Where to begin?
After three weeks away, mostly thinking of the sea, it is hard to know where to begin writing now that I am back on land, in a cold city, back engaging with the political landscape, albeit slowly and without my usual enthusiasm.
I’m far from the warm northern waters that I have been floating on for ten days. While I was away I wrote often of the sea, as I watched its changing moods from the safety of the cockpit on a six day voyage.
When I reached land on the northwest fringe of the continent, the texture of hills far to the south came flooding back into my thoughts, even as I noted the red Kimberley dirt and tried to divine some sense of understanding of this place where red sand meets blue water.
On the day we arrived in Broome and dropped anchor in Roebuck Bay, just after the nine metre spring tides, we tuned into the news in time for the Labor leadership spill. We had left Indonesia six days earlier with a female PM still in charge in Australia, and arrived in Western Australian waters to find the male PM returned.
Now I am reading Anna Goldsworthy’s Quarterly Essay, alongside Kim Mahood’s Craft for a Dry Lake, while The Long Way by solo sailor Bernard Moitessier waits on my desk. Land, sea and misogyny: three threads that are mingling and meeting now that I am home, away from the sea but with the motion of the waves still in my blood as it always will be.
Where to begin?
equineocean 
I guess I’m the lucky one – still at anchor of Broome’s Cable Beach with warm sun and light breezes. One of the interesting things about this anchorage is the conflict between wind and current. The boat often doesn’t know which way to point as the changing tides create fast flowing currents through the bay (at Gantheaume Point) and the wind blows across it. Hmm.
cheers, Jim