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life aboard

A little bit of earth

Mar 30th, 2011
by Sara.
1 comment

I’m going to admit something to the whole wide world (well, at least the teensy corner that reads this blog): I. Hate. Gardening.

Seriously, I can’t think of anything I’d rather not be doing than getting dirt under my fingernails pulling weeds, planting bulbs, and basically doing whatever it is gardeners love to do that requires knee pads and rubber shoes. The weeds in the last two places we lived ashore completely took over the yard each and every summer. Embarrassing, really, but not enough so to overcome each excuse I was able to come up with to avoid pulling them. I really do think this is the biggest reason I love living on a boat: no need to touch dirt with my hands, ever.

However, let me be clear: I LOVE the idea of gardening. I love visiting gardens, lounging in gardens, enjoying fruits and vegetables grown in a small garden, and admiring my friends’ green thumb handiwork. I drool over the lovely landscapes in Sunset magazine. I even had a number of houseplants when we lived ashore and I enjoyed them as long as they didn’t outgrow their pots and just asked for a cup of water every month or two.

Our oldest daughter, Leah, on the other hand, loves dirt just about as much as I dislike it. She adores digging in it, planting things in it, finding worms in it, burying — shudder — her hands and feet in it. She relishes the feeling of cool gritty earth on her skin and under her nails. I suspect she has a bit of a green thumb.

From the time she was two she has begged me to plant things and since she has been the one to do the actual digging I have happily obliged. Last summer, Leah began drawing up plans to plant all sorts of crops on board our boat: tomatoes, basil, strawberries. This time, I had to patiently explain that we just are not able to cover our decks with pots of growing food as it is difficult to, well, sail with dirt flying around and stuff.

So with the arrival of spring recently her requests to grow things began to crop up again: one day she asked me if we could plant some chives. That I agreed to: I felt I could handle a small pot of greens, especially since they go so nicely with hot baked potatoes and butter. After procuring some seeds, we re-purposed a small plastic container (me having gleefully given away all our lovely empty ceramic pots last summer before moving aboard) and I, armed with a large spoon, headed up to the marina parking lot gardens to dig up some dirt. Back on the boat, I described to Leah how to sprinkle the seeds over the dirt and cover them up with a light blanket of soil.

Sadly, nearly a month had gone by and nothing seemed to be happening in this little pot of earth. I chalked it up to yet another of my failed attempts to grow something edible. But then, just the other day I glanced over at the little pot that has been living under our dodger and noticed something green growing in there. Either weeds are sprouting up from our borrowed marina dirt or we may actually have some chives soon.

I am now feeling quite buoyed by our gardening attempt and am ready to embark on yet another food-growing goal: sprouts! I found a delightful old book on sprouting while cleaning out my late mother’s cookbook collection last year and saved it, having heard about sprouts being the perfect thing to grow on a boat. With no dirt required(!) I think fresh crisp greens grown in a jar may be just the crop for us. I’ll keep you posted.

Adios winter.

Mar 20th, 2011
by Sara.
1 comment

It’s official: we have survived living aboard an entire Pacific Northwest winter and all her glory. It was dark, it was windy, it was wet, it was bone-chilling cold but we have lived to tell the tale! Today is the first day of spring and it marks the start of our last full season at the dock.

In all honesty, while we just about lost our marbles a number of times this past winter, it really wasn’t all that bad. Or maybe that’s just hindsight or the fact that the sun actually was shining when we woke up this morning and we are still feeling a little sundrunk. Of course, the clouds rolled in by 1100 but we so enjoyed the forgotten warmth the sun can bring. It’s been a while. Last night we even slept with the porthole above our bunk open and breathed deep the sweetly scented warmer night air drifting in above us.

Living aboard with kids, or just living with kids period, means that there is always plenty to do so boredom rarely set in. Cabin fever, yes, but there was rarely an empty hour this past winter. Of course, not all of it is of the mentally simulating variety (i.e. washing another sinkload of dishes, hauling laundry up the dock in the rain, scraping dried mac & cheese off the cabin floor) but the dark damp days just flew by and now here we are, welcoming spring.

Already the not-so-lovely memories of Winter are fading as they tend to do. The good ones will come along with us: the luscious sound of the rain pattering on Wondertime’s decks, bowling bits of ice across the frozen watertop, the pure silence of snow falling on the docks in the morning, 40 knot gusts of wind gripping the boat and straining her docklines, the oven warming the cabin with it’s smell of fresh cookies. Maybe it wasn’t a matter of surviving winter after all, but savoring it.

Guest posting on Foodista.com

Mar 1st, 2011
by Sara.
3 comments

I was invited recently to write a guest blog on Foodista.com, a unique food and cooking website created and edited by users, and my first article has been posted this morning! It’s about the fun and (mostly) challenge of galley cooking, but these ideas can be applied to cooking in any small space (my first apartment after college had less counter space than Wondertime’s galley). Read it here!

Contentment. Afloat.

Feb 24th, 2011
by Sara.
8 comments

Last night, I had to pause for a moment to wonder if I had lost my mind. I was returning in the dark from the shower up at the top of our dock ramp, wearing flipflops, in — I kid you not — the snow. And I didn’t even feel cranky about it.

Maybe I haven’t gone crazy. Maybe I’ve just grown kind of fond of this life.

