The Joys of Downsizing
he is small, but she is mighty. I have to keep telling myself that. It can be easy to forget when you’re alone, 400 miles offshore, and green water is pouring over the deck with every swell. My singlehanded trip from Fiji to Australia aboard the 26ft Contessa, , wasn’t planned that way. In fact, none of my trip has really been planned in the normal sense of the word. But there it is. I’d left Los Angeles aboard a 31ft Hunter with plans to cruise around Mexico a few months. Now it’s over two years later, and I’m sailing a different boat on a different continent. Only the vastness of the Pacific has remained constant. I ended up selling the Hunter after arriving in Tonga and realizing my cruising friends were probably right—boats like my Hunter just weren’t built to stand up to the rigors of prolonged bluewater passagemaking. Fortunately, I’d met some fellow cruisers back in Pago Pago, American Samoa, the previous year who’d just arrived from Fanning Island on the boat that would
