On a mooring at Killarney Mountain Lodge, Ontario
July 25,2014

We have done what we came here to do! We needed to resolve in some way the terrible ambivalence we have had about where we wanted to sail. And you all have been witness to our sometimes ridiculous turn arounds.

We have just completed two days of vigorous sailing including a 35-40 mile day from Hotham Island to Snug Harbor on the Landsdown Channel. Dividing these two days was a midnight anchor watch. We were nicely settled, mostly asleep, and protected against the predicted northerly wind. Severe storms, announced only at the last hour by the weather service, erupted to our east-- thankfully not on top of us—when a strong westerly gust yanked the boat around 90+ degrees forcing the anchor to reset itself. In the process we lost some ground on the boat behind us. It took the next hour or so checking new sight lines in the darkness to satisfy ourselves that the anchor was indeed holding. We crawled back to bed again finally at midnight. The northerly came in sometime during the night turning us another 90 degrees, but with less fanfare. We slept right through that wind shift.

So we are tired, but still able to do what it takes, this year. And that is one of the dilemmas of aging: the unknowable “What about next year? And where will the boat be then, etc., etc. But in the end our decision to turn back west to L. Superior has less to do with our physical condition or the uncertainties of health, but of the total picture of who we think we are now.

The choice is not without the sadness and grief of a door closing forever; the dope slap of mortality. Our adventures in Far Atlantic Canada will be with us always, gratefully and proudly recalled yet now laced with finality.

In the end, commissioning the boat in four days in a faraway place with the hassle of getting there and back—well you know the drill-- seems like the opposite of our increasing desires for comfort. There is more, but as we said before, it is hard to put it all down in print.