If you had asked me a year ago, when we first launched the idea of moving onboard Wondertime in anticipation for our departure the following year (this year), I would have told you that while living aboard in the Northwest again was not my least favorite thing, it was still right up there. When we moved off our boat Rivendell in 2006 I declared that I was never going to live aboard again, not unless we are actively cruising. Somewhere sunny, hot and dry.

Here in the Northwest, Summer is two months long. The rest of the year, you have to walk through the sleet and snow to take a shower (if, that is, your boat’s shower is full of laundry and coats and cat litter like ours is). There are pools of water on the insides of lockers that are exposed to the cold hull and the walls have been drip drip dripping for months. Our head (bathroom) sink drains into our head (toilet) and I have to pump the water out of the bowl while I brush my teeth. The cat paces the floor, yowls endlessly, pissed off that it’s too cold to go outside. Children bounce off the too-close walls and I hide in the tiny head (bathroom) sometimes just to get a few moments of quiet. Until they find me (it’s not hard) and start pounding on the door….

But recently I began thinking about the future, thinking about what we’re going to do after our cruising kitty runs out in about two years. Of course we’ll still live on the boat while we work a year or two (or better yet, work as we cruise). What about when the girls are teenagers and need more space?

The thought of moving off the boat one day made me panic a little. I realized: I don’t ever want to move off of our lovely, simple home. The cold and wet are temporary. But even with them, this winter has been a joy. The girls and I baked sun bread inside our tiny galley oven yesterday while snowflakes fell silently on deck. It was cozy and special. I realized that I like living with the true essentials, that every time I need to buy something new it just feels like adding clutter to my life. Having a simple wardrobe and a handful of pairs of really good shoes that I replace when one wears out is fine by me. I like living with the weather so close: we rock like a giant cradle when the wind blows and the blue sky is right there above our hatches when the sun does come peeking out. The girls’ art hangs everywhere around the cabin and I change our beautiful gallery constantly. There is no need for any other wall decorations. I love sleeping just feet away from my growing girls, so close that I can hear them breathing at night.

I am 35 years old. Every one of my post-toddler years I’ve had this feeling, this thought, that someday, my real life would start. Maybe once I had finished nursing school, or signed that book deal, or sailed across my 360th degree of longitude. I always had the sense that I was preparing for something, only I was never really quite sure what. Troubling, really, as years are passing quickly by.

Michael and I, our life has zigged and zagged around with boats and trips and houses, but the one common thread has been our love of the sea. We tried a comfortable “secure” life ashore but the longing was always there, no matter how hard we tried to bury it and tell ourselves that we loved land life. We realized we were living someone else’s dream, still beautiful, but all we truly wanted to do was get back on the water. So we did, and started planning the next Big Trip. But over the past seven months of living back onboard both of us came to realize that it wasn’t just the trip we loved, it was all of it. The planning, the getting ready, and just simply living on a boat. The trip, we look forward to sure, but it’s just part of the whole adventure of our life.

Recently, a few weeks ago, I had a moment. It truly was a moment of revelation, a defined piece of time with thoughts suddenly clear as ice, like you read about in books sometimes. I was standing in the center of our boat and realized that the unfinished feeling that has always haunted me was, completely, gone.

This is my life.

This is all I ever wanted.

It’s been years in coming but I can finally say that I’m content. Afloat.

Coffee Afloat

Feb 16th, 2011
by Sara.
5 comments

We’ve been trying to cut back on our coffee consumption, we really have. There have been a few too many trips through the Starbucks drive-though lately (and Starbucks for four is totally not in the Budget). We also have a habit of drinking a little too much coffee on the weekends which ends up with Michael and I snarling and sniping at each other for no real reason other than over-caffeinated nerves. We are also thinking ahead: unless things have changed the only coffee available in Mexico is typically Folgers and that just is not going to do. During our last cruise in Mexico we stopped drinking coffee altogether; truthfully I can’t remember if it’s that all the extra sunshine helped get us off the caffeine habit or if it’s just that we couldn’t stomach the taste of the “coffee” sold pre-ground in cans.

But anyway, we are here in the Northwest and coffee is just a necessity. We can’t even get out of bed in the dark damp mornings without downing at least one cup of thick, black brew. However, for the reasons above we’ve been doing our best to cut back. For quite a long time now we’ve been mixing regular and decaf beans to reduce our caffeine intake. But this doesn’t really help with the mid-day lattes when we are out and about.

Wondertime's Coffee Shop

Recently, we found the perfect solution: we purchased a Capresso frothPRO with some gift cards leftover from Christmas. We grind our beans fresh, then use our AeroPress to make up to 4 shots of perfectly rich and smooth espresso. [A quick note on the AeroPress: this is the best coffee maker ever invented. Just add some additional hot water to your espresso shots and you’ll have the smoothest, richest, best tasting cup of coffee you’ve ever had. I mean it.] The frothPRO heats and froths our soymilk up just perfectly; with a few squirts of chocolate or caramel sauce, or, my favorite, vanilla syrup we now drink lattes regularly that rival any from one of our local coffee shops. Now we are able to drink even MORE coffee, with delicious creamy lattes right on the boat!

Hmm.

Well, if nothing else our trips through the Starbucks drive-though have been noticeably reduced now that I know that if I can just wait to get home after running errands I can whip up a latte myself for just pennies. Now, the only problem is that we will almost certainly have to fill the bilges with beans from Trader Joes because it appears the frothPRO is happy frothing up cold lattes too. On second thought, I think the coffee is still winning, but I can live with that:

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