The Storm Before The Calm

Crash!  A heavy jerk followed by the sound of broken glass.  The front end of the Prius was smashed in by a car that swerved into my lane as I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge after spending a day at Muir Beach with my sister Bodoe.  Everyone was all right, including Little Bear in the back seat, but with only three weeks before leaving on our long sailing journey and my to-do list totally full, I wondered how I would ever find the time to get it fixed.

We had just returned from a wonderful East Coast trip where we’d dropped off Julian at Boston College and seen lots of old friends in Martha’s Vineyard, Washington, Chapel Hill, Winston-Salem, and Asheville.  Tomorrow I would leave for Seattle, where Pam would fly in from Canada, and we’d see Lindsay at the University of Puget Sound.  Such travel plans!

Only a couple more weeks to pack up the house and stuff everything into a 37-foot sailboat.  And buy enough canned meat, spices, and coffee to sail across the Pacific.  And fix the sprinkler that broke so the garden would not completely dry up.  And paint the bedroom.  And have Dr. Peterson show us how to sew sutures into each other.  And deal with some new repairs needed to the boat, like bolting on the autopilot which I noticed was about to fall off every time I turned the wheel hard to port, and the dodger which had a big chunk of window knocked out by a flying jib line and now served as the perfect wind tunnel in high seas.

We managed it!  The Prius got fixed just in time for Lindsay to fly down from Seattle and snatch it.  I sold my beautiful old Mercedes 380 SL convertible, said farewell to Little Bear, and hauled a couple of dock carts of additional stuff to s/v Pamela as she waited in her berth with her gorgeous canoe stern sagging several inches lower in the water.

At sunset we slipped our lines and sailed her out of South Beach Harbor.  The storm was over.  Or was it?  The offshore weather forecast called for gale-force winds from the south …