Luck

The top picture is my sister Jenny organizing our medical kit, the bottom picture is the banana that stood in as the patient for the lesson that Jenny gave A. and me on skin staples and suturing.

I have an aversion to talking about luck afloat, but I do think that adventures like ours provide plenty of opportunity to make your own luck. In a setting like the Iditarod, where everyone is exposed to the same universe of potentially bad-luck sources like weather, trail conditions and the odd moose, it’s the experienced mushers who tend to come out at the other end with fewer hard-luck tales. They’ve made their own luck by preparing hard and having been around long enough to have built a catalog of past mistakes.

So lots of what we’re doing now I think of as building (hopefully) our own luck. The rest is just an endless list of jobs. But it’s all coming together. Alisa is almost done with work, and I’ve just got two more frantic weeks of getting research published. We’re both going to stay home next week and pack up everything in the house. Alisa has three months of provisions on board and we’ve got the main and staysail bent on. We’ve had Eli on board one day at the dock as we were getting things together, and in the midst of all the screaming we learned something about his preferences on the boat. Our idea of having him sleep in the salon didn’t work – too much activity for him to take a nap there. So we’re kissing our double bunk forward goodbye and fitting it out with a crib.