Stillness, sting rays and canned peas

I could count the hours until this is over. In fact that’s exactly what I’ve been doing for days. Within 24 hours we will be in international waters, leaving the Bahamas behind for the hurricane season, heading for Ft Pierce and destinations further north.

It could be said we’ve taken 6 months of Bahamian island hopping bliss for granted and now it’s all about to disappear behind us in a blue haze…

But that’s not true. The truth is that I pinch myself (well not literally) all the time. The things we see, feel, and are surrounded by are simply amazing. It does not go unnoticed or unappreciated.

Yesterday the sky and the sea merged. They came together, enveloping us in an endless loop of blue. And I had to catch my breath. No buildings, no boats, no ripple on the water. Just us and blue heaven. Even the air was sucked away.

It was an eery calm that inspired deep thought. Thoughts about what we do with all the moments of our lives. Existential thoughts. And then peace. Hot, sweaty peace. Didn’t even crave a rum cocktail ;)

It was 36C in our saloon and our tiny cabin fans spewed out hot still air that landed on us and blanketed us with sweat.

We had just circled Sandy Cay in the dinghy – our home island for the last few days. 

We hopped in the 35C water to cool off. LOL. And then we had visitors. Wild sting rays who swoop gracefully between our slippery bodies, hoping for an offering. 

It’s been 6 months – this year alone – in the Bahamas, and I still cannot be calm when they come around. By now I should be petting them or at least taking them for granted. But no – if you want to see fast movement, watch me as two 6 foot wide stingrays make a beeline through the still water at me. Holli lounging in the deep water becomes giant splash-kick-splash and voila! Holli safely up in the dinghy.

These are the challenges I face. For now.

Hard to fathom that in 2 days my challenges will include traffic and homeland security bureaucracy and too many food choices!

Right now we are on an ‘inventory reduction diet’. The freezer is empty and there hasn’t been a vegetable onboard for 2 weeks. We had stopped in the island/town of Grand Cay (population somewhere between 200 and 300), in hopes of finding a cabbage or a tomato to sustain us through our last week. But no. It was a couple cans of soggy-sodium laden pseudo-veggies. The trade offs of life in paradise. Scurvy. Call us pirates.

So after a supper of ramen and canned mush we looked out at the utter stillness. And as the sun set, somewhere beyond all the calm, a pink sky developed. Took the place of the blue, and it reflected on the water and once again we were enveloped in something so natural yet so ‘otherworldly’. 

How can we leave this all behind and surround ourselves with honking car horns and pollution and shopping malls and fast food joints with their garish coloured road signs, screaming adverts at us constantly?

It’s a sailor’s dilemma. We need the things from shore. We need towns and stores. But out here, there is another world all together. A world everyone should experience.

Forget the mosquitos, no-see-ums, rolling anchorages, lightning squalls, dumb founding heat, cramped quarters, moldy cabins, culinary sparseness… forget all that because tonight, our little mattresses and pillows dragged up front, as we lie out under the stars and slowly drift off to sleep with meteor showers above us, nothing else exists.

TWISTER! What's next? Tsunami or maybe an earthquake?

I’ve never wished more for monstrous 350HP engines and a sleek fast speedboat in my life. I actually looked down at my leathery bare feet, dangling from the (too tall) helm seat, wishing they were red slipper-clad, and that my name was Dorothy, and that there was truly a Kansas I could wish to disappear to at that instant.

Minutes before, we had been heading out of Nassau’s hectic harbor, Shiloh chugging along slowly with her 40HP engines purring perfectly, as the ‘fast toy’ electric blue and Florida orange speed boats zoomed in and out by us, literally leaving us rolling in their wake.

We were sighing that sigh you sigh when you leave a city for the country on a weekend after a busy week. Shaking off the lists of things to do, repairs, Government agencies who e-mail you requiring payments of $15 be made by money order and requiring letters to be faxed. Faxed?! What era are we living in?!

But I digress. We spent the week getting our errands done between massive storms that rolled in each afternoon, soaking our groceries and propane tanks as we headed back to the boat in the dinghy. Storms that blew over 45kts and obliterated the towering Atlantis resort behind a white wall of water. Storms where the thunder rolled continuously like the sound of fighter jets in the sky with a constant light show of our favourite menacing bolts…

But now, on a Saturday morning, leaving through a light sun shower, we head toward Rose Island – a little oasis only 5 miles outside Nassau. A place of beaches and clean turquoise water, swaying palms. Sigh…

But as we round the edge of New Providence, about halfway between our city anchorage and the relative safety of our beachy spot, our boat buddy calls on the VHF radio. “Shiloh, Shiloh, AlleyCat.”

