San Diego: miss

        Although today was another perfect day, I did not go sailing.  I did not feel enough enthusiasm to tack out the channel, sail along the beach for an hour or two and turn back, so I sanded the cockpit.  I will paint it tomorrow.
        I am long on the record as not liking to daysail.  I like to go out and not come back.  I am going to have to think this through now that I am in the third part of my life.  Perhaps, Iike my friend, Steve Earley, I am going to have to plan week or two week cruises, though I will admit that I have thought of another voyage, and I am only three months from the completion of GANNET’s circumnavigation.  I don’t know that it will happen.  It is not a circumnavigation, but it would be epic. 
        I am feeling my way into the dying part of my life, as I expect that all of us who are aware do.  My situation may be unusual in that I believe I have already fulfilled my destiny and perhaps outlived it.  A Ulysses far older than any other great poet ever imaged, and perhaps more aware of Penelope, which I will write about in time.  I don’t believe I have to do more, but perhaps I do.  Perhaps as I wrote in the first passage of GANNET’s circumnavigation from this very basin to Hilo, Hawaii, “Use yourself up, old man.  Use yourself up.”  It may be my pride and curse that perhaps I still haven’t used myself up.  And perhaps as Milton wrote about his blindness, “And that one talent which is death to lodge in me useless.”  I am aware of the religious interpretations of that.  But there are powers some of us are born with that demand endless expression.
        As I say in the video not yet uploaded I have a lot of history in this basin and within a few miles.
        I lived aboard here in the late 1960s.  I began my second circumnavigation from here.  I began my sixth from here.  And my grandparents’ house where I spent my teenaged summers was two miles away.
        Quivira Basin would be an honorable end.  But maybe it isn’t.  I don’t know.

        I was asked recently what I miss in moving from a 37’ boat to a 24’ one.  A good question that I had not been asked before.
        I thought for a moment and said, “Other than living with Carol on a boat, which she doesn’t want to do anymore, nothing.”
        GANNET suits me alone perfectly.  I go to the monastery of the sea.  She is the perfect monk’s cell, and better at this instant than she has ever been now that I have gotten rid of unnecessary debris.
        I can fit every essential part of my life on GANNET’s small space:  I can write; I can sail; I can read; I can listen to music.  Every essential part of my life, except Carol.