As 2011 comes to a close I sit here at six a.m. listening to some sort of techno trance music playing on a nearby beach loud enough to mistake it coming out of speakers on our own boat. Without that pesky sleep in the way I’m able to think about the past year and all that we as a family were able to accomplish. Our number one accomplishment as far as I’m concerned is that for another year we’ve managed to live life exactly the way we want by doing the things we want to do. That’s no easy task for anyone.

It was a big year for us, no doubt. We started out still way back in Rio Vista, California, with a one-year-old and Ali one month pregnant. It would still have been easy to throw in the towel on this whole complicated, difficult, frustrating, boat lifestyle that we’d envisioned for ourselves. But we didn’t. We moved the boat to San Francisco, continued to get next to nothing done on the boat project list, and then miraculously sailed out of San Francisco Bay, under the Golden Gate Bridge, and took a left.

While Ali flew on ahead to Puerto Vallarta with Ouest on her own I dropped the dock lines and single handed the boat a thousand miles south without major mishap. Soon after that Lowe was born and we had two Mexican babies living aboard. We split time living in Puerto Vallarta, the boat, and Sayulita, before moving back aboard full time when the weather chilled a bit.

And finally we went cruising as a family of four. So here we are at anchor in Barra with ecstasy club music thumping away in our heads. Ouest is sleeping while Lowe is teething, and feeding, in Ali’s tired arms. I’m sitting on the couch typing away and thinking about what 2012 will bring us. Lots of ideas, no set plans. But I do have a vision.

Randomness: Lowe’s first tooth officially popped through today, I beat the S&P 500 by fourteen percent in 2011, we have grass a foot long growing on our waterline, and a boat dragged through the anchorage today and then ran aground three times.