While Holly was napping today Michael, Leah and I were enjoying the afternoon sun in the cockpit. Michael was spying around our anchorage here in Cadboro Bay with the binoculars. He stops his scanning suddenly in the far end of the bay.
“A playground!”
The dinghy is launched and when Holly is up a shoreside excursion commences.
The girls of s/v Wondertime rate Cadboro anchorage as one of the best ever.
Eric and Angela, s/v Rouser (Tenacatita)
When we were getting ready to set off cruising in 2002, we received an innocent email from a couple also gearing up to head south that year. The crew of s/v Rouser, Eric and Angela, lived south of us in Olympia (we were still in Seattle at the time), had just found our blog, and were excited to find another couple getting ready to set sail that was also well south of retirement age (27). Since we had never sailed to the south Puget Sound before, we took a week in late July that year to meander down that way and get a personal tour of the town of Olympia from our new friends. We hit it off right from the start and made plans to meet up again in San Francisco in a few weeks. Which we did: right after Michael and I passed under the Golden Gate, Eric and Angela zoomed out in their dinghy off Sausalito to greet us, having arrived the week before.
We sailed together for the most part of the next six months, exploring southern California and the Channel Islands, sailing across the US/Mexican border together, Baja California, crossing over to mainland Mexico to Puerto Vallarta, then down to our most southern anchorage of Tenacatita, where we stayed for a month in January-February 2003. I remember countless evenings spent with what soon felt like old friends: laughter and food and drinks, hikes, exploring small dusty Mexican towns, our New Years road trip inland to Guanajuato, bonfires and music on the beach, sailing side by side to a new destination.
And then, as it always does with while cruising, it came time to say farewell. Rouser was preparing to puddle jump to the Marquesas that spring and had decided to sail farther south to Zihuatanejo to depart from. We were heading north to spend spring in the Sea of Cortez. The day had come when we had to part ways.
It was a teary afternoon; we said our goodbyes quickly. We said we would keep in touch via email (which we did) and visit together in the future (which we have). Angela is from Minnesota so we gave them a copy of Lake Wobegon Days
Eric and Angela made it all the way to New Zealand, and we made it all the way back to Seattle. Our gift never made it to the top of Pelican’s mast for reasons I can’t recall now. But we’ve toted that bubble-wrapped light around with us for eight years, through another boat and two houses. Now on Wondertime we were hardly surprised to find out that she didn’t feature a nice tri-color light, but a burned-out rusty single anchor light at the top of her mast.
Now she does. Our beloved gifted tri-color light is sporting new high-efficiency LED bulbs up at the top of Wondertime’s mast. We now shine brightly in the night sky. Friendship made visible.
Can't lose this medical ID overboard
I wrote a guest post recently for Six Until Me and am totally honored that it was posted today. Kerri began her SUM blog over 5 years ago, writing about her life with type 1 diabetes which she was diagnosed with at six years old. Her blog is now the most widely read T1 blog ever, filled with years of laughs, tears, frustration and (yes) joy of blood sugars, insulin pumps, highs, lows, and giving birth to and being a mom to her first daughter. I have been able to relate to each and every word she has written as I too have been living with type 1 diabetes for nearly 25 years.
It’s not something I’ve written about on our little blog here, until now. Maybe it’s because I was diagnosed at 11 and I still have uncomfortable twinges of feeling “different” that haunted me those early years with diabetes as a teenager and tend to want to keep all this stuff to myself, hidden. But it’s such a big part of my life, maybe even the biggest reason why I choose to live this crazy life on the sea. I need to share these stories too.
Head over to Six Until Me to read about my invisible crewmember, now visible.
(And if you arrived here from SUM, welcome! I truly hope you enjoy our stories about our family’s life on the sea.)
Joy ride
In a few days, that counter you see on the right-hand side of our site, the one counting down the days until our cast-off from Olympia will be in the double digits. Which means only three months until we are outta here. Oh my.
This sends chills down my spine for two completely separate, distinct reasons. One, I am so freaking excited. I mean, New Years was practically yesterday and that was nearly three months ago. I have a sneaking suspicion that the next three crazy busy months will fly by even faster. Spring officially starts next week and will whiz by until Summer comes sneaking in and then we are off, off and away for two years of bliss and terror. We will at last be off cruising with our children, a dream that truly hatched the last time we were cruising in Mexico when we saw the joy older cruisers were having with their delightfully bright sailing kids. We are so so close and barring any major catastrophes (and it’s got to be a big one) we will be officially cruising in 106 days. Chills.
On the other hand: that leaves a mere 106 days left to get ready. Oh [insert favorite expletive here]. There’s quite a lot to do and my head swims with all that I must get done in the next months: passports, homeschooling materials, HAM radio license renewal, mailing address change, rigging splicing, another storage unit cleanout and move, first aid kit stocking, clearing out winter clothes and storing summer duds, sunscreen hoarding, car selling, on and on.
Michael has been steadily ticking away on the boat’s List, working on at least one thing daily. Our #1 must-dos are getting checked off one by one and we are truly at the point where we could leave now and get the rest of the items done underway (which is how I suspect a few will be completed anyhow). At this point, we have finally whittled down the big stuff: new lifelines=yes, new refrigerator=later, watermaker=much later. The dinghy we purchased for $400 on clearance at Costco (yes, Costco!) two years ago seems to be hanging in there just fine so it’s the one we are leaving with. We’ll keep the money to replace these items in our cruising kitty for now and replace them when a great deal appears in the future, or as needed.
Most days, I am so entrenched in the regular details of our life (laundry, cooking, grocery shopping, chauffeuring Leah to preschool) that I feel like it’s impossible that I’ll even make a dent in my list and I feel our departure date looming, instead of looking forward to it. But bit by bit it’s getting done. Each week I part with even more stuff that’s been hiding in our storage locker (we are whittling it down to fit in a 5×5 unit), getting things cleared out via ebay and Craigslist. I tuck away books for our endlessly curious students of the sea. I whip the end of a fraying sheet, hoping my fraying nerves will stay in check too. I try not to panic. I know the list will never be all done anyway. It never is, no matter what you’re doing in life.
Besides, I only have 106 more days to worry about “getting ready” anyway. After that, we’ll be cruising. Chills.
