San Diego: three surprises

        I painted the cockpit today. 
        Painting white on white in bright sunshine and with my flawed vision, I found in this evening’s subdued light  places I need to touch up which I will do when I paint the remaining parts of the deck between the Raptor nonskid panels.
        I am content here working on GANNET.  That is the first of the surprises.  I don’t know that contentment is my natural state.
        While I have lived more in the MidWest than anywhere else, I am not a MidWesterner, though when I think of Americans I admire, other than those of the true greatest generation,  that of the Revolution, the names that first come to mind are MidWesterners:  Abraham Lincoln; Ulysses S. Grant; Harry Truman.  But I am pelagic and and as I have noted Quivira Basin and Mission Beach are as much as any place on land the center of my life.
        The second surprise came when I learned that several people thought that I would sell GANNET after completing her circumnavigation.  That had never occurred to me.  I did not buy GANNET intending to sail her around the world.  That evolved.  She suits me perfectly and I think I suit her perfectly.  Unless, as I think highly unlikely, Carol decides she is willing to live on a boat full time again, in which case I would buy something THE HAWKE OF TUONELA size, GANNET and I are good for the duration.
        The third surprise to me is that only three months after we completed GANNET’s circumnavigation I have thought of another voyage I would like to make.
        It took me a year after my first circumnavigation before I thought of another.  And the passage from Panama was brutal and joyless.  I completed it from pride and honor.  I have a self-image of Webb Chiles being as far as possible out to the right of the bell shaped curve of normal distribution where the line flattens and never quite touches the baseline, a self-image I will not fail to live up to.
        I am not saying I will ever make another voyage.  If I do it will  not be a circumnavigation.  The first phase would be to sail GANNET across the Pacific to New Zealand’s Bay of Islands, where she would spend a final year.  And from there I know, but will not say.
        It may never happen.
        I am really old and we are all ultimately self-solving problems.
        I have done enough, and I haven’t.  I might never be able to do enough.
        Time and chance will solve that.