We left the Gambier on the third of July, though not before I motored over to Akamaru to say goodbye to Billie the Kidd. He stood in his usual spot and ignored me with the total commitment he brings to everything, which is the closest thing to a blessing he offers, and I took it. I left a few spare parts with the boat next to his, said something sentimental to nobody in particular, and pointed Cloud Nine at the pass. The anchorage at Rikitea had quietly emptied over the past weeks, fifteen boats down to two or three, and there was a low building in the northwest that I had no wish to entertain at anchor. So we left while leaving was still the easy option. Not every departure is a hard decision. This one practically made itself.

The first day was slow, and I enjoyed every hour of it. Light wind, a soft sea, the land dissolving astern until there was nothing left to manage but the small ongoing miracle of a boat holding together in the middle of an ocean. After weeks on the hook Cloud Nine seemed to loosen her shoulders, and so did I. A booby turned up on the second day, took one look at the rigging, and decided we were headed his way. He rode our wind for hours without once offering to help, which made him excellent company and, by the standards of this trip, remarkably low-maintenance.

Then, because a passage is really a machine for generating small emergencies, the instruments got involved. Around midnight the wind readouts began reporting numbers from a private and imaginary ocean, and I spent several absorbing hours chasing the fault before I found it, a tired paddlewheel under the hull that had stopped counting, which meant the wind computer, denied any honest sense of boat speed, had simply been guessing all night with tremendous confidence. I know the feeling. By dawn I had talked the radio back into service, coaxed the AIS and the GPS onto the screen, improved the wind read-out, and comprehensively bricked the instrument core I had unpaired earlier while accusing it of the crime. Two things forward, one thing back. I have kept that tally for a few years now. It has never once come out even, and I have finally stopped expecting it to.

The weather found us on the fifth, thirty knots and a great deal of rain and a night spent listening to the boat hold a long muttered conversation with herself. We motored through the worst of it and came out into a following breeze and a rinsed-clean morning, and I celebrated by doing the laundry and taking a hot shower, which this far from anywhere qualifies as a spa day. The sixth was my birthday. I spent it under light air on a flat sea with the engine purring along, and that night the stars came out in numbers that make a person feel very small in the good way rather than the existential one. There was no cake, unless you count popcorn and a warm beer, and out here you count it.

The eighth tried to spoil the mood. The engine quit and then reconsidered, the autopilot walked off the job the instant I raised sail, and I hand-steered by feel until I found the loose connection and we came to an understanding. A shroud needed a field repair that will want a proper one in port. Somewhere in the middle of all this I noticed that none of it frightened me the way it once would have, and I have decided to file that under progress rather than poke at it too hard. Cloud Nine and I have been at this for a few years. We know each other's tells.

The ninth was the boat's apology for everything. The barometer climbed, the trades filled in warm and steady, and the sailing turned quietly, almost suspiciously, perfect, one clean gybe and a long unhurried run that lasted the whole bright afternoon. That night gave up the best stars of the passage, and I woke to land standing out of the grey to the west, exactly where the chart had been promising it would be. We motored in through a well-marked pass and set the hook in twelve metres, floating the chain for the first time over water clear enough to watch it settle, and then I sat in the cockpit a long while and did the most satisfying thing on offer, which was nothing at all. Two repairs are still on the list, and they can keep. For now the seven hundred miles are behind us, and Cloud Nine is riding easy on her chain, and I am somewhere I have never been, which is the whole reason anyone unties the lines in the first place.