I haven’t had a chance to go to sleep yet and I feel like a whole lifetime of experiences has passed me by since I arrived in Darwin. I came in unscathed but I can’t say as much for the sails… Sailing close hauled across the Van Dieman Gulf the mainsail just ripped to shreds too… Of course coming in I first had to clear customs as usual but this time I had to go to the pier to do so. And so I filled in form after form and answered the officer’s questions, the letters just dancing in my head and unable to find their right places. It felt suddenly very warm inside the cabin, probably in part because I still had my sailing clothes on… Guppy lay quietly at the dock but for me it was not quite like that, the ground felt like it was moving!… Then the officer from the Quarantine office took one and a half hour inspecting the entire boat as I kept filling in the forms. In the end he left with what looked like a meat can and he took my trash with him too… I thought I would pass out from exhaustion as I sailed to anchor and should have stayed there and enjoy a shower before going to bed. But I felt like having a cold Cola with lots of ice cubes and having a chat. And so after the yachtclub owner and I took my dinghy to shore for easier assembling, it became evident that I should have gone to bed because, of course, I had forgotten the outboard engine which meant that I had to go back to Guppy… But then my outboard engine did strange things, my dinghy’s buggy wheels – I use to run ashore – were deflated, and my folding bike was all tangled up on itself with its wheels deflated too… I tried to put everything in order but my body that had only half an hour of rest in the last 48 hours, strongly protested…and won. Tomorrow, tomorrow is another day kept on echoing through my head. Yes but this day today is not yet over I said to myself. But I also longed to sleep… a long sleep in one stretch…. A night without shredding sails, without islands, without reefs or sandbanks, without buoys or ships… How wonderful! But my brain was still running at full speed… then slowed down, slowed down until this most active part of myself fell asleep, fell asleep into a deep and long sleep…

Laura