“Alley Cat go ahead!” we answer, grinning at our escape from town.

“Look right guys.”

And we did. And I blinked. The sky, divided in two – the sunny expanse to our left and above us, pushed by the bully - the ominous end-of-world billowing charcoal sky to the right, complete with two perfectly formed water spouts, spinning down onto the ocean surface.

Wow! We thought at first. As if it was on TV and a great spectacle to therefore take time to watch. We took photos. We marveled. And then we realised. It was heading toward us. Fast.

I sped up. LOL. Shiloh went from 4.5kt to 5.3kt (as in slower than your average walking speed). We were NOT going to outrun a raging ocean tornado that was kicking up water around it to what looked like a hundred feet in the air.

Our little lightning gadget – bought on Amazon.com after our FIRST big strike – was beeping and beeping, like a tiny bird sent as a messenger of doom. “Beep beep! Beep beep! Beep beep!” the display warning that strikes were detected a mile away. A mile away!

AlleyCat had his radar on and assured me over and over that the storm was moving away – south and west. We were heading north. Like a snail with a lion in hot pursuit. 

Every time I looked back the spout was bigger, wider, the water below visibly churned up. I knew if we were in it’s direct path we would be no longer. We would be lifted, shaken, and tossed across this expanse of water in many pieces like a cheap child’s toy.

Nothing like blood-curdling fear to get your adrenaline pumping.

We sped up again, Shiloh’s little motors growling and panting and moving us a little faster. In the distance a sun drenched little sand spit of an island beckoning us. 

And then as if by wishing alone, the storm retreated. The water spouts spinning sideways, getting further and further away like the kites strings of demons… the storm moved away. South and west.

Half hour later, boats anchored in a mild swell, we sat waist deep in the luke warm water at the edge of an idyllic beach, squinting at the sun and marveling at our adventure.

The thing about this life, this cruising thing, is that life can come all at once in a day.

An hour after our swim we were barreling toward Rose Island to avoid the huge swells that had built up out of nowhere, knocking us from side to side while another storm threatened in the distance.

The first anchorage we tried was worse. We then headed around the south of the island toward the storm and through a choppy bouncy inlet between rocks where the waves splashed angrily up through our trampoline onto the front windows.

We crawled along the coast in the swell trying to imagine how horrible the prospect was, of dropping anchor in this washing machine but it was getting late and not much time to get all the way back into Nassau Harbour. So we’d have to make the best of it.

We tucked up into the furthest end of the island where there was a bit of protection and made the best of it.

An hour later – no joke – the wind and waves were flat, calm docile. We sat waist deep in the luke warm water, beers in hand, and marveled at our adventure.

Then we ate supper, watched TV and were about to retire to bed – as you do – when a huge wind picked up about 11pm and the full moon sky disappeared behind a thick black clouded ceiling.

By 2am no one had slept and the wind blew like a horror film, whining and howling and bringing spurts of rain. Close the hatches. Listen. Hope it won’t pick up and drag our anchor in the pitch black of night.

But alas, the worst of that one missed us. Or took pity on us and allowed us some rest. And this morning, despite the daylight and the heat, captain JW sleeps. We take our moments when they come to us. Cruising is supposedly a lifestyle of freedom. And it is. Freedom from many things. But we are slave to the weather. We respect and fear the moods of mother nature. On her time we relax, on her time we are vigilant.

Today the wind is light, the water calm. We can relax. For now…

On the days we must be mad...

... (because what would a blog look like all full of pristine beaches, turquoise seas and rum punches?!)

 2 am as we lay panting in our tiny mosquito occupied chow-zone of a cabin in the stifling heat, not a breath of wind, sweat trickling down our necks and pooling on the dampened pillows beneath us, the random slapping of limbs breaks the relative silence of the dull hum of a useless fan. I thought ‘this couldn’t get worse’. (Note to self – never say those words, even in your head).

After weeks of prepping for our friend’s visitors in perfect Bahamian weather, they have arrived. And since then the whole climate’s gone for a ‘sh*t’.

They brought booze!

The visitors on arrival day

2:30 am the distant rumbles of thunder have caught up with us two lonely little catamarans in Cherokee Point, the vulnerable bay, exposed to all the oncoming fun and games. The sky lights up to the brightness of day in shocking zaps and we are up.

