Prima Vista

I was standing on the walkway, next to one of the new Hanse yachts in the Greifswald marina, when I saw a man walking in my direction.

“Hello!”, I said.

“Hello!”, he replied and walked over to me.

There was a moment of silence, and he looked at me a bit curiously, as if he had some question he wanted to ask, but wasn’t really sure whether he should.

I turned back to the Hanse next to us.

“I came from Finland today and drove here from Berlin, and I just had to come here and look for our new boat right away”, I said. “I think this is the one”, I continued, “but I’m not sure. It seems to have the same colour wheels and deck, but I don’t know.”

“Oh, it’s your boat!”, the man replied happily, “I see it immediately from the way you are smiling!”

And he was right, of course. It really was our new boat, right there.

I had been a bit afraid that reality eventually wouldn’t live up to all the ten-month long hype and expectation building, but it did. In its own way, of course, as reality always does when it starts replacing dreams with lovely imperfections that are true.

The moment was quite magical.

(I sent a picture of the boat to Charlotte and the children and in all the excitement I used a lot of exclamation marks and a Finnish curse word— in a good way!— to underline my joy. I don’t curse very often, but sometimes it’s called for and this was that time.)

And who was the man?

Just a nice person who was visiting Greifswald with his wife and their own sailboat.

We walked over to look at their boat as well, and it looked really nice. He told me about their plans to sail around the Baltic sea this summer, and we agreed to keep in touch in case we’d have a chance to meet when they come to Finland.

So …

So … tomorrow our dealer’s person arrives and I will check in with him in the morning. After that I will leave him to his work (I think he’s working on the boat all day tomorrow) and go do some shopping myself.

The handover is on Thursday. Today I got to say my first hello, with a broad smile on my face.