Cruising World - February 2016

FEBRUARY

2016

cruisingworld.com

32

I

n 2014, my wife, Alisa,

and I found ourselves in

the Tuamotu Archipelago

for the third time. After a

tough passage from New Zea-

land, we parked our 45-foot

cutter, Galactic, in our favor-

ite uninhabited atoll and got

down to some serious tropical

living with our sons, Elias and

Eric. Each day featured a per-

fect mix of snorkeling, beach

walking and coconut harvest-

ing, all amid the soul-easing

colors of an atoll — sea in a

dozen fl avors of turquoise,

deep-green palms, beaches the

color of the sun.

We had fi ve months of

wandering around the quieter

corners of French Polynesia

to keep us content before we

would tackle the passage to

Chile and our long-standing

dream of sailing to Patagonia.

It had been seven years since

we’d sailed away from our

home in Alaska.

But while we were overjoyed

to be in the Tuamotus, and

fi lled with the happy antici-

pation of reaching Patagonia,

Alisa and I also had some big-

ger questions to address. Most

immediately, we wondered:

How long were we going to

be doing this? We were happy

on Galactic. But we also didn’t

think that being full-time sail-

ors was everything we wanted

to accomplish in our lives, and

Elias, who would soon be turn-

ing 8, was getting ever closer

to the point where he would

benefi t from a stable group of

peers and the opportunity to

establish himself in the world

beyond the family boat. How

long would we keep going?

So one night after the boys

had gone to bed, Alisa and I

sat in the cockpit with a bot-

tle of wine and Jimmy Cor-

nell’s World Cruising Routes and

considered our endgame. We

came up with a plan: Two years

of sailing would see us to Pa-

tagonia and then up the west

coast of South America, and

thence to the Galápagos, Ha-

waii, and home to Alaska in

the summer of 2016.

Cut to 2015. The language,

culture and landscape of Chile

were just starting to become

familiar to us. After a month

spent in Valdivia, our landfall

after the passage from Poly-

nesia, we spent a month cruis-

ing the waters of Isla Grande

A long-term itinerary doesn’t work for everyone. We have better luck

taking it two years at a time.

BY MIKE LITZOW

THE ETERNAL

two-year PLAN

Point of View

MIKE LITZOW