It's time

The sun will set an hour earlier tonight. Summer  time has ended and we'll be leaving Sydney soon, sailing north before winter arrives. Alex has given me the middle of May as a deadline. We're approaching it at different speeds, and in different states of mind. He's going full tilt, as he does, while I'm digging in domestically. Today I cleaned the house. Cleaning isn't so bad when you're mentally taking leave. Even the bathrooms provided a quotient of pleasure; I opened all the louver windows in the new one downstairs and let bright watery sunshine spill in from the garden. I also baked bread - again. I'm working towards a crusty, chewy loaf which can be reliably reproduced in our galley oven. It's happening. I baked an almond cake too for Monday Night Dinner, our family's equivalent of the old-fashioned Sunday lunch. Since it's Easter, I slathered the cake in melted chocolate icing and eggs. This is a recipe which won't travel so well to the tropics.

                   Let them eat cake (but please may they say nice things about the bread too!)

While I savour the remaining weeks of our home life, Alex has two feet on the boat much of the time and is always at sea in his mind. He spends all day and much of the night working on his list of boat jobs. It still fills one page of a spiral-bound A5 notebook but most of the problems we identified on our first cruise have found solutions. Correction - with the verb in the active form: Alex has found solutions to those problems . Today he's finished installing a more environmentally-friendly (or so I maintain) toilet system. There have been endless flow diagrams (and bad jokes), but when push came to shove (yes, that bad) he said it was a one man job to fit the new set-up. I didn't argue. He's where he wants to be, doing what he wants to do. Next up is fitting the two new solar panels which will give us more power on the boat. They're lying in a carton in our hallway now, waiting for a stainless steel frame which is being made up in a workshop out west to Alex's design. He hasn't decided yet which AIS system we're buying. AIS is the newest and grooviest thing in navigation aids, used to identify and track the direction and speed of big ships, by far the most terrifying occupants of the ocean. I thought we'd nailed the AIS thing one evening during the French Film Festival as we waited for the ads to spool through before the main feature. Where better to run through relevant radar, chart plotter, VHF and antennae configurations than in a cinema's  companionable darkness? But a few days later another variation on the AIS theme presented itself. The boating world is awash with new product.

After I've gone to bed, Alex roams the world's on-line marine suppliers. Doing boat porn, I used to call it (I'm kinder these days). In the morning he lays out his successes for me to admire. The other night he tracked down a particular kind of plastic rail clamp integral to the solar panel project. A guy in Florida was sitting on a stash of 10 of these widgets (there 's apparently a global shortage) but undertook to post him eight on the strength of  fond memories he and his wife had of sailing in Australian waters a while back.  Every day is Christmas at our place as couriers deliver the spoils of Alex's late night foraging, and another piece of the puzzle titled 'boat preparation' drops into place.

Where am I in this? Well, aside from my bread-making campaign, my toughest marine challenge has been what to do about the curtains on Kukka which offended my eye from the first moment I stepped down into her otherwise impeccable Swedish interior. What were those ugly flaps of left-over furnishing fabric scrunched on either side of the windows? Alex claimed never to have noticed them in all the weeks he'd been working on the boat in Bundaberg.  Huh. I was sorely tempted by printed hemp fabric from Cloth. clothfabric  Hemp is supposedly mould-resistant, but the designs which were small enough to work on these mean little curtains got lost in the bunching. Instead, in a flash of decorating brilliance, I've taken the easier option of distracting attention (mine, primarily) from the window-dressing with lush, richly-coloured cushions from Marimekko.  You can take the girl out of Vogue etc etc. 

Frivolity aside, I'm sucking up all the pleasure there is to be had from the company of our young adult children, from the graciousness (and spaciousness) of our house, and from the cultural offering of this big, noisy, showy city which, going back a year, I couldn't have imagined feeling such indifference towards. "What do you do on a boat anyway?" I asked Alex at one point as the reality of spending months, rather than days, in the confines of a small cruising yacht began to un-nerve me. He wasn't impressed. There were some fraught moments before we sailed out of Bundaberg on our 2009 shakedown cruise. He was over-worked, and I was fearful. Fearful of leaving what I knew, and what I had mastered. 

But it was fine. More than fine. It was a triumph. Once we were at sea, Alex remembered what it was he liked about me, and I remembered what I'd known as a child, and had forgotten - that I'm happy when I'm sailing. Sailing works like a tonic. It clears my head, it invigorates my body and calms my soul. Most astonishingly, it lifts me out of myself. If that sounds too wacky, try reading the mesmerizing prose of round-the-world sailor Bernard Moitessier (The Long Way). He levitates.