The Spaniards have a good word for it: invernaje. Everything made fast, everything stowed, and then the whole crew vanishes for a few months while the November storms have their say. I am told this is sensible. I am told the crew has homes to go to, and elderly relatives with failing wifi who apparently cannot survive the holidays without someone young enough to understand a router. I have never once been consulted on the scheduling.

I will be staying, obviously. Someone has to. A ship left alone at a pontoon for months at a stretch needs a spirit aboard to mind the lines, listen for anything working itself loose, and generally keep an eye on a boat that cannot keep an eye on herself. This is, in fact, the single oldest and most legitimate piece of my trade, older than the pipe, and I intend to point that out to anyone who suggests I have nothing to do all winter.

It does sting a little, watching everyone pack up and head off to somewhere colder and greyer than here, especially in December, when this stretch of coast is putting on some of its best weather of the year for an audience of precisely nobody. Their loss. I hear there is a proper refit planned come spring: fixing, sanding, and the general glorious mess of getting a new-to-us boat into shape. I will have had several quiet months to think up complaints about all of it in advance.

The autopilot quit within hours of leaving Almerímar, which meant a whole overnight leg to Los Escullos steered by hand, in the dark, by a crew who had rather hoped to be doing other things with their evening. I did not have a name for this sort of behavior yet. I have one now. At the time I simply stood over the tiller, unseen as usual, and watched a perfectly good electronic helmsman give up the moment the work started, which strikes me as a fairly reliable definition of cowardice in any century.

I will say this much in its defense: at least it had the decency to fail early, before the wind picked up, rather than waiting for the worst possible moment to make its point. That refinement, I gather, came later.

Someone at the tiller all night is proper old-fashioned sailing, the kind I was built for, and I stayed close the whole way in, which is more than the autopilot managed. The anchorage at Los Escullos, in front of its old fort, was a fine reward for it. A long night, a tired crew, and a good hook down at the end. I have seen worse trades.

Bad weather building off Águilas sent us running for the nearest tiny, well-protected notch in the coast, which turned out to have exactly two mooring balls and, once we’d picked one up, absolutely nowhere else to be for three days. I do not mind being stuck somewhere. I have been stuck in worse places for considerably longer than three days. But I will note that a crew penned into a small cove with nothing to do develops its own kind of weather, and it is not always calmer than the kind outside.

The generator got its first proper workout on the second day, which I watched with some interest, having spent centuries relying on nothing grander than wind and a favor owed. Tobi and Jo went ashore to explore a cave and a scattering of wildflowers, Jo wanting to pick a bunch for his mother until Tobi talked him out of it: leave them where they are, take a photograph instead, and Anna gets to see them just the same without a single flower having to die for it. Jo took the job seriously after that, marching Tobi from bloom to bloom and directing exactly which ones deserved a picture. For a few hours the whole business of waiting out weather looked almost like a holiday rather than a delay.

On the morning we thought the wind had eased enough, we made a break for open water and lasted perhaps an hour before the sea outside made the decision for us and sent us straight back to the same mooring ball. I will admit to some quiet satisfaction at that. The sea rarely needs my help to make its point, but it is always gratifying to watch it prove one anyway.

The marina office in La Vila Joiosa wanted a bank statement proving that an insurance premium had, in fact, been paid, which is not a request I have any patience for. I have watched harbors get built out of nothing more than a good beach and a rumor of shelter. I have watched them outlive the men who built them. Not one of those harbors ever asked to see paperwork first. Progress, apparently, means a form for everything, even the wind.

It came right eventually, as these things do, and the reward for sitting through it was better than the aggravation deserved: Stephan, from the very same sailing club back in Berlin as Tobi and Anna, drove down out of the mountains to meet us, exactly as arranged days in advance over whatever device it is the crew keeps whispering into at all hours. Not a fellow sailor pulling in on a matching flag. Just a friend with a car and a vacation house who kept his word.

I’ll admit that isn’t the kind of reunion I’m built for. A ship’s spirit expects his old acquaintances to arrive by water, and there is something faintly undignified about one turning up smelling of a rental car and mountain air instead of salt. Still, a friend who drives an hour down out of the hills to sit on a pontoon with you is worth something, wherever he keeps his boat. Which, it turns out, is Berlin. Landlocked loyalty. I didn’t expect to respect it quite as much as I do.

