Take to the sea

What you come to find, sailing long distances on an old sailboat, is you live in a machine in constant motion that’s always breaking down. No matter how new, expensive, or trusted your brand of boat, entropy cannot be escaped for long at sea. Sometimes you need one of those in-between pieces. Or the specialty replacement part that’s an ocean away and costs more than you can stomach spending anyhow. If you want to stay on the move, it pays to invest in a little bag of tricks that will keep you equipped to respond to misfortune.

Try to record it all before it fizzles. So many thoughts pay me a visit while I’m sitting here on watch, but I rarely write them down. So many observations, words roaming around in my head. We have been on passage now for four days – just finished our fourth night…beginning our fifth day. I want to get some of this down on paper before we climb through the jaws of the Papagallo to be masticated and spit out somewhere near the Gulf of Fonseca.

That about sums up the cat these days.

Day 4. Saturday. Halloween. It’s a Northwest rain with solid light gray skies. The green jungle trees outside the hatch look textured by the white noise of falling water. The island we’re anchored to belongs to a billionaire with celebrity friends, if that sort of thing excites you. Apparently Britney Spears walked around nearby Bahia Honda once, and there is good reason to believe that Mick Jagger has enjoyed the view. Not much is going on aboard Serenity this afternoon, which is a blessed break in the activity of the past week. The trip home has started.

We just left Boca Chica and the nostalgia is already overwhelming. I’ve written and rewritten this post in my head at least forty times but I can’t quite find the words to express how deeply we came to love this place and how difficult it is to leave.

The total expenses for October were $1150. Not too shabby.