Our Omega Event for Sailing

Here we sit in Soper’s Hole for another night. Carol has decided that she wants ice cream for dessert, and it is on hand at the Harbour Market. She also claims that I am tired, a way of saying that she is tired, and that we need a day without travel, a day to rest. I am OK with that.

This trip was always going to be the consolation prize: the “kids” could not be here; we have no access to the USVI; 17 days in the BVI is a lot. What made the trip, for me at least, was the incredible, consistent wind. I would estimate that we wind in excess of 10 knots well over 90% of the time. Almost every time we put up the sails, we could sail like we had rarely done before. This was good, very good. The other nice surprise was how good Verizon’s cell coverage is. I have always been able to get to the internet, always with good 4G coverage.

I have another trip that I very much want to take: Croatia, a place most Americans could not locate on a map. It runs along the eastern side of the Adriatic Sea and includes Istria and Dalmatia, places where the rough sandals of Roman legions once marched. At Croatia’s southern point is Dubrovnik, dubbed by Lord Byron as the Jewel of the Adriatic. I have charts and charter agreements with the intention of going there next May. This is not a whim; I have literally been researching this trip for years.

My career was, more or less, an advanced degree in real life. One of many lessons I learned, and one of the few lessons that I taught, was intellectual integrity, a fancy name for learning to look at things objectively, as they are, not as a person might hope, want, wish or need them to be. The first step of all twelve step programs is recognition of having a problem, hard to do if a person is not dialed in to objective reality.

I now find myself, and to a degree Carol, in the uncomfortable position of doing this objective review on myself, not some abstract business situation. We have done well enough; we have not made any major mistakes; we have not put ourselves or the boat in a position to suffer harm. What disturbs are two things. First, we have been sloppy in our execution of basic boating stuff. Most of my course changes have been terrible; the few good ones raising to the level of bare adequacy. These are not fatal flaws, but they show clearly that we are now far removed from the practiced skills we had before we sold our boat in 2013. The second concern is stamina. We have both been tired most of the time. That cannot be the result of long legs of trips; at most we have gone about 25nm in a day, short sails in a small area. The Adriatic trip, if taken, would require much more mileage to be covered in a day.

As an objective observer, I can only conclude that another trip, to the Adriatic, would be an overreach, something that we could do, but in the doing there would be little enjoyment. So, quoting myself …

Setting aside the metaphysics of Deities, everything has an ending, an “Omega Event”. Astrophysicists tell us that the very universe in which Carol and I have sailed will one day collapse back into itself. If there is no BIG BANG then, maybe, there will be a giant slurping sound like a straw siphoning the last few drops from the bottom of a glass, although it is hard to hear noise in the vacuum of space, and there will not be anyone around to hear it, anyway.

This trip is to be our last, our "Omega Event," and it will be. Starting and finishing our life's great adventure in the same place seems an artful symmetry, a closing of the circle. Our future joy will come in the remembrance of things past.

This blog posting will be number 186, and there will be only one more after this is posted. I started the blog in 2008 so that my mother would have a way to know where we were and what we were doing. She passed, but the blog went on, a quotidian diary of our boating lives. Our blog has been read by so many times that the number staggers, a little. It is humbling to think that Carol and I have shared a portion of our lives with so many others and that it has been interesting to them. Carol and I have been fortunate in our lives and in each other. It has been my pleasure to share some of our good fortune with blog readers.