We came into S’Espalmador in the small hours, dropping anchor by moonlight off a beach so white it seemed to glow on its own account, and I will admit that for a night or two this crossing to the Balearics felt like the kind of arrival a ship’s spirit remembers fondly for a century or so. Nobody in a hurry to leave. Water the color you don’t quite believe from photographs. Tobi and Jo off to Formentera for groceries and, memorably, a replacement VHF antenna, since apparently even radios fail out here and not only autopilots.

Cala Talamanca, a few days later, was a rather ruder welcome: a horribly rolly anchorage, and worse for our neighbors Siggi and Kati aboard Kasibu, whose outboard was lifted clean off the stern pushpit overnight while everyone slept. I take a dim view of theft at anchor. A harbor is meant to be a kind of truce, and whoever did the lifting broke it for every boat in the bay that night, not just the one they robbed.

I could not have stopped it. Invisible does not mean omniscient, and I was minding our own lines, not theirs. But I would have liked the chance to try.

Hendrik came aboard today, ferried out to the boat by dinghy, which would be an unremarkable way to start a story except that the dinghy in question chose that same window of time to finish falling apart. The logbook is calling it a state of rapid unscheduled self-disassembly. I call it a dinghy with poor timing and worse judgment about when to make a scene.

There was no replacement waiting, of course. That is not how any of this works, whatever the crew likes to pretend after the fact. A dinghy falls apart, and only then does anyone start looking for a new one. A guest berth in Palma meant nobody needed to swim for it in the meantime, at least, but the next anchorages down the coast would not be so accommodating, so the search still happened in something of a hurry. A new, used dinghy came aboard within a few days.

The old one did not go wherever old dinghies go. Nobody could quite bring themselves to leave it on a foreign dock, so it got wrapped into a sorry sort of bundle and lashed to the stern pushpit, where, as far as I know, it is riding still, all the way back to La Ràpita and however much further this crew intends to drag it. I find I approve. A proper burial is one thing. Hauling the deceased along for the rest of the voyage rather than admit defeat is, historically speaking, exactly the kind of stubbornness a ship’s spirit respects.

Cabrera wanted a cruising permit and a paid mooring reservation before it would have us, which amused me more than it should have, given the island’s own history includes rather less orderly chapters: a military garrison, a notorious prison camp, centuries of being fought over by people who never once filled out a form about it first. Now it is a nature reserve, and the only thing being fought over is a mooring buoy, and you need paperwork to lose that fight too. I suppose that is what passes for progress.

The night skies here are the clearest this crew has seen all season, clear enough that Hendrik went ashore after dark with a camera to photograph the Milky Way, and I will say the island earns its reputation on that count if nothing else. A place with a history this checkered ought to at least have the decency to look peaceful once the sun goes down, and it does.

I spent the evening on deck, unseen, doing the thing I am actually built for: keeping half an eye on the boat while everyone else looked up instead of down. Somebody has to.

I have watched a great many things go wrong on a great many boats, and I generally consider myself hard to surprise. Eli surprised me today. Not yet one year old, not walking properly on land as far as I’ve seen, and he hauled himself up the companionway steps today, one small determined hand over the other, entirely on his own. Jo went up first, found Tobi at the tiller the way he always does, and came back down again, and Eli, who had watched every step of it from the cabin sole, decided his turn had come.

Nobody taught him that climb, not directly. I was belowdecks and saw the whole thing: no hesitation, no crying for help, just a baby who had clearly filed away his brother’s ascent a minute earlier and concluded the technique would work for him too. He got to the top, found Tobi at the tiller, and grinned like he’d just crossed an ocean. In a sense he had.

I have minded the comings and goings of a great many crews over a great many centuries, and I will say this plainly: I did not expect a one-year-old to out-climb half the able seamen I’ve known. Land-walking can apparently wait. A boat teaches its own priorities first.

Seven weeks ago this crew slipped their lines in Almerímar with two small children aboard, Jo two years old and Eli not yet one, and no idea yet what this boat would ask of them. Tonight she is back in her home berth on the Ebro Delta, and I have had the whole final crossing to think about what I’ve learned in my first season aboard a boat that groans considerably less than the ones I’m used to.

