Sailing Positive Waves

Meeting Positive Waves was surreal.  We worked with the team at Boreal for over a year to configure the boat to exactly how we wanted it, from anchor size to autopilot choice to lamps and fans. We had a multi-page spreadsheet that we emailed back and forth with Jean Francois at Boreal and we had numerous phone and email conversations. Hans and I flew to Treguier at the end of January (right when coronavirus was exploding in Wuhan) and saw the boat at about 90% completion. She looked like a boat and we could imagine  her finished, but she was still covered in protective plastic in places and the electronics and the galley weren't installed.  When we walked down the dock yesterday evening and saw her tied up in a slip, it was like all the imaginings on paper materialized in real life. The kids ran down the dock and we implored them to "slow down, you don't have life jackets on!" Freja says that as she walked down the steep dock her legs were shaking from excitement and

The last few weeks in Corpus Christi were a blur of selling stuff, throwing stuff away, and saying goodbye to friends. This was all complicated by the pandemic and the massive spike of cases in Corpus Christi. We went into June feeling very optimistic about our last six weeks in Corpus. Positive Covid cases had remained very low and it seemed like we were spared the surge of cases that New York City, Louisiana, and the northeast saw. The kids went to a Harry Potter art camp for a week, we saw more and more friends, and Hans and I even had our favorite babysitter, Holly, over for an evening so we could go to the best restaurant in the city, the Yardarm. In retrospect that all looks like a golden blur. Cases spiked in late June and by the beginning of July the hospitals were filling up and the city leaders had called for help from the federal government. The kids and I stayed home again while Hans split his time between working at the reservation in South Dakota and the hospitals in Corp