It has been quite a while since I added a post and since we haven’t been cruising I haven’t really felt the urge, but Nelleke is up on the hard, the tanks and the engine winterized, last night was the first plunge below freezing and a lot has happened since the summer.

So, here goes.

The biggest thing is that my younger brother passed away after a nine month battle with cancer. My Mom and Dad were already gone so other that me that makes me the last. A bit of a sobering thought and wake up to your own mortality. I can remember sitting one of the church pews and looking in the prayer book at the church calander stretched out over the next 100 years and thinking back then at the ripe old age of 14 that with a life expectancy of 90 years how much we had stretched out in front. I don’t want to look at those pages now that I am in my sixties.

If you look at life as a game or a race then I feel I have been really fortunate. My team mates or running mates, Barb and the kids, have made the race interesting, fulfilling and enjoyable and I can’t see the finish line yet. My brother, on the other hand, never had a team and never seemed to get out of the starting blocks.

I wish it could have been otherwise somehow.

That’s enough depressing stuff.

We have our plans underway for Nelleke over the winter and have started in on a couple of them. Besides the repairs to the mizzen pulpit the big thing is our decision to get a self steering mechanism. We have selected the Monitor and are looking forward to being able to make the offshore passages without power consumption. We will have it installed before launch in the spring and will take a couple of local 100 mile cruises to familiarize us with each other.

We will take some photos.