Idyllic conditions

When you are on a boat,  there are several very satisfying measures of progress. You can track how far you’ve sailed in terms of miles covered, or in hours out from port, or in the change of latitude and/or longitude. Even if, at the end of a day’s sailing, you put down the pick in an anchorage which wouldn't have been your first choice at the beginning of the day, there’s always the satisfaction of having arrived safely.

Back on land, I cover a lot more distance, and much more quickly than at sea, but I don’t have the same simple – or is it simplistic? - sense of progress. I now struggle to keep a course in a way I never did during the cruising season, and on some days I make embarrassingly heavy weather of what, to an objective observer, must seem the most idyllic conditions.

People talk dreamily of going with the flow, as if nothing could be more pleasant or desirable, but in reality, we’ve been taught - and conditioned - to drive ourselves forward, to resist the current, to swim against the tide.  I’m a city girl, and in the city, if you go with the flow you get washed down the storm drain.  I’d like to think I can profit from, not to mention be grateful for this much gentler, and relatively stress-free period of my life, with its unlimited room for turning. I don’t know why the feeling of drifting, or of going around in circles, should be as unsettling as it is. What I do know is that there are days when I pine for the straight forward satisfaction of a job well done, or Progress Made. How very Protestant!

These next few months look like being a waiting game. First, we wait for some interest in Kukka, which could come sooner, or it could come later. She is now with the Sydney broker Windcraft. She’s also featured on several local and international boats-for-sale websites including Yachtworld and, thanks to Agnes, the popular Swedish site Blocket. She’s more than ready to meet new admirers, with no part of her having escaped Alex’s fastidious attention. While I was in New Zealand, he and Bertil solved a superficial wear-and-tear problem – suffice to say that when a man is thrown across a cabin in a gale, something has to give and in this case, it wasn’t just the man.  She’s even got new fender covers (I think the skipper was right not to wait until I felt the urge to run up replacements on the sewing machine – though I remember how intrigued he was last year to learn from a crafty woman on a Clipper launch of how she saved megabucks by making her own fender covers from the chopped-off legs of cheap over-sized track pants.)

I found myself looking at Kukka differently on my return from NZ, not just because absence freshens the eyes, but also because I’d been looking closely at another boat….Grace, the HR46 for sale in Auckland. Grace is a beauty too and, given the right circumstances, I would be more than happy to spend the next few years living aboard her. The immediate questions I had have been answered – 46 feet isn’t too big, and the bed in the aft cabin is perfect. Buy! No, wait….she’s on the wrong side of the world, we haven’t sold Kukka yet, and did someone say something about money? Ah, details…mere details.