Turn and Face the Strange...

I was chatting with a cruiser friend recently. She asked when we were going to be leaving to start doing some local overnight trips. I replied that we would be leaving this Friday, if we did not get divorced before then. She chuckled and said that pre-departure bickering happens to just about everyone and I thought, why don’t they tell you about that before? In honor of this and the myriad other dirty little secrets we have learned and will learn in the future I’m making a new tag for the blog” Stuff no one tells you”.

I don’t even remember what we were bickering about. Probably something like the wind velocity of a fully laden African swallow or something equally notable.. The ‘what’ is not important, it’s the ‘why’. We are in transition and lets face it, change is tough, for everyone. We’ve spent so much time and effort into getting the boat seaworthy that now that we are just about to the “Be nice” stage of the refit (be nice to have refrigeration, be nice to have xyz, etc) and are now concentrating on sailing and living on the boat it feels a little chaotic. We’ve gotten into refit routine and groove and now its time to shake it all up again and it’s a little bit stressful but its also kind of the whole point of the past 2 years and a necessary step to the next phase.

So we are off on a short sail tomorrow. We plan on staying on the hook in an anchorage some where around here. After that the plan is to take Ceol Mor out of the bathtub that is Galveston Bay and just let her have a little taste of the sea. Just a wee bit, then we will do something else the next night. We might go to another anchorage or we might decide that staying on the hook without XYZ really sucks and we need to add that item PRONTO and either way its ok. We’re going to roll with it and be open to completely changing our plans if that seems like the thing to do.

So here we go, here comes lots of new experiences and challenges. Here comes change and I’m gonna try my darnedest to face it with humor and grace and remember that time will change me, and that is a god thing.