Rainbow coloured bottles of nail polish lie on their sides
in the cabin, rolling around like bright felled soldiers in anguish.
Elsewhere in the front cabin, onion skins cover the surfaces
like a vegetable confetti from a wild party. The onions themselves lie around
the floor and bed like drunkards on the morning after. Plastic wine glasses
line the hallway.
Across in the other hull the carnage is also evident. In the tiny head (washroom), bottles of
shampoo, hurled from their high shelf perch, lie bleeding sticky bubbly pink
into the drain.
It’s been a rough day at sea. Everything has been tossed and
slammed and kicked around by some grudge filled side-on waves. But Shiloh has
survived. Despite the casualties around the cabins, Shiloh has excelled. Despite
the all consuming groans of wood on fiberglass inside, she showed a brave face.
She sailed today, all day, fast and furious. Like a dance with the wind, she
came up to meet each wave, each gust of wind, and she pushed forward, she
sailed. Beautifully.
Unlike her inhabitants, the awkward bulls in the china shop,
grasping each surface as we passed, trying to keep our composure, our balance
against the wishes of the forces around us.
It was our first sail after my trip to Canada, and it was a
baptism by fire in many ways. It reacquainted me with all the good and the bad
that is sailing life. Once we reached the lee of Great Abaco Island, nine long
hours after leaving the shores of Nassau, the waves were tamed, the wind eased
off and the conditions were much more pleasant for us ‘inhabitants’. Shiloh on
the other hand, preferred the challenge of a big sea and a beam reach.
A day before our little journey, we’d played host to some
ladies from Canada. A day on a boat. It was a detour for them, from a short
holiday to Atlantis. For us it was a chance to imagine what it might be like to
charter the boat. It was exhilarating, it was fun to be host. Champagne and OJ
with snacks, a short trip to a pretty little island out of the hectic Nassau
port for snorkeling and swimming.
It was so different from the reality of our day to day life
on the boat. I’ve got a lot of respect for our friends who charter for weeks at
a time. Mike and Muffy on Extasea and Mike and Rebecca who did the same on One
Love for two years. When your maritime home, with all it’s inherent problems (engine
issues, limited water supply, incessant mold growth, limited power etc etc),
becomes the hotel for 6 or 8 people for a week full time, that must be intense.
Meals, snacks, drinks, towels, entertainment. Full time! Hats off to the
charterers.
For us the sacrifices are far more abstract. When you’ve
made the choice to ‘live the dream’ you make some other choices by default.
When your first grand baby is born, you are thousands of miles away. Maybe
without phone or internet. Maybe you are facing storms or just big waves. You
are preoccupied. Your life is moving along on a very different path.
When your boy graduates from the relative security of
college and his last faction of childhood, you can fly across a continent for
only a short time to see him through, to watch him take off. But then you must
return to the sea, because you know that he has his own life to live and you
still have yours. Your sails are still full and they are blowing you once
again, somewhere else.
But us cruisers are still parents. We still ache and worry
for them. We still look at a photo of them with baby fat and glistening
innocent eyes, and tears well in our salty eyes. We might be on a thousand mile
journey to an uninhabited island in a vast ocean, or fighting a rusty washing
machine in some city in the developing world, but we will never leave the first
path we travelled. The path of never ending love for our children.
We are just different. We crave adventure to a fault. We
don’t mind hand pumping our toilets. We conserve water so we can go for an
extra week without visiting a city. And we get excited when our boat sails. No
engines. All sails up. That feeling when the wind works with you and the power
in the silence. Even if it means cleaning the aftermath in the cabins later.
