A lot of people might tell you that planning in one summer to get married, rent out your house, move aboard a 33 foot sailboat with your bride for an indeterminate period of time, and immediately circumnavigate Vancouver Island as a honeymoon trip would just be asking for trouble, but I say big leaps in the wake of the wedding are traditional. Charles Barkley met 17 year old Frances Trevor in September of 1786, married her in October, and set off from Belgium for the West Coast of North America in November. Edith Iglauer moved at the drop of a hat to Vancouver BC, from New York, to marry and fish with John Daly in those same waters, and that was as recently as the seventies. It wasn’t that long ago that the custom was to make all your dramatic lifestyle changes right after getting married. Go slowly? Dip your toes in first? Bah, I say. Take the plunge!
But anyway, a lot of people have, usually quite politely, told us they thought it was asking for trouble when we planned to step aboard our 33 foot sloop, Insegrevious, last July on the night of our wedding to live aboard indefinitely and circumnavigate Vancouver Island. They may still be right, but at least we have some tradition to cling to.
The Barkleys spent 46 years together, much of it sailing in this very region, so I don’t think the precedents are terrible. Maybe we’ll get something named after us. Or perhaps Mandy will outlive me and write a new Northwest classic. Possibilities abound.
We’re not as tough as any of those past sailing couples, of course; the perseverance and stoic work ethic that came from a life aboard a wooden vessel in a wilderness a year away from civilization, or from weathering a great depression and a world war, are virtually unknown, and perhaps unimaginable, to our generation. But we have been in some difficult places, and can at least imagine ourselves capable of getting through more of them, and if we lack grit forged in childhood from poverty and deprivation, perhaps our current deprivation will impart some.
At least we have withstood the first part of the test, sailing around Vancouver Island, and since we returned more excited than when we left, I think that bodes well for our chances. I started writing this after a week back on dry land, a week that seemed twice as long and three times more stressful than the month we were gone; all we could think about was getting back aboard.
I should say more about the vessel we will be aboard; a sailor’s boat may be as much or more a part of his or her character and outlooks as all other formative experiences combined. Sometimes I think that the boat informs the experience of sailing more than those sailing her. Insegrevious is a 33 foot Hunter sloop, a ’77 model, an old, solid John Cherubini design with nice lines (no humpback for us!) and a good turn of speed for her age. She isn’t as spacious as newer models and much of her gear and many of her systems are old, but she has been pretty well maintained and retrofitted enough to make me comfortable taking her into out-of-the-way anchorages like those on the west coast of Vancouver Island. After two years of pretty hard cruising, it’s clear the time is coming due for a haul-out and re-fit but we try to take the breakdowns in stride. After all, what else can you do? The sea is unpredictable and boats are built by human hands. Any cruise is fraught, regardless of what you sail in.
This blog will be about cruising, the fraught parts together with the fun. We are moving aboard because it seems like a good time to do so, with business depressed (we are both self-employed) and likely to remain so, and with cruising a long-held goal. We’ve heard that cruising is just like real life but more damp (even in Seattle) and that’s all we expect; we’re under no illusions that we’re getting away from it all, we’re just trying to take it at a slightly different angle.
At the same time, we don’t want to simply be floating apartment dwellers, one of those boats with a DirecTV antenna clamped to the rail and mooring lines that have stiffened enough to be used as clothes lines… we want to be out, sailing, living that life at the same time as we work and play in our current lives. We’re not south-bound along the traditional escape route of Pacific Northwest cruisers, but we’re not just going out on the weekends anymore, either. Call it local long-distance cruising. There will be changes, some of them major, sacrifices, often unpleasant, and trials, frequently unexpected. But still, it’s just Mandy and me, moving forward, only now primarily under sail power. We hope you will find it interesting.
– A note about the name of the blog
Not many cruisers are as rigorous about log keeping as I am (more on that in a subsequent post), and those that are often have their own methods and shorthand for doing so. My own introduction to logs and logging came at the impressionable age of 18, when I went to work with a bunch of ex-military, ex-police officers for whom there was a Right Way and a Wrong Way of recording watch information for subsequent readers. In that indoctrination, I was taught that it was always best to record information as it happened, but if that were not possible, one was not to simply fudge it and write things down in a subsequently timed entry; instead, the time of the observation should be noted at recording, and annotated with the initials “LE” for “Late Entry” to indicate that the information itself was actually being recorded after the fact (and therefore, the recollection might not be as fresh, might be informed by additional knowledge, etc, etc).
Cruising and blogging are activities which are almost inherently dis-contiguous in the time-space continuum, in that when one is sailing one is almost certainly without either the time or the means to blog, and conversely one who is blogging probably is not sailing (or at least not sailing very hard). Thus, pretty much all my blog entries are going to be “Late Entries” in the nomenclature; you are hereby notified that they may therefore have been considered, re-considered, half-forgotten, polished, and embellished before you ever get sight of them.
Excited to see more of your posts!