It’s like a colossal game of electrified ten pin bowling right over our heads and everywhere around us. The lesser gods are on a bender and they are at the lanes, drunken and disorderly. The ball rumbles along above us, barreling through the great black clouds and then the crescendo – a teeth clenching, boat-shattering smash as the thunderous ball hits the pins. Over and over again, as I wince and squeal. JW has turned off the main power to the boat, knowing we are at the mercy of these lesser gods as to whether we’ll take a direct hit and potentially lose all the electronics on board. 

They are obviously in the mood to have some fun with us. They’ve stirred up the ocean as well, so the boat spins and bobs madly in this rain drenched mayhem.

I retreat inside, brushing aside the mosquitos who are just as frightened I’m sure. They’ve taken such a back seat as the bad guys, they might as well retreat completely and come back with their blood sucking intentions another day.

And here I sit – making sure not to hold on to anything metallic just in case – and I focus on JW’s silhouette in the door, lit up like a photo negative in the lightning show. I know he is worried, and that the soul crushing feeling of being helpless in a situation furrows his brow.  I squeeze my eyes closed after each bolt snaps down from the clouds and see the jagged designs behind my eyelids over and over.

The truth is that we are in the vicinity of some serious danger. Boats are lightning attraction devices with their tall masts, and we’ve come to a bay where there is nothing around us but surface rocks, beach sand and a tiny settlement of one story homes nearby. So we are IT if it comes down to the wire. Worst case scenario the lightning passes through the boat, leaving a gaping hole below the water line and we sink. Total loss.

I think of the storms we’ve slept through on land, the light and noise a mere inconvenience with the secure feeling of insulated and sturdy walls protecting us. Out here it’s all raw and real. We have no mosquito nets, we have no lightning protection. It’s yang to the ying of the paradise we live in. It’s the other side of the coin. It’s real and it’s 5am and we’ve been up for hours.

As I rub my red sore eyes I realise this lifestyle has no middle ground. There is no ‘mildly amusing’ or ‘slightly annoying’ in our vocabulary. It’s all ‘OMG!’ or ‘WTF!’ Extreme beauty, extreme fun, extreme danger. Big joy, big problems.

On the boat next to us, a family has flown thousands of miles to see what we see. Experience what we call normal life. This is their vacation. They swat at mosquitos, wince at the storms and hopefully will experience some of the big joys over the next few days.

As the storm passes, the game has moved on and left us with some big winds and big seas. That means ‘anchor watch’ (to keep an eye that we don’t drag into the rocks behind us), so no sleeping yet. Until the sun rises and the benign morning negates the heightened fears of the night and promises a new day of extreme beauty and yet another adventure. Zzzzzzzz

 

Between a rock and a sleepless place

It’s 2 am and one moment I am deeply sleeping, my body slightly rolling with the waves. The next moment I am at the helm, starting engines, blinking wildly to get the eyes to focus. The harsh rocky coastline of Fowl Cay was beautiful in the day when we anchored into the prevailing east winds, and tucked ourselves nicely up in her lee. 

At 2 am when the wind has swung against all predictions to the west, and the frantic sound of waves slamming against sharp defiant rock is now just a few feet from the back of the boat – not so beautiful. We have to move. Now.

As JW balances up front, his headlamp blinding me as he moves around lifting the anchor, I reflect on the bizarre reality we live in.

There are no 6 am alarm bells or morning traffic for us. A Sunday is the same as a Monday. There is a lot of laughter and freedom and of course rum punch. But there are nights like this. Sleep is not sacred on a boat. It’s the shut-eye you catch when the seas allow. In the very early days of my sailing career I would meet these interruptions to my nights with exasperation and fear. Being woken to an impending disaster that requires immediate action, is something you have to develop a taste for. Tonight I realise that I have. It’s exactly what has happened. Expect the unexpected. Deal with it as it comes.

I gun the engines into forward and leave the crashing slamming disaster looming all behind us. We are blind navigating and choose a spot just far enough away from the island and before the ocean floor dips further out. Apart from our buddy boat Alley Cat, we’re alone out here. It’s another one of those strange realities. We spend much time socializing, either on boats or partially submerged, treading water by countless beaches, a beer in hand. But only one sail away, we can be totally alone. And it’s an amazing feeling. Like camping deep in the woods. You hear all nature’s sounds. You see things that are invisible in a city. 

