We haven't sold the boat yet, but that one detail aside, we are getting our heads around life ashore in the woods. It comes upon us once in a while that we're detaching from one life as much as adapting to another.

It's strange to realize that we will no longer be saying, yes, we live on our boat, spend the winters sailing in the Caribbean, yes, it's a very nice life. I enjoyed peoples' reactions, and got used to their envy. It made it very hard to kvetch about the tough or tedious bits. I'm wondering what will make us special now. Our friend John, also a cruiser, recently cut off his really impressive ponytail. When I asked him how he felt afterward, he very candidly said he'd miss the attention it brought him.

That's part of how I feel about selling the boat. There was something special about ND that reflected well on us. Every new anchorage, heads turned on passing boats and dinghies, and we so often got the wave and the shout "beautiful boat!" She was always unique among other cruising boats. One admirer called her "the prettiest girl at the dance" and I think those sorts of comments kept us living up to the boat. I had to learn to be a sailor, and the boat often enough rewarded my efforts that it seemed worthwhile to keep learning and to get attached and committed to doing things well. Things I got to be proud of: going up the mast to actually fix stuff, sailing at night in lousy conditions, developing muscles and callouses and skills, bringing home the bacon (fish). And those informal "races" with other cruisers. I accused Randy of being rather competitive on a passage with a couple of other boats, and he said "I'm not racing, I just want to get there first." We usually did, and it was mostly because of the boat (and the willingness of the crew to put down a book and trim sail). Two things I heard over and over from the Captain: Life's too short to sail an ugly boat, and If a boat looks good, it will be a good sailer.

In six years, we visited 20 countries and over 70 islands, lots and lots of them many times. We sailed and motored and motor-sailed some 7,000 miles. In all that, the boat never failed us, and Randy's experience, knowledge, and considerable skills kept us safe. He taught me to be a sailor in his very quiet way, and his confidence in me seemed to be pretty consistent. The first time he hoisted me up the main, I got just below the spreaders and barked down "I DON'T THINK I CAN DO THIS." He just kept cranking on the winch, and saying "You can do it!, don't look down, you're fine!" And of course I was. Bastard. He promised me adventure, and he delivered, and it was grand. I was going to say, generally grand, but that would be peevish.

Since July 2005, which was the first blog entry, in which I noted that we were "beat to a snot" before we'd even moved onto the boat, I've posted 287 blog updates, and as of this afternoon, there are 67,877 hits recorded. Randy's mum mostly? but also early followers from the Dartmouth Yacht Club (I can only imagine what they thought as we headed out into the fog, me clutching a bottle of Ativan...), links from friends' blogs, and people from dozens of other countries. There are occasional comments from people in far-flung places that I don't know, and that's always been cheering. Someone in Moldavia stumbled on us last week, probably looking for sailing adventure tales. What did they get? Food, fishing, snorkelling, laundry, and now lawn-mowing and black flies.

Given that this blog was intended to cover our sailing adventures, I'm wondering about carrying on with it. In the spirit of not wasting raw material, I will start to turn into a book (you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll barf at some of the more graphic bits) when I get my domestic life in some sort of order. I was folding laundry yesterday, looking out the window at the woods behind the house, and thought, I've folded laundry in an awful lot of places, "awful" being the operative word, and wondered how I could keep the blog magic alive.

I'll ask my kids. They'll be brutally honest, and they don't read the blog anyway. Then I'll do whatever I want.

Thanks for reading.

(photo by Pepe Millard on Beez Neez)