I've never thought of our journey as a collection of memories before, in fact I don’t look back that much at all which is surely one of the reasons I’m such a crap friend but still, after a whole year now, it does feel we could have been on the sea-road forever. We’ve had blissful moments, time on the open seas where we stared at the skies and felt like the only people on this planet to unbelievably intense ones where tankers have come so close to hitting us we could have climbed into their red, bullet-shaped life rafts. We’ve been mesmerised by huge plazas in La Coruna where doing small things like eating ice cream have seemed the best way to fill them, to arriving across the Atlantic and jumping into the clearest water lagoon criss-crossed by the paths of Queen Conchs. And man, the people, people who it seems have been placed by a large invisible hand to cross your path at the exact moment you a. really need to meet them or b. because life is not supposed to be one lick of a smooth ice cream cone. This includes the ‘I’m just glad I got here,’ Mick sailing in his boat with his friend, also Mick from Ipswich to Las Palmas, the impossibly cool and hard not to compare yourselves to, catamaran Invictus who are now happily pootling round and still showing everyone what a lame-ass they are in the South Pacific after leaving La Rochelle also exactly a year ago to the nicest couple that we ignored on the marina pontoon for a month and then at the last minute decided they were not brother and sister after all and yes, let’s cross the Atlantic together, Big Bully. We’ve still got your treasure map.. And now the House-Sitting Hobos who go from staring out their underwater porthole, walking along a plank of the Cutty Sark to sampling the nicest houses of Grenada; like that guy is going to pop out the cupboard and ask, ‘Who lives in a house like this?’ Hopefully he’s not in prison at the moment! We’ve discovered too that the people who you meet for five minutes in the back aisle of a chandlery, next to a cannon on top of a hill, right after you’ve picked up Fin’s dog poop or just killing time in a boatyard, these can be no less profound meetings and accumulated memories.

Leaving memories aside for a moment, it’s become clear that the most important thing about our journey so far and the one we least expected is how it’s completely changed us as a family. At home, of course we loved each other but there were all those lovely distractions. Pause while I sigh and remember. Good times. On board however, while we don’t spend every moment in each other’s pockets, we’re always close to each other’s pockets and over time, this has a undeniable effect which is not always welcome and not exactly conducive to privacy. But, if we want to carry on in our big, white, beautiful money-trap that is Quest and carry on seeing the world, we have to learn to live with each other in a way we didn’t before. Before, we could go to another part of the house, exit the house, drive around in the car, go for a walk, etc, etc. but on Quest, unless you like swimming and of course we do but sometimes even that’s a big ask, we have to get on with each other instead. Fix the issues instead of walking away. For people like me with long necks which are designed to be buried in sand, yes it’s handy to crane your head past a crowd but impossible to get into a compartment under Quest’s floor. So with this in mind, I’d like to send out a quick and regular sorry to our boat neighbours, though perhaps they don’t hear us since they’re busy doing the same thing. I keep thinking of what my friend, Lindsay said to me before we left, ‘You got to keep talking. That’s all you’ve got.’ Oh yes. And five thousand metres underneath you sometimes. Thanks, Linds xx

Love from F/F Quest and her crew xx