I’m sitting in the cabin right now. Tucker is laying on the ground making his signature pterodactyl noises, annoying everyone onboard. Gabe is cooking a bowl of cheesy tuna fish. Tor is sitting up top, repeatedly getting excited when the wind picks up and sad when it dies, over and over again for the last 2 hours. We’ve been sailing for 11 and a half hours today and have 3 hours left. Tucker and Tor took the first shift at 3 this morning, and Gabe and I took over at 6. Since then, it’s been continuous snacking, reading, and looking out at the grey water and sky. Tucker gets hungry about every 45 minutes, and asks, “Who’s hungry!?” When no one offers to cook food, he eats a granola bar. The cycle repeats endlessly. A few times the fishing lines started whirring, and each time we pulled up seaweed. There are about one billion dolphins out here. My favorite was a tiny baby who swam next to its mother the whole time they rode the bow.

The past week we’ve been surfing in Santa Barbara with Tucker and Gabe’s friend, Vincent. Tucker got a cool video of one of the many leopard sharks at the surf spot there. But no great white attacks yet.

The last two nights we spent in Smuggler’s Cove again, on Santa Cruz Island. Mostly, we played a new world-building strategy game Gabe found. It’s called Polytopia, and it’s consuming all our lives. When I close my eyes for bed, all I can think about is whether I should train swordsman with catapults or just knights.

Gabe, Tucker, and I ripped ourselves away from our kingdoms yesterday to dingy around the cove and look for a good snorkeling spot. Unfortunately, Tucker put the anchor out and let go, forgetting that it was not attached to the boat. After that, in order to snorkel, one of us had to stay in the dingy with the oars and keep it away from the rocky shore. We did not retrieve the anchor. But it was hilarious.

Although it’s cloudy today, it’s calm and sparkly, so I’m going to go back outside and watch the island come into view. Hopefully, Tucker will drop less items in the ocean today than he has been.