South Sea Vagabonds and preparing for departure

Today I woke up in a heatwave! Summer has finally reached Amsterdam. I drink my coffee in the sun and I finish John Wray's South Sea Vagabonds. Oh, how much I would love to be out there now, at sea, under a clear blue sky, following the breathe of the Trade Winds! This weekend me and Mister Papi, the former owner of the Rana and now a good friend of mine, will finish some last little things on the boat. We're painting her in fresh bright colors and we're fixing the exhaust system of the engine. The boat is almost ready to leave! This summer Mister Papi and I will do a long 'sea-trial' on the Waddenzee and we'll visit all the 'Dutch Wadden-Islands' to perform and to collect miraculous stories from the Island people from below sea-level. This trip will be my initiation onboard of the Rana. Mister Papi will teach me everything I need to know about the boat he build up so solidly and carefully over the last 28 years. He is a real Chepetto and I feel so blessed that his miraculous creation will be tranferred to my care. He teaches me all about the character and habits of the boat. All little tricks and hidden secrets.... And he tells me the stories of the voyages and adventures they've lived together. It's true, a wooden boat is like a living creature, a Pinochio that comes alive under the hands of it's builder. It has it's personality, it's history, it's passions and it's habits. To me a boat (when it's a 'real' boat, not one of those factory made plastic bath tubs) feels most like a whale. A pacifistic hunter. When I was a little girl I always believed that a boat was a sea animal. When I had my first canoe and went paddling on the ditches next to our house, I remember, I always imagined I went for a long discovery voyage on the back of my best whale friend, the canoe. We had long conversations about our shared experience, about the feeling of the water and the other animals around us. When I once crossed the Atlantic, a whale swam along the side of our boat for hours, it really felt as if that the boat and the whale were friends or lovers. To me the Rana feels like an old friend whom I haven't seen for a long time. We now have to catch up on each other and Mister Papi is the intermediair.