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.

Motors, Mud, Meat - doing with and without

It’s been an eventful week (sort of), since the departure of our guests and our return back to Hog Island.

We survived the dinghy impeller malfunction, made it across to Le Phare Bleu marina, across the epic waves.  We arrived safe but sopped and salty, and then had the dinghy motor lifted and carried away in the wheelbarrow to the engine hospital. An hour later, she was as good as new. The impeller turned out to be a little star shaped black rubber thingy… amazing that it could make or break a motor!

We are just crazy enough to have volunteered for another hash – read mud, mud and more mud. It didn’t help that the skies opened unabashedly for the first time in weeks just as we boarded the bus, en route to Cabier Lodge where the Bastille Day hash was being hosted.  We worried about getting there alive as the windows fogged up, and our driver swerved and overtook cars in washed out roads, while the cruisers inside gasped and held on. We also worried about Shiloh out in the bay, left alone to face the rain and possibly some strong winds. (Secretly I was happy that I’d set up my little rain catcher and was dying to prove to JW that we could in fact catch a meaningful amount if it really rained.)

It really rained. But it was over an hour later when we arrived and it left behind mountains of mud and slime on the trails, for the huge turn out that set off and a couple hours later, completed the hike. 

The crowd heading off on the hike (notice my French colours!)

 The highlight of the day were the crepes on offer back at the lodge. What a reward!

Our boat neighbors and blogger friends at Zero to Cruising, who are definitely the fittest couple we know, took the French theme of the day to another level, sewed up some great costumes, proceeded to run 8km in them, and then deservedly won the prize for best costume!

The after party with Mike and Rebecca from Zero to Cruising

 And all of that led to today. The day we have been leading up to for so long, that we denied and many times lost piles of meat…. The day where we admitted that the freezer was more trouble than it’s worth.

This morning as we listened to the continuing pitter patter of rain on the newly waterproofed bimini, I decided it would be a ‘cooking’ day and headed over to the freezer to pick out some chicken to thaw. But alas all the chicken was already thawed. Along with the steaks and the sausages and the soggy buns I was trying to keep fresh.

A quick sniff told me that most of them had tipped the scale between ok and might kill you in a violent and painful way. So we had to toss everything. Again.

I had that deep down GRRRRRRR anger again, and really it’s just not worth the long lasting effects of stress. I left the world of traffic jams and work deadlines for a reason. No more GRRRRRR.

So after I chewed out JW on learning he’d turned the freezer down ‘ever so slightly’ as it was drawing too much power and necessitating we run the generator for hours every evening, I resigned myself to the loss of meat.

We realised we don’t eat that much meat anyway and if we do want to make something, we’ll buy it that day, cook it up and for dessert we’ll savour the sweet display on our inverter/battery charger, showing such low current draw. We might only have to run the noisy little red generator once every two days!

Boating life takes some adjustments.  Today we are at the second Laundromat, as the first we tried had a power outage.

It’s either hunt around or handwash everything, using up our precious limited water supply on the boat and hope the things will dry, hung along the sides of the boat, as the rain squalls come over one by one…

On the bright side, this marina has fast wi-fi, cold Coke Zeros, and we have left the rolling swells back on the boat for a couple hours.

A beach scene in Bonaire... more adventure awaits!

Our friends on Chaotic Harmony meanwhile, have headed off today on a three day straight sail to Bonaire, and it has me dreaming of all the places we have yet to see. The sailing we’ve yet to do. The plans we're starting to formulate. But those are other blog posts and for now, all the little hassles melt away.