cruising

Books as ballast

Wondertime's bookshelf. Already a bit crowded....

With nearly all systems ready and the standing rigging replacement just about complete, Michael and I have been left to concentrate on tucking away the hundreds of pounds of spare parts, tools, clothes, sails, toys, art supplies and books we want to take along into Wondertime’s cubbies. As it currently stands, by the time we get around to packing the food on board it appears that we’ll all be stuffing our pillows with dried rice and pasta. But as always, I’m sure everything will find it’s place eventually.

My job this week is to sort through the eight crates of books that have been in our storage locker and make the painful choice as to which ones go with us, which ones stay in their crates and which ones go on to new homes. This is no easy task: I’ve already weeded out our book collections many times previously, moving from house to house and then onboard Wondertime last year. The remaining ones are our very favorites and now it’s time to weed through them and pick out our very very favorites.

Today, I sorted through our three crates of sailing books. This actually wasn’t too difficult as many of them are collectibles we’ve already read so I easily filled a crate with those books. Others were outdated (but beloved) guidebooks from past cruises, favorite old “how to go cruising” books (before we found out the only way to really find out how to go cruising is to GO cruising), and a variety of reference books that we haven’t cracked since Google was invented. Another crate holds our favorite sailing stories. I will no doubt miss these and yearn to reread many as we travel (I am sure a fourth reading of Maiden Voyage is in my future). I am also fairly certain we will procure ourselves a Kindle or Nook at some point so I am just going to have faith that I’ll be able to access these stories easily one day even as they are tucked safely away in our storage closet in Olympia.

Finally, the chosen few were selected and packed into a relatively small cardboard box for transport afloat: Charlie’s Charts of Mexico, our Mexico Lonely Planet guides, Nigel Calder’s Boatowner’s Mechanical and Electrical Manual, our British Columbia cruising guides, a book on celestial navigation, our Storm Tactics Handbook, Spanish for Cruisers. Wondertime’s bookshelf space is at a premium and while I am the type of person that just loves to have books around because they look nice, only the ones that will actually be read and used make the cut.

That done, I am now moving on to my cookbooks, fiction books, general reference books, children’s picture books and children’s chapter books. I have a sneaking suspicion that there is going to be yet another round of book sorting.

The most difficult month

May 31st, 2011

by Sara.

11 comments

We have exactly one month to go before we untie the docklines and head north from Olympia. Sleep has gotten more difficult, the lists of things to do and buy and fix are checked multiple times daily. We grow more and more nervous about how our lives will look 30 short days from now. We are still excited but these last few weeks are beyond stressful. Wine helps.

It feels like I have a million things to do, buy, organize. I press “Two-Day 1 Click” multiple times each day on Amazon.com as I stock up on coffee filters, homeschool books, rechargeable batteries. It will be infinitely more difficult to get, well, stuff, when our car is sold three weeks from now. Mail order will pretty much cease at the end of this month as we won’t be staying in any one place more than a few days in our quest to travel around Vancouver Island by the end of August. Check, check, add another item, check….

In reality though we are ready to go. Only three things keep us at the dock other than Leah’s last day of preschool in mid-June:

Moving our things from our larger storage unit to the cheaper, smaller out-of-town unit
Hauling Wondertime in mid-June to paint her terribly overgrown bottom.

Make that two things. I feel better already.

Our departure date is hurtling towards us. At this point we’ll get what we can get done but whatever doesn’t will happen underway. We know this, we’ve done this crazy race to the end twice before. We know we’ll leave no matter what and it’s never mattered before what was still on the list when we threw the lines on board. Some nights through, we collapse, exhausted, at trying to chink away at our lists and take care of our two busy girls (the youngest of which is going through her 2 ½ year disequilibrium with full force. Which can be pretty cute. But still…).

That is when we grab a guidebook off the shelf and start reading, again, about the places we’ll be traveling to. In 30 days. We talk about route plans, anchorages we don’t want to miss, friends to stop and see along the way. We forget about the lists for an hour or two and remember why we are doing all this in the first place.

Interview with a (soon to be) cruiser: Leah

May 23rd, 2011

by Sara.

4 comments

In case you haven’t seen the Interview With a Cruiser Project website do head over there (after reading this post of course!) and check it out. Livia of Estrellita 5.10b maintains this collection of interviews with cruisers who have/had been out there for at least two years with a new interview posted each Monday. It is fascinating; what strikes me is how differently we all do the same thing.

