Calypso’s winter plans are set. We’ll haul out on Monday at True North Boatworks, right near Mischief, and get to those projects that were pushed to the very bottom of the list last summer. We’ll fix the couple of rotten spots on the bulwarks, remove and re-bed a lot of leaking hardware, paint the topsides, and work on a down below shower solution.

Mischief’s project list has two main items (or one item with 2 parts) on it, and they have the potential to be real doozies. Getting the electrical system operational as part of getting the engine operational.

Current thinking is that in the spring we’ll take both boats north, moving up the bay in tandem, in time for Cruisers University at the spring boat show in Annapolis. Mischief will be hauled at a yard up there while Calypso continues north to Maine or even Canada, this time with a bit more leisurely exploration possible.

It’s been an incredible shakedown cruise, filled with new places and a new appreciation for this wandering life of ours. Hauling out again this soon, as expected and planned as it was, feels like something is ending.

I guess everything is an ending of sorts, though. Leaving an anchorage to find a new place to explore? An ending of being in that particular spot. Putting the boat in the water to start a cruise? An ending of life on ladders. The Seismonic song “Closing Time” has lyrics that nail it: “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”

Both of our previous extended cruises, only temporary escapes from a more usual existence of cars, appointments, the 9-5 of jobs and school, had defined end points - and therefore a more urgent sense of destination. Get to somewhere beautiful as fast as possible so we can start enjoying our limited time. (I realize how strange it can feel to be thinking of a year (or 3) as limited time, but that might be cruising in a nutshell. Time is more elastic.) A boatyard is not a beautiful destination. And though we did haul out to do a bottom job and a couple of other projects in Trinidad during our first cruise, it was after 2 years of meandering around.

Hauling out for boat projects is a part of cruising life. We know this. I don’t know if it’s that we’re hauling in the same yard we left from in July, or that we’re hauling again so soon after so long in the yard and so short a time cruising, or that we’re talking about being out of the water for 5 months and not just a couple of weeks, but it is hard to shake the notion that the “as long as it’s fun” cruise we’ve been working towards forever is over.

Maybe it’s that both of our previous cruises were followed with a prolonged period of boatyard storage and/or not cruising. In the 90s, we hauled in York River for 3 years after we got to Virginia; it took us until 2002 before we spent more than a night aboard. After the 2010 return, we didn’t get out exploring with the boat for another 5 years. It’s hard not to wonder. Will this be the same? A short burst of sailing and then mothballs for ages?

This is different. There’s no limited time to this cruise, no rush to get to the destination we have in mind. The work we’ll do this winter is just another phase of the refit. Hauling out is part of cruising life. We do big projects in the boatyard because we’ve learned that we don’t, actually, do them when we’re actively cruising.

I just have to keep reminding myself of all of that.