It’s autumn here.
I know that may not seem like it deserves its own line but you know what, it does! The year here starts in Summertime and then goes to Fall. Fall comes before Spring in the southern hemisphere. You can get all intellectual about this but until you feel it, you’re not going to understand why those three words get their very own line.
The weather has been getting cooler but I foolishly keep pretending that everything is “normal.” So when Ceilydh asked us if we wanted to do a little mini-cruise over Easter weekend, my mis-calibrated brain thought “it should be getting warmer every day, why not.” The day before we left the forecast was for four days of solid rain. Lucky for us we got nearly perfect weather for the whole trip and had enough sun that we could almost maintain the illusion of the season our bodies were expecting.
I cleaned the hull, checked the zincs, ran the watermaker, and generally started to feel like a cruiser again. We had a raft-up, sundowners on Ceildyh, surfed an enormous sand dune, sailed around in Fatty, and generally had every type of fun we could squeeze in to our days.
The spectrum and contrast of my emotional response to the trip surprised me though. On the one hand the permanent cheshire grin that I wore every sailing day across the South Pacific, sprang back to my face the moment the boat was underway downriver. On the other hand by the end of the first day I was uncomfortably cognizant of the fact that I was not in fact cruising again, and would have to return to the pile moorings soon enough.
By the time we hauled anchor I had resolved all of that discord. I realized that it is a precious thing to be able to sail off to the islands for a weekend, and the life that we are setting up in Brisbane is full of promise, opportunity, and joy. My reality check; we aren’t cruising at the moment, but we are still on an adventure!