhaps I need very little.
April Love texted this morning that she is at Caro Babbo and sent pictures. The new dodger canvas is in place, as is the new sail cover. Josh, the canvas worker, should be figuring out and implementing the cockpit enclosure. I hope he is successful. I can’t ever seem to do things the way everyone else does.
As I write this, the train is coming into San Luis Obispo. We’ve just passed the prison north of town (Chico) and will have a view of the water from here south.
Boat buying fever has infected my WhatsApp Zingaro saloon, with John of the dog channel fame having just bought the boat Kokopelli, a 40-foot Choate in Lee’s Landing that was owned by Nate and Liz. It’s a full-ahead blue water racer. John wants to circumnavigate in it. It is a fast boat, and I expect a wet boat that will require agility to sail. I think this is John’s first sailboat.
…and then I look at my to-do software, 2Do. Hmm, there are 299 items on the list. About normal. Ninety-two are slated to be done before I put the boat in the water. But they range from repairs that must be done (fix the tachometer) to the merely wishful, buff out the hull, with a dozen or more routine maintanance items, such as test all the bilge pumps, check the battery water levels, and 21 things I should buy, so I guess I will have a duffel of things to fly with.
I also want to finish replacing all of the solar panels with flexible panels. There is one left to go.
The itch is there, just on the other side of the flight to Homer, which is on the other side of all the shopping, which is on the other side of a month more of land travel, which precedes a potential flight to the Caymans and to sail a Leopard 46 catamaran to the Florida Keys.
It’s not a bad life.
The itch gets scratched by leaving Homer’s dock. It isn’t a scratch, it’s a release: a popped blemish, removing tight clothing – does taking off a bra or shaper feel like this? It is breathing easily. It is more than anything being away on our boat that we maintain, that we know as it protects and we journey in it to places that are often new to us and always away from the crush of social pressures.
In 2023, next year, we plan to take Caro Babbo back to Puget Sound, back home.† It will be four years since we sailed the inside passage, since we sailed to anchorages with many boats.
† The world is such an unexpected thing. In May 2023, I’d have a stroke, which push everything back a year. That 2023 season, sailing to and around Kodiak, would become a favorite memory.
