The boat stayed in Gambier while I did not. I went home to see family, came back to Papeete worn to the thread, and spent one night in the hospital there on the strength of a mild pneumonia that had been trailing me for the better part of two months. That is the whole of the illness, and it is the least interesting part of the story. What came after is the part I keep turning over.

A couple of sailors ran me out to Cloud Nine in a dinghy, which is the kind of thing cruisers do without being asked. She had waited well. Nothing was wrong that turning something back on would not fix. Lights on, engine checked, a beard of growth scraped off her bottom, and she was herself again. I was the one who still needed the work.

You do not notice you have become a land animal until you try to be a sea one again. You step off a plane walking flat and certain, reaching for a cup that has no intention of sliding anywhere, sleeping in one long unbroken piece the way houses let you. None of it is wrong ashore. All of it is wrong on a boat. The change back does not announce itself. It arrives in the corrections you stop having to think about, the hand that finds the grabrail on its own, the body that starts sleeping in the two-hour lengths the sea prefers, the ear that wakes at a shift in the wind a moment before the mind does. You cannot point to the morning it returns. You only notice, some days in, that you have quit bracing against a world you thought was trying to throw you, and started moving with it instead. I am somewhere in the middle of that crossing, the one that has nothing to do with distance.

I ran the stores in Rikitea and gathered every vegetable the island had to offer, which came to a bag of onions and two sticks of ginger. It should be an interesting couple of weeks. That is what vitamins are for.

Then I took her out to Akamaru for a proper shakedown and to drop some parts for other sailors, and found I had the whole anchorage to myself. This is a fine thing and a slightly suspicious one. You sit in the quiet and start to wonder what everyone else knows that you do not. Did I miss a weather report. I do not think I missed a weather report. There are eight knots of wind, the sea is flat, the moon is up, and Akamaru is doing what it does, which is hold up a church far too big for the island beneath it and keep its own counsel.

Tomorrow we leave around noon. Four to six days should put us in the Australs, where I will spend a few days before turning for Papeete. The route is the reason for the route. I should have fair winds in both directions, which matters, because the alternative is beating up through the Tuamotus, and I would rather not thread a solo boat through the atolls looking out for a bomby, the uncharted pillar of coral that waits there to introduce itself to a hull. So we go the long way, which is the short way.

The other reason for the Australs is the whales. This is the season they come back, and it is most of why I am pointing the bow at them. Sperm whales, if the ocean is feeling generous. We will see what we see. I am short of pictures this week and the hospital can take the blame for that. I will make it up on the water.