Maybe?

Deb is out of the big cast and the stitches have faded away. She has a fancy new brace on the arm and a list of exercises to do to limber up the joints. Normally there is another check-up in three weeks. But when told of our need to be on our way her doctor agreed to just one more check after a week. We are making a cautious assumption that one will go okay so, tentative as they may be, we are making plans and starting preparations to—finally—drop the dock lines and head north. Chart apps have been updated, route planning has begun, final boat projects are getting finished, and each day we look for appropriate weather window.

It has been several years more than we expected since the last time we were underway as long distance cruisers. We have never been underway as long distance trawler dwellers. First Light is a far more complicated machine than was Kintala. Truth to tell, and even being pretty sure I know what happened, two fires in a few weeks have not left me with warm fuzzies. We have owned this thing for a while working hard to get it into acceptable cruising shape. And it isn't like we don't have a clue as to what we are doing. We have crawled all over the engines, generator, water, waste, and electrical systems. We have poked our noses into every nook and cranny we can find, combed through the wiring, replaced a bunch of things, fixed a bunch of things, and modified a few other things. But the boat is not going to feel like “our boat” until we put some miles under the keel.  Having spent as much time as we have on the hard and then at the dock, First Light hardly feels like a boat. She is more a tiny fixer-upper house that shuffles around a little bit in the wind that offers a fantastic view out of her "living room".  It is also the house we were living in while being felled by a couple of events that have left their marks. I have a pace maker in my chest that is keeping me alive. Deb has a plate and screws in her wrist after an ugly fall that could have turned out much worse. Neither was even remotely thought a posiblility when we left St. Louis back in April. Such things tend to have one looking over one's shoulder just to see what is sneaking around waiting to pounce.

The crew of First Light is not the same crew that piloted Kintala out of Oak Harbor Marina all those years ago. We are far more at ease with our own abilities and experience, and far, far more wary of the environment we have chosen to live in and explore. I guess one way to put it is I love and enjoy the cruising life, but don't trust it at all. Expect anything, begrudge nothing, and do the best you can to make it safely to the next protected harbor. In any case ours will be a happy departure even while knowing that rouge waves lurk in an uncertain future. As the sages of any worthy ideology teach, thus it is with any journey, particularly the one we call "life".