Another family, currently on the east coast but setting out any day on a looong drive to their new-to-them boat Del Viento down south in Mexico, posted a couple of interviews with their soon-to-be-cruising two daughters. To add to the little collection of soon-to-be-cruiser interviews, here’s Leah’s take on our whole endeavor:

How old are you?

Five.

What is the name of your boat?

Wondertime

What are you going to be doing this summer?

Hmmm….sailing?

What is your favorite part about living on a boat?

Looking for sea creatures.

What is your favorite thing to do on the boat?

Playing horse!

Is there anything you are afraid of about being on the boat?

The dark.

What don’t you like about living on the boat?

There’s nothing I don’t like.

What are you going to do when we get to Mexico?

I would like to go ashore and look for sea creatures. But I don’t know because I haven’t been there yet.

What is school going to be like next year?

I don’t know.

What are some of the rules that you need to follow on the boat?

Don’t go on the deck without a life jacket. No playing on the steps!

What is your room like?

Lots of stuffed animals. And anchor chain.

What will you do when you are bored?

Play with My Little Ponies.

What are you most excited about traveling on the boat?

Snorkeling!

A light, a friendship, and a job done

May 2nd, 2011

by Sara.

2 comments

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 to read on their way across the much bigger lake. They gifted us with a nice tri-color/anchor light that they had as a spare, inscribed. I think Michael had always lamented that Pelican did not have a tri-color at the top of her mast, which would be much more visible at night than our deck-level navigation lights when sailing. We were touched that our friends wanted us to be visible too.

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.

Our Favorite Island

Apr 19th, 2011

by Sara.

1 comment

Holly has declared that Hope Island is her favorite island. Of course, just this morning she grabbed the stool the girls use to reach the head sink and declared “this is my favorite stool” so I think that she may be using the term generously. Nevertheless Hope Island really is our favorite south Puget Sound island destination. The entire island, over 100 acres, is a State Park accessible only by boat. There are mooring buoys on the west and south sides but the anchorage is so easy that we prefer to drop our hook. If you anchor on the NE side, between Hope and Squaxin Island, both shores surrounding you are devoid of any buildings or evidence of human existence; it feels like a glorious British Columbia anchorage much farther north. (Watch out though for the current here; it runs swiftly. Set your hook well.)

Breakfast on Saturday was a dutch baby smothered in maple syrup, which warmed our bellies and the aft cabin from baking in the toasty oven. We piled in our dinghy for a trip ashore. We’d barely set foot on the sand and the girls were already captivated by the tide line ripe with sea stars, hermit crabs, sea urchins and all sorts of interesting rocks and shells. Our pockets quickly filled and we coaxed the girls into the trees for a hike around the island. An easy 2-mile long trail circles Hope Island and we set off into the brilliantly spring green woods. As usual, we saw no other humans on our trek; even in the height of summer the island is never crowded and we were all alone exploring our very own island wonderland on this visit. We eat our snack by the caretaker’s cabin which is set upon the island’s original homestead, near the perpetually empty campground. Continuing on the loop path, Leah says hello to our old friends Face Tree and Onion Tree. Our trail meanders through towering douglas fir and cedars; it looks like it was mowed by fairies through bright green moss. We arrive back to the beach where our dinghy awaits and another Hope Island circumnavigation via foot is complete. We return to Wondertime for a late lunch and spend the rest of the day lounging around our true island home.

After a long night’s sleep on moonlit millpond waters, Sunday morning arrives. We are always a little sad on our last day of a weekend getaway but we are determined to enjoy the day before thinking too much about the return sail back to our marina and another work week. The sun is actually shining in a brilliant blue sky. It is glorious. Another hearty breakfast and we are off to the beach again. Michael and I watch as the girls run around the beach gleefully, throwing rocks in the water, climbing on logs, finding raccoon prints, turning over rocks to watch crabs scamper around. We draw out the easy morning as long as we can.

We eat our picnic lunch on the beach, then return back to the boat to put Holly in her bunk for her afternoon nap. Exhausted from her beach adventures she falls fast asleep. We tidy up below then Michael begins cranking in our anchor chain. With a light north wind blowing it’s the perfect chance to unfurl the genoa and start sailing home. So I do and Wondertime is on her way. The wind is perfect all the way back to Olympia, we zoom down Budd Inlet with 15 knots pushing us the whole way. It’s bittersweet though, the returning to port, when it doesn’t really feel like home anymore. Home is where the heart is and our hearts are definitely “out there” already.

(Hover over photos for a description, click for full-size.)