OK, this isn't related to sailing, but I wanted to add one last up-to-date family photo. This was taken near the Tioga Road in Yosemite's high country, with Half Dome in the background, in early August!

Astute readers, if there are any left, many have noticed that the last dozen or so blog entries only showed up recently. A few of you may have even wondered why, perhaps having noticed we had seemingly been “stuck” in Rockland, Maine for the past 4 years. Not surprisingly, my blog entries tended to lag a couple of weeks behind real time. So about when I would have been doing the last entries we were busy packing and stowing gear aboard Tahu Le'a (which took the better part of a week in August 2007), then flying home, then almost immediately starting school…and somehow never quite got around to finishing the blog. Until now! So we really did finish the 2 years of cruising, ending up in Northeast Harbor, and we did make it back to Maine and Nova Scotia for one more summer, and now we’re all back in Los Altos, California. Except we’re not all in Los Altos, because I’m starting my sophomore year at UC Santa Cruz and am living in a house 2 blocks from the beach in Santa Cruz. The rest of the family is in Los Altos, with Kaela in her sophomore year at high school, and Tahu Le’a waiting patiently in a slip in Redwood City, ready for future adventures. Although we all still love cruising, I do most of my sailing now with the UCSC Sailing Team. We race CFJs, although in the picture above I'm sailing a 420 with Kaela in Redwood City Harbor on SF Bay. As for further cruising, not to mention blogs, we’ll see what the future brings.

As planned, we returned to Tahu Le'a in Northeast Harbor, Maine in June of 2009. Although we love cruising in Maine, we also had fond memories of our brief visit to Nova Scotia in the summer of 2006, and our friends on Symphony were still living there, with their boat at the Lunenburg YC (LYC) in Mahone Bay. So, we decided to return for a longer visit this summer. After the requisite stops at some of our favorite spots in Northeast and Southwest Harbors, and waiting out too many days of rain and blustery weather, we headed back across the Gulf of Maine on an overnight passage to Shelburne, NS. After checking in with Canadian Customs and Immigration, we headed on to Mahone Bay and the LYC. We spent most of July there (photo is from deck of LYC, overlooking docks, moorings, islands...), spending lots of time with our friends (who were living on there boat much of the summer), exploring the local area, and just enjoying the beautiful location. Kaela took a 2-week dinghy sailing class, and I spent the same two weeks practicing in 420s with the LYC high school racing team. We loved both the sailing aspect and the chance to get to know people our own age from a small coastal town in Nova Scotia, rather different than our suburban home in California! We had a great time, although it was one of the wettest summers ever in Maine and NS, with only a few days without rain or fog (or both) through all of June and July. This made for an unforgettable island camping trip with the kids from Symphony - the mosquitoes were voracious, the rain unrelenting, and our mood alternating between hysterical laughter and tears. We left LYC in early August and headed back to Northeast Harbor, but only after one last stop at the world famous Lahave Bakery (on the Lahave River about 20 miles from LYC), the only bakery we know of with a dock for visiting boats (and a café, and a craft coop, and take-out pizza - our kind of place!). Back at MDI, we packed up Tahu Le'a once again, said our good byes to all our favorite places, and headed for home (which would turn into one of the worst air travel experiences yet, taking almost 24 hours from Northeast Harbor to Los Altos...). Overall, we had spent part or all of 5 of the past 11 summers in Maine and especially around Mount Desert Island. Although happy to be back home in California, we are definitely going to miss it.

Well as the title suggests, this is our last blog entry as we complete our two year cruise. The entire family is at once sad to leave Tahu Le’a and nervously excited to return to California. Our journey started in a little motel in Bass Harbor, as we slowly transitioned into life in a (very approximately) thirty by ten feet living space. We began sailing around and beyond Mount Desert Island and soon were alternating chugging and sailing our way down the east coast. Despite the challenges and setbacks we faced (both individually and as a family – and as a boat!), we completed the goal of cruising as a family for two full years! It’s been an adventure and a learning experience in countless respects, covering almost 12000 miles by water, with 8 overnight coastal passages and 4 longer ocean passages, dozens of beautiful anchorages, cities and towns big and small, 2 tropical storms, 1 hurricane, and, of course, numerous restaurants and bakeries! As we pack up box after box to be shipped home, preparing to leave Tahu Le’a stored in Maine is becoming as hard as the packing is. We have had an amazing time and with luck will be returning in the summer of 2009!

...before we attacked the hapless lobsters. One last requisite family photo before the end of our journey. [Note to future visitors: Thurston's can be identified from land or sea by the distinctive yellow awnings peaking out in our pics.]