Tonight, the charcoal sky has been torn in one small spot and the moon peeks through. It’s only half exposed but it’s enough to make out our surroundings.  We drop the anchor, tug back the engines in reverse and wait for it to grip. We are set.

It’s all over and the excitement has died down but sleep is now a distant memory. In the morning we’ll be diving with the sharks who prowl the reefs just around the corner if all goes well.

For now I ponder the world we discovered earlier in the evening. Sundowners on the tiny beach, after the boat loads of happy rowdy tourists have made their way back to marinas and resorts and we had Fowl Cay to ourselves. The terrain is other worldly. Sharp towers of spiky rock poke out from the soft sand, making walking treacherous. We made our way to the little shelter built as a vista – or a bus stop where no bus will ever arrive?!

Tiny hermit crabs, who like us, take their little homes with them as they go, made their way along the sand. To destinations unknown, they made patterns between the huge science fiction style rocky mountains. I was fascinated. Filled with wonder. As if I’d shrunk and seen their world from their height. A new adventure. Another of natures amazing mysteries. I close my eyes now and smile. And sleep comes. 

The other-wordly landscape of Fowl Cay

Sundowners in the Fowl Cay shelter

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.

900 days of sailing

Today marks exactly 2.5 years or 30 months that we’ve lived aboard Shiloh. That we’ve been cruising. That we’ve been sailors.

I can’t quite believe it to be honest. I still feel like a newbie, an observer, a wannabe. But at the same time, I can’t imagine living on land.

We ticked a bucket list item last month – sailing up to the statue of liberty. It was amazing, tingles all over. 6 months before that it seemed a distant dream. That was back when I imagined that once we’d sailed all the way up to New York city, I’d finally be a ‘real sailor’!

Recently though I’ve realised something profound. (For me at least!) I’d been silently assessing, researching and compiling data from all the sailing folk we’ve met. Trying to ascertain how we fit in to the cruising life. What kind of sailors we are. Which box we should slot ourselves into. And that was exactly the wrong perspective to have. 

Like anywhere, you invent your own life. Your own style of doing things. Carve out your own comfort zones, and then as far as sailing goes, pushing that envelope all the time.

Every time we find ourselves in a big storm with zero visibility, whipping winds, huge waves tossing us around, lightning snapping the water surface all around us, my boundaries are pushed a bit further.

Then there are the days where your boat is anchored directly across from the Manhattan skyline and you find yourself clad in your flip flops and ‘cruiser’ backpack, navigating the eclectic neighborhoods of NYC on foot. You gotta pinch yourself on those days.

Somewhere in my distant tactical memory are the days I pinched myself in the crystal blue turquoise waters of the Exumas in the Bahamas. It was like a different world. Yet what connects the two worlds is us, and our experience of both, and all the amazing worlds in between.

For the first 2 years I imagined that being a cruiser was living on your boat in tropical heat, with no a/c, swimming daily, listening to the ‘cruiser net’ on the VHF radio and enveloping yourself or at least observing the politics of the cruiser community in the islands. It was all about rum punches with frequent squalls, anchoring in clear sandy bottom places, spotting sting rays and turtles, enduring rough seas from island to island.

This year I’ve learned so much more. Cruising is what you make it, where you make it.

I haven’t swam in months, haven’t seen the bottom where we drop the anchor in about as long (there is a correspondence there!), and our VHF radio is constantly buzzing with local fishing boat traffic. I’m wearing faux fur-lined tights and fuzzy slippers and I can’t remember when I last broke a sweat. Cheap golden rum has been replaced with red wine and tots of whisky to warm the chilled soul.

Downtown Boston

Maine

Provincetown, Cape Cod

Provincetown dock

Gotta love Provincetown

Guest House Provincetown

But still, we are the observers. Taking our home with us, from bay to bay, city to village, climate to climate.

I’ve learned there is no such thing as a perfect sailor, we are learning more but we still make mistakes. But even my sailing heros make mistakes from time to time. We’re finding the intracoastal sailing quite easy, but we did buy a membership to TowBoatUS, so our confidence extends only that far! (They are on call to tow out boats that frequently find themselves ‘aground in the shoaling mud’).

We’ll be leaving this autumn wonderland soon, heading back to more southern climes, but the world lies ahead, undiscovered, beckoning a couple people who live on a boat, who crave the adventure and the thrill of the unknown. I’ve peeled back the box I started building for Shiloh, choosing instead the fluid, non defined beauty that is this experience. Like the ocean herself, we are moving.