I'm mid-flight, headed back to the States, and instead of excitement I mostly feel unsteady. This one's raw: the anxiety of an ending, the strange comfort of a passport full of stamps I won't need where I'm going, and the parts of coming home that are harder than anyone assumes.

A bowl of apple crumble shouldn't be enough to break you. But after months at sea, cold, exhaustion, and a team slowly coming apart, sometimes the smallest things carry the weight of everything else.

Between sips of cocoa on our last anchor watch, Graham looked at me and said, "I don't think I've ever gotten first in anything." It hit me: it wasn't just him. After twelve stages of pushing from behind, our team had one last chance to change that. What it took to get there is the part that made it matter...

I thought I knew what crossing the finish line of a circumnavigation would feel like. A few weeks before race finish, I even wrote down my predictions. Reading them now, I'm struck by what I got right - and what I couldn't possibly have understood until I was standing on the other side of it. It turns out you can prepare for the finish line, but not for what comes after.

For nearly a year, I struggled to put my circumnavigation into words. Not because I had nothing to say, but because I had too much. Between ocean crossings, sleepless watches, changing crews, and the constant rhythm of life aboard, the experience became too big to capture in real time. Now that I’ve completed my circumnavigation, I’m finally ready to begin unpacking the stories, lessons, friendships, and adventures that shaped this journey.