Thanksgiving 2025

We’re sitting in Tahiti as I write this, less than a week out from family flying in for the next holiday. I love how we get the opportunity for so many different experiences out here . . .

Happy Thanksgiving!

It would be easy for me to get sad about all we missed this particular Thanksgiving. It’s my favorite holiday, a chance to gather family and friends around a groaning table, where the food may be the visual focus but the real point is being together and being grateful for what we’ve got. This year? We were more than 5000 miles from family.

*Mom and Dad in their Rupert kitchen, Dad ready to carve.*

Cruising can sometimes be very hard.

Thanksgiving for me is about abundance. Abundance of food. Abundance of gratitude. Abundance of people, usually. Friends and family, strangers who we have met for the first time around the Thanksgiving table. My grandmother, on finding a mysterious additional place set at the table, made a sign to hang on the tree outside that read “Dinner at 5; room for one more.” I aspire to this same generosity.

I can remember, with sharp clarity, almost all of the Thanksgivings we’ve celebrated while cruising. There was the first, 1994, tied to Dotty and Waldy’s dock in Naples, where we dug out our fanciest clothes to accompany them to a restaurant ashore for the actual dinner. The following year (1995) with 4 other boats (Red Baron, Little Gidding, Phaedrus, Eos, and Calypso) in the former nun’s quarters at Chacacare, an abandoned leper colony in Trinidad. We carried everything up to the old dining room, decorated to the hilt (Nina from Red Baron even sewed a tablecloth and napkins for all) and overabundant. We found out later we’d celebrated a week early.

*David from Little Gidding must have taken this shot . . .*

The year with the kids, when we found ourselves alone in the anchorage at Double Breasted Cays in the Abacos, Bahamas, celebrating a successful crossing of the Gulf Stream as a family of four.

There was Thanksgiving at sea in 2022, just over a week out from Beaufort. Our new fridge was too small to stash even a diminutive turkey breast, so the new tradition of pork tenderloin for Thanksgiving dinner was born. Of course all the regular sides applied, because what is Thanksgiving without those essential tastes? On our table, there are always mustard carrots and mashed potatoes and gravy. Even at sea.

Thanksgiving 2023, when we stashed Mischief in a marina in Beaufort, North Carolina, and rented a car to join family in Connecticut. We put well over 1000 miles on that rental car in the week we had it; being able to celebrate in person was worth every last aching moment in the car. When will we do that again?

*Scene from a post turkey walk, Fairfield, 2023*

Last Thanksgiving, 2024, tucked into an anchorage at Williams Bay, Exumas, a week after leaving West Palm Beach. Another pork tenderloin dinner, with, you guessed it, mustard carrots and mashed potatoes.

*Terrible lighting. Mashed potatoes, carrots, peas, pork in evidence though*

And now we’re in the Tuamotus, where carrots are in slim supply and the mashed potatoes might be the instant kind. I have not seen a pork tenderloin, let alone a turkey in any form other than vacuum-sealed deli slices, since Panama. But.

*Sunset setting of our Thanksgiving spot*

But friends (and friends of theirs, plus the additional American-flagged boat in the anchorage) hatched a plan for a potluck kind of dinner together. We hit the local stores in Rangiroa in the hopes that the recent supply ship stop might have delivered so-far unseen goodies (not so successful); they went to the farm at Tikehau and found a pumpkin and some eggs. Our main hunk of protein was the boat-smoked chicken (!!!) supplied by Makae.

We had lots of delicious food, excellent conversation and laughter, and were so grateful to be together, forging new memories. It’s another one for the books.

*In Cahoots*, *Catalyst*, *Makae*, and *Calypso*!

Happy Thanksgiving to all!