Seven weeks, and the last of it was the strangest stretch: a crater bay out at the Columbretes that turned into a proper witches’ cauldron on arrival, gusts pouring straight in with no safe way through, so we sat a night on a mooring outside the rim like sensible people before going in to meet the two park rangers who apparently live out there full time. I have met stranger crews. I have not met many stranger addresses.

Now we are back where we started, less than a mile from the yard that spent all winter turning this boat into something with considerably less use for me. A season’s accounting, then, since somebody ought to keep one. Six hundred and fifty-some miles. A storm nobody forecast. A tin helmsman who quit once, dramatically, mid-corner, and was reinstated without so much as an apology. Two small crew members who have both gotten noticeably taller since April, which I understand is normal for their kind and still finds me unprepared for it every single season.

I did not fix a single thing that actually needed fixing this year. The hull held. The rigging held. The whisper-screw and the weird black planks and the glowing oracle box all did exactly what they were built to do, without me, the entire way around. So I wrote about it instead, in the margins of this blogbook, which is apparently what a ship’s spirit does now in the golden age of nothing breaking. I am told there is a refit coming this winter. I live in hope.