Night sailing is really weird.

I can describe better with some more time, but for now I am trying. It is my shift while Ketil sleeps for a few hours.

I sit inside the boat. Which looks like a home, but it is a home that wiggles and sways. My logic brain knows it's moving through water. It's got autopilot on so we can relax a bit. We have to look out at the dark abyss on rotation to check for ships.

We have been deeply deeply lucky with weather. No storms. No "old waves" as Ketil calls them. Not a cloud in the sky. It's deep dark black all around us. Fully black. With an insane milky way 🌌 above us. 2000+ meters deep below us. It's kinda unfathomable. That is over a mile deep. I still don't grasp it. Though I know if I were to jump in I would be lost to it. Then I might be able to imagine the depth below us. I do not want to learn about it that way.

Sometimes we sit and watch tv on my phone (horrible set up). During those moments I forget how wild it is to be moving while feeling so cozy. Will I ever get used to it?

We move through the dark with perhaps a single boat miles and miles away from us. The only way you can tell the sky from the water is the shine of the stars, but then they bounce around reflecting on the glass flat water. I can see why people have been enchanted with the sea since they could move upon it.

Then small waves break and you wonder what was there to make it be disrupted and there's no way to know. We are moving at 7 knots (13kms an hour). I know it doesn't seem fast but if I went into the water I'd be lost fast.

We cannot see shore in any way whatsoever. Total dark soup all around us. It's super hard to grasp it.

There's more to say. But just took a moment to get that bit out.

It's sooooo weird.

To be alone on the sea on this boat, sitting on the outside deck, in total quiet darkness, looking at that dark deep water unable to see where it separates from sky and horizon.

Part of me only wants to sail at night.

— Somewhere between Italy and Sicily, the dark between the stars

I made it to Italy.

A direct flight from San Francisco. Ketil was waiting at arrivals with a rented car and I had a list. Our first act as liveaboards was, of all things, a trip to Ikea. The fluorescent light, flat-pack furniture, endless mazed capitalism pathway eroded any energy I had. I fell asleep somewhere between the lighting section and the storage options. We abandoned the full mission and went to the boat.

This was my first time stepping aboard when it was in the water and fully ours. After all the dreaming, planning, talking and waiting — here was the moment. Here we were. It felt like arriving into a reality I never fully thought would come. I napped while Ketil puttered. The boat rocked beneath me and I had assumed I would be too excited to sleep, and yet a few hours later I woke up reluctant.

Rome was beckoning. Ketil's parents were there, waiting at a hotel. One last night of land sleeping before the boat becomes my permanent home. We ate a meat-heavy Argentinian meal, took the subway across the city to visit the family who had hosted us on WorkAway months ago — back in November and December, when we were still in the process of buying the boat and all of this felt more like a dream than an imminent reality. We had left some things with them, knowing we would return. We hadn't known it would be months later, after traveling through Asia, after so much living in between. It was good to step back into that earlier time. To feel the distance between then and now.

In the morning we said goodbye to Ketil's parents and spent the day driving all over Rome collecting various necessities for the boat. We got kicked out of the supermarket at nine in the evening. It was embarrassing, in a way, just how much we had left to do. We opted to keep the rental car one more morning for a final shop. I was exhausted with jet lag, holding a particular kind of unknowing — the uncertainty of preparing for something you have no baseline for. How do you know when you are ready for an experience entirely outside your previous experience? You buy too many things and hope.

That night we slept our first night aboard. We had power, which meant heat. It was comfortable. I was excited to get to know who I would become in this new floating home. Who would she be by the end of it?

In the morning we did one last food shop, returned the car, and got the boat fueled at the harbor pump. While waiting at the petrol dock we chatted with our boat neighbors — a French couple on a Lagoon 420 catamaran, dockside for three weeks waiting on a single engine part. They were preparing for a trans-Atlantic crossing next year by doing a Mediterranean navigation this year. We traded boat tours, curious about how each other lived, marveling at what a four-foot difference in vessel length actually means. The difference was dramatic, and likely a million dollars extra for us to experience. We said our goodbyes and motored out toward the mouth of the Tiber.

The weather was kind. The waves were gentle. We were excited in the way you are when something you have waited for is finally, actually happening.

Fifteen minutes out, one engine died.

To say the wind left our emotional sails is an understatement. We kept hoping the French couple's misfortune was not contagious. Honestly, I had no idea. All I have ever heard about boats was the same saying — "The best day of owning a boat is the day you buy one and the day you sell it." We turned back on one engine, slowly, carefully, without damage when docking. The mechanic came quickly, worked for a couple of hours, got things running. He had another small repair to make in the morning and then we would do a sea trial. One hour on the water to be sure before continuing south to Naples.

For the worst thing that could have happened, it felt manageable. We were in hands that cared and felt responsible — the mechanic had just spent a month refitting our engines. It was clear he was going to set this right fast and with skill.

These first twenty-four hours have been a lot. Things are finding their places on the boat slowly, imperfectly, with an insatiable desire to get it all done now — which I know is not possible. I have to know the boat first. Still, the coziness is beginning. So is the trust that we have to figure this out as we go, which is the only way to begin something like this.

After the mechanic left, the French couple invited us to dinner. We sat aboard their boat for a few hours, eating well, drinking two bottles of wine, talking about boats and politics. Then we dinged back across the Tiber in the dark to our own boat, our own four-foot-smaller vessel. Still it was ours.

A sweet ending to an otherwise not great day.

— Rome, the mouth of the Tiber, let's see what the future holds