When your home is your boat

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.

A cold and empty nest

We finally did it. We broke down and bought a portable gas (propane) heater. And it helps. Sort of. It’s better than leaving all three gas burners blasting away on the stove. It’s so less ghetto anyway. Now it’s more like camping in Alaska in the winter with a heater in the tent.

It turns out Lagoon catamarans that were built for chartering in the Caribbean have about as much insulation against the cold as a nylon tent.

And let’s face it, despite being born in one of the coldest inhabitable countries in the world, I am NOT made for winter. I left the icy shores of Canada 20 years ago and since then I’ve never spent more than a 14 day period at a time in wintery climes, and that has always been with central heating. So this, being north of 38 degrees near the end of October, is not for me. Nor Shiloh. We need to move south.

But we’ve rounded a new corner, we’re starting fresh in a way, we’ve got an empty nest once again. Junior captain, aka Devon has been with us onboard since May 2013 and since then he has gradually become an integral part of our sailing team. In fact, if I’m not kidding myself, he has become the hardest working member. He has actually been our captain. He is the one who has sat on watch for endless hours up the ICW and the Chesapeake, plotting our course, adjusting sails, running the boat from place to place. We’ve become lazy and somewhat dependent. Shame on us. The boy needs to break free and start a life of his own. Time for us to cut the apron strings, or jib lines in this case, and let life happen for him. *Sniff*

So….. It’s time for me to resume a more helpful role around here. No more lazing on the couch as the boys check the oil and water levels. No more sitting up front in the dinghy like a passenger, being driven to shore, doing the ‘Queen Wave’. Nope, this girl’s gotta start cranking the dinghy motor and running the generator onboard. Pulling in the jib, lifting the dinghy on it’s davits at night. Time to step up!

The boat show is over. We oogled and criticized, we pointed and pretended. We drank and laughed and bought some toys. New house batteries and folding props to be exact. Not the kind of toys that usually excite me. But it means we’ve ticked that boat show box. We’ve been there! It was great. Like an outdoor mall and open house free-for-all – geared entirely toward boaters like us!!! We’re usually out casts, fringe visitors to the towns we’re in. But Annapolis with it’s free public dinghy docks at the end of each street and free hot, decadent showers for yachties – well now, this is our kind of town. Plus, it’s got the annual boat show! 

But it’s got winter. And it’s coming fast. And our portable heater can only do so much. So we’ve gotta get this boat ‘on the road’ and join the American and Canadian snowbirds on the journey in only one direction: south!

A pic of Spa Creek where we are today, ICED OVER! No thanks...