Passages Are Like ….

Miles traveled day 2: 99
Miles traveled day 3: 118
Miles traveled day 4: 156
Miles traveled total: 482
Miles left to Niue: 598

I’ve been trying to figure out what it is with passages and how to understand them. We’ve had pretty good luck and basically enjoyed our passages right up until we made landfall in the Marquesas. Since then I’ve been pretty challenged to come up with something good to say while we’re on passage, and may even have broken our strict “no whining” in the blog mandate. The first four days of this passage have again made writing without whining difficult. Every day has been different from the previous one, but they are getting better. As a matter of fact we’re having a marvelous sail right now. Bouncy, but mostly marvelous and making good time in the intended direction.

About day 2 I had a little realization that maybe you can’t just define a passage as one thing. Sometimes a passage is going to have lots of different personalities. So I thought maybe Passages Are Like Relatives. There are days when you feel like you’re back at Crazy Aunt Sally’s on Thanksgiving, and there are days when you’re sitting in the sun on the deck at Ray’s Boathouse having lunch with your sister. You can’t pick ’em, you just get what you get. But that’s not entirely true – we could have waited another week or month to try and get a perfect weather window for this passage. But with a 10 day passage and no way to forecast accurately further out than 5 days, you can’t really pick a perfect passage.

Then I thought maybe Passages Are Like Cliches. It is what it is. But in the end, I realized that Passages Are Like Forrest Gump’s Box Of Chocolates – you never know what you’re going to get.