We have not yet managed to pull free of the Antigua vortex. We have been here since we arrived from St. Helena in the South Atlantic in mid-January. We had intended to cruise down island for several weeks, but unrest in Gaudeloupe and Martinique put us off. Even if the islands had been peaceful, though, we probably wouldn't have gotten away. Our friends, Clive and Laila, whose 72-foot yacht, Billy Budd, we took care of while we were in the Beagle Channel during the (southern hemisphere) winter, arrived here a bit over a week ago. Clive and Laila came from two different directions. Clive came by plane from Spain after surveying a 112-foot yacht for the owner of Billy Budd, having flown there from the Falklands after their trip to South Georgia. Laila brought Billy Budd north with a crew of three, so we had to be here when Laila arrived after a month and 5,800 miles on her first offshore passage as skipper. After Laila berthed Billy Budd stern-to in Nelson's Dockyard at 3:00 in the morning, we sat on deck and drank champagne on a dead calm night under thousands of stars. We had not expected this reunion. When Laila started out on her passage, she was heading for the British Virgin Islands.

Our sailing lives have been full of transitions, of sometimes painful partings and unexpected reunions, like the one we enjoyed a little over a week ago with Laila. Sometimes the hardest thing about this life is the uncertainty when we finish one leg of a voyage and try to decide what's next. Even more difficult is the transition back to shore, as we discovered when we sold Silk in 1995 after our three-year circumnavigation. In less than four months, we had both concluded that land life no longer suited, and we began the process of building Hawk so we could go to sea again. This time, we've lived aboard our boat for more than a decade, longer than either of us has lived anywhere since before graduating from high school. As we've been getting closer and closer to the United States, the questions have loomed larger and larger: Where will we live? Can we keep the boat? Where will we keep her? What do we want to do? Will we be able to find jobs we really want to do in the current economic climate?

It's not that we're worried about finding a way to earn a living, it's that at the transition point from sea to shore everything changes - from what we do day-to-day to where we live and who we interact with. That's a bit overwhelming and somewhat intimidating. As adults, most people take pretty much for granted that they'll be doing next year what they're doing now. But every few years, we are forced to examine what we're doing and to make wholesale decisions about our lives that often take us in a completely different direction.

Last time, we returned ashore and Evans spent six months looking for a job. This time, the job came looking for him. He was in Spain with our friend, Clive, surveying the 112-foot Royal Huiseman yacht, and he has been asked to be involved in the refit of the boat. Laila changed her Caribbean landfall to Antigua so Billy Budd, the Oyster 72, will be here for the Oyster regatta, when they hope to find a buyer for the boat. Evans will be working pretty much full time on this project for anywhere from four months to a year. And we'll be working with Clive and Laila instead of saying goodbye again for an unknown period of time.

So our plans have become just a bit clearer - more like tomato soup than mud. We had planned to clear out of Antigua last Thursday when our visas and cruising permit expired, but we got permission to stay a few more days, in part because of the local election on Thursday and the national holiday the day after. That turned out to be a very good thing, as it gave us more time to coordinate with Clive and Laila over the refit. We will be leaving tomorrow for the Virgins, where we will cruise for six weeks. My sister and brother-in-law will join us there at the end of April, and then we'll be heading north for the Chesapeake in early May, returning to the boatyard on Magothy Creek just north of Annapolis where we fit Hawk out and from where we left ten years ago.