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.

Fierce winds and following seas

It’s 2:30am. Of course it is. Because I am up and there is something dramatic going on outside. Tonight it is gale force winds. As I stand in the relative protection of our cockpit, other boats in the bay come in and out of view. The wind and rain beat the boat and the water’s surface, and we are swinging wildly from side to side on our mooring ball. Thank heaven for the mooring ball.

Earlier we headed out of Mustique, intent on never looking back after two days and nights of a swell that came into the bay and hit us side long, with force. It had been like anchoring out in the middle of the ocean. Our guest gagged while JW and I puttered around with flashlights, holding on so as not to fall over, or off the boat completely. We checked the mooring ball and the lines (ropes) for chaffing. The squeaking sound of the ropes, fighting an uphill battle with the forces of nature were more than unnerving.

The decadent evening at Firefly earlier in the night, where we had snuck into the fold of well-to-do landlubbers, dining on rare beef and banana flambee, had dissolved into a haze of erratic motion and whipping winds. We could no longer imagine sipping after supper liquers and retreating to stable, large, soft, four poster beds.

 Instead, I steadied myself against cupboards, walls, poles and prayed for morning to come quickly.

After one last visit to the civilized strip of shops on Mustique, chocolate croissant crumbs at the edge of our lips, we had to face the reality of getting out.

Once out of the bay, waves piled up behind us, pushing us along in huge navy mountains of water. We put up a reefed mainsail and cut the engines. The wind, directly behind us at 20 knots, rendered our autopilot useless for the first time, and we manned the helm in turns.

As my arms tensed against the force on the steering and the waves gathered and grew to walls, coming up behind us in 3 to 4 meter swells, I peered around for any sign of other boats. But no one had been silly enough to head out in these winds, these waves.

The overwhelming feeling that we had no control over our boat and our surroundings kept me in a mild state of unchecked panic. JW, my calm and able captain took it all in stride and kept up small talk with our guest. All I wanted was to reach the other side, have a few straight shots of rum and climb down into a deep non-rolling sleep.

Just then, between waves, appeared another Lagoon cat, coming diagonal to us, beating directly against wind and waves. Each undulation of wave sent one hull completely up and out of the water altogether. It was at once beautiful and frightening. And as they came closer, the 4 crew came into view and we waved madly, a sense of crazy camaraderie overtaking us all. And then they were gone. Disappeared in the distance, behind the mass of waves.

And eventually we came into the lee of Canouan and the huge Charlestown bay.

But my dreams of leaving behind the wind and tucking in to the safety of land disappeared as the gusts continually hit 22 to 25 knots, deep in the bay.

We followed the small crowd of boats, tucked in as close to land as possible, to avoid the swells. Dropped anchor and let out a lot of chain. But the strength of the wind didn’t allow us to switch off engines and relax. I donned my snorkel gear and jumped in to assess our holding.

The surface of the ocean, slapped by wind, slapped me in turn and with my snorkel continually full of salt water, I could only see that our anchor was dragging slowly, puffs of sandy dust billowing up below me. JW tried again and once again until the local guys from the charter company in their little speed boat came to warn of more serious winds in the night and offered us a mooring ball, if we agreed to put our anchor down as well. Double protection.

If only all the ‘protection’ against dragging meant a peaceful night’s sleep.

If only the wind, determined and powerful wouldn’t target our anchorage, and when I peer out my cabin porthole I didn’t see a huge Lagoon charter boat, dragged or lost it’s mooring, trying desperately against the storm to re-anchor.

If only this life in paradise didn’t come with the unpredictable chaos of weather.

But then, with only turquoise seas and rum punches to look forward to, we might get bored.

Boat designer?

I wish I could design a boat. Let me clarify, by confirming that I know absolutely nothing about boat design. But thanks to my mom, I know a tiny bit about interior design.

I definitely know what doesn’t work when I see it.

Let me clarify further. Shiloh is a Lagoon 410. A beautiful boat, designed and hand crafted in France. She sails well and is quite spacious, all things considered.

My issues are purely in terms of living functionality.

In 2004, Lagoon designers thought it was a good idea to position the engine under the aft cabin beds. This means that if there is any trouble with an engine, everything in that cabin needs to be quickly evacuated. Clothes, bedsheets, pillows and mattresses. Yes, mattresses. Not easy nor user friendly.

This is our bed when the engine needs attention.

Mattresses tossed in the hallway

 A few years after our model was built, Lagoon came up with a brilliant idea. The engines were moved to the back of the boat, accessed through the sugar scoop steps. No need to move beds, no filling the sleeping cabins with diesel fumes and oil stains.

Ah, the genius. Wasn’t this an obvious? I truly believe boat design has been wrongly placed solely in the hands of men. This is just a wild guess. I’m allowed some of those.

Open any cupboard and see that the insides have been left as unfinished rough fiberglass. This is where you store clothing, food, valuables. Would a woman have approved that design? I think not.

But then I am a newbie, a landlubber just converted, a learner. I will try not to complain. I am living on the ocean in paradise and I don’t have a boss. I think I might work on some ideas to send to boat manufacturers…