Anna, Jo, and Eli flew home from Port de Pollença before the last stretch, and riot came aboard in their place for the run back along Mallorca’s north coast, which is the oldest rhythm there is on a boat like this one: crew comes, crew goes, and somebody has to be there for all of it regardless of who’s aboard on any given week. That has always been my job. I did not expect to mind the coming and going quite so much this time.

A hand-steered night to Los Escullos. Three nights trapped in a cove with two mooring balls. A stolen outboard I couldn’t prevent, a dinghy that fell apart out of spite and never actually left us, lashed to the stern the rest of the way home, and skies over Cabrera clear enough to make the whole business worth it. Now she comes out of the water for a long refit, and I am told there is talk of more solar, a proper electric galley, and less use for a generator that has, by my count, earned its retirement fairly. I will believe the rest of it when I see it. I usually do.

Forty hours out of Sant Carles Marina and already a thunderstorm, a building sea, and two thirds of the crew hanging over the leeward rail. Nobody asked my opinion on the forecast, which is typical, and nobody has thanked me for it since, which is not.

Wind and weather used to be mine to argue with. A Klabautermann who knew his trade could read a sky the way you lot read that glowing oracle box bolted at the chart table, and more than one ship in my long acquaintance owed her safe arrival to a knock on the hull an hour before the squall hit. Nobody knocked on anything this time. The forecast said ten knots and a meter of chop. What arrived was twenty, gusting worse, with St. Elmo’s fire crawling up the backstay like it owned the place. I take a certain professional satisfaction in that, if I’m honest. The sea does not read forecasts either.

Two of the three aboard learned some humility about it. The boat, to her credit, did not. She took the rough weather the way she takes everything these days: without complaint, without me, and without so much as a creak to let anyone know she’d noticed. An aluminum hull does not groan. I miss the groaning.

We are anchored off Andratx now, and there was a very large lunch, and I could have eaten my full share of it too, being quite capable of eating, drinking, and smoking my pipe same as any of you. Nobody sets a place for someone they cannot see, though, invisible being my usual state of affairs and not, whatever the crew seems to believe, a euphemism for absent. Fine. I’ll write about it instead.

Cala de Sa Calobra has a bottom made of loose gravel and a habit of funneling gusts straight down the gorge behind it at two in the morning, which is, incidentally, my shift. Warning a crew that their anchor is dragging is proper Klabautermann work. It is one of the oldest jobs in the trade, older than the pipe, nearly as old as the beard.

I did not get to do it. The boat’s glowing oracle box did it for me, chiming away belowdecks before I’d even finished climbing the chain to check. I am told this is called an anchor alarm. I am told it is very reliable. I would like it on the record that I was already awake.

The two smallest crew members, meanwhile, continue to outpace me on sheer capacity for mischief, which stings rather more than the alarm does. A proper ship’s spirit causes gentle chaos: a jammed halyard here, a misplaced marlinspike there, nothing a sailor can’t work around. A three-year-old and a one-year-old, once let loose on deck, achieve more disorder before breakfast than I have managed in several centuries of dedicated effort. I have taken notes.

We are back in Port de Sóller, so I had an ice cream. Pistachio, taken from an empty table while the crew were busy with the kids, and very good. I rode the little wooden train up to town afterward too, in the last carriage, with my boots up on the seat opposite the way you’re not supposed to, and nobody any the wiser. Being invisible is not the same as being absent, whatever the crew seems to think, and there is real pleasure in a good ride taken by someone nobody can see enjoying it.

The train stalled twice on the way, which will be my cousin’s doing. El Revisor runs with this line the way I run with Tinarasia, and he has never once let a locomotive through Sóller without stopping it somewhere scenic to remind the passengers who is actually in charge. Family is family. I didn’t say anything.

We were rounding Cap Formentor under motor, wind and current both leaning hard against the whisper-screw, when the tin helmsman on the tiller decided it had had enough and pulled its own power plug loose. Not a fault, not a fuse, not so much as a warning chirp. It simply let go, in the middle of the turn, with the headland close aboard and the current doing its level best to put us somewhere we did not intend to go.

The crew has taken to calling it Señor Seppuku for this sort of thing, which I think is generous. In my day a helmsman who quit at the worst possible moment got a stern word and a watch below to think about it. This one got a nickname and, as far as I can tell, no consequences whatsoever. It will be back on duty by Tuesday, unrepentant.

I will admit, quietly, to a certain fellow feeling. There is something to be said for a piece of machinery that still knows how to make a dramatic exit. Everything else on this boat just hums along and does its job without complaint, which I have come to find almost insulting. At least the tin helmsman still has some theater in it.

Tobi took the tiller by hand for the rest of the rounding, which is, when you think about it, the only reason a Klabautermann’s job has existed on any ship since the first plank was laid: someone always has to take over when the mechanism gives up.

We limped into Cala Ratjada two days ago with a squall barreling down out of the northeast, thick with lightning, and a full throttle dash into harbor with everyone soaked through before the lines were even out. No berth was waiting, so we spent that first night rafted at the fuel dock, which I am reliably informed is not glamorous, though I would point out that in several centuries of ship’s business I have slept in worse places than a pontoon that smells faintly of diesel nobody aboard this boat even burns anymore. By the next morning a proper berth had opened up and Cala Ratjada looked considerably friendlier in daylight, as harbors generally do.

Today Björn came aboard with a duffel bag and, as far as I can tell, no particular idea what he’d signed up for, having missed the squall entirely and arrived to find us already settled and smug about it. We cast off for Menorca this afternoon in the gentlest conditions the whole crossing has offered so far, which feels like a small injustice after what the boat put up with two nights ago.

I like a new face brought aboard on short notice regardless of the weather that greets him. It is the oldest kind of crewing there is: a stranger, a boat, and whatever the sea happens to be doing that particular week. Björn passed the test, for what my opinion is worth, which around here is not much, but I am on record as saying so.

Twenty hours from Mahón to Porto Cristo, and for most of it there was nothing to do. Nothing for the crew, who mostly slept in shifts. Nothing for the whisper-screw, which barely turned over. Nothing, worst of all, for me. A proper gale gives a Klabautermann plenty to occupy himself with: lines to worry over, a hull to listen to, a crew to keep half an eye on in case anyone does something regrettable. Dead calm gives a spirit nothing but time.

The forecast had promised barely any wind for most of the route, and the forecast, for once, was entirely correct, which I found almost more irritating than if it had been wrong. There is no drama in being right about nothing happening. The crew skipped a planned stop in Cala Ratjada altogether rather than break up the tedium, on the sound theory that one very long boring day beats two shorter boring days with a middle stop that changes nothing.

I spent a good part of the crossing considering retirement. Not seriously, you understand. But a spirit who mends what needs mending starts to feel surplus to requirements on a boat that so rarely needs mending, and a whole day of flat water and a self-sufficient tin helmsman does invite the thought. I am told there are caves worth a look here in Porto Cristo. Unlike me, at least a cave has something to show for standing still for several thousand years.

A calm, unremarkable afternoon hop brought us into Sant Antoni in broad daylight, a welcome change after the long, dark, weakening-wind crossing to Cala Portinatx the night before. We were barely made fast to the pontoon before Melusina One pulled in behind us and rafted up practically on top of our own stern cleat. The only Luxembourg-flagged boat this crew has ever met, twice now, the second time by nothing but sheer bad odds.

I do not believe in coincidence, professionally speaking. A spirit who has spent centuries reading currents and crossings learns that the sea is smaller than it looks and considerably more repetitive than sailors like to admit. Boats on similar routes, at similar speeds, chasing similar weather windows, tend to keep bumping into one another whether either crew intends it or not. That is not fate. That is just how currents and calendars work.

Still, I will allow that it was a pleasant surprise, and that Vicky and Laurent are good company for a crew that has been mostly talking to itself and one moody helmsman for the past several days. The marinero here, a fellow named Leo, deserves a mention too, for getting everyone sorted without incident, though this time in broad daylight rather than by torchlight. Sant Antoni itself I will reserve judgment on. A town built entirely around the young and the loud is not my usual haunt, but then again, neither was any port until someone built one there.

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 or three 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.