Many thanks for chiming in with comments on yesterday. As with my mid-trip post, it is both surprising and touching to find out I was missed.
Yesterday I say I didn’t know where to start. But when it’s hard to know where to start, the easiest place to start is at the beginning, and where sailing is concerned my beginning is in Corona Del Mar, sometime in the late Seventies. My childhood best friend’s mother had remarried and I was just old enough to take the train up the coast to visit for a weekend during the Summer. The new husband (Ned) was a yachtsman. He had a big ketch, and my best friend (Jay) now spent his weekends sailing his sabot.
So that’s what we did on my first visit to Jay’s new home. We sailed his sabot all around Newport Harbor, and by the end of the weekend I understood the basics of how a sailboat worked. I was also hooked, completing the surfing, fishing, boating trifecta that has formed foundation my avocational life ever since.
Since the late Nineties I’ve been building boats, crafts ranging from a six foot pram for my daughter to a 25 foot sharpie schooner named after her, and I had been entertaining the fantasy of building a boat that we’d all be able to sail away on (and come back!)
But the economics of the last few years have been so weird that building big boats makes less and less sense. The cost of materials (wood, epoxy, paint, etc.) has skyrocketed. Meanwhile there’s a surfeit of well-found GRP boats from the Sixties and Seventies. (The ultimate useful life of glass reinforced plastic hulls is still unknown, but so far they appear to be nearly indestructible.)
This all came into focus late last Summer (I was outlining yet another design concept on my lawn with stakes and string.) I realized that the fantasy of building a boat was getting in the way of the fantasy of sailing away on a boat. I began looking at classified ads.
In October I found a boat that was sea-worthy, big enough, and within our budget (which is to say we’ve put off replacing our 1990 Volvo with a minivan for another few years.) It was in Georgia, so I flew down to look at it and spent about a week sailing it and living on it. In November we bought it, and in late December we drove from New York to Georgia, got on the boat and began our adventure.
We spent the next few weeks working our way down the coast of Florida. By late February we had (somehow) made it to Lake Worth, and the day after the full moon, we set out for our first (modest) open water passage; the jump across the Gulf Stream to the Abacos.
We made it and spent the next four weeks in the Abacos, then sailed back, running the 140 miles from Grand Keys to Port Canaveral in one long 32 hour stretch. With the benefit of our hard-won experience, we made the trip back to our car in Georgia in another six days. (Going the other way, getting from the car to Grand Keys had taken two months.)
Our trip was plagued by, perhaps even characterized by bad luck, bad weather, neophyte mistakes, doubt and uncertainty. The Southeast had one of its worst Winters in recent years, and it turns out that the Abacos is about the worst place you could choose to go on a boat in March (frontal passages, often violent, every 48-96 hours; very few all-weather anchorages; none of them deep enough for our boat to enter on low tide, if at all.)
Yes, sprinkled in amongst the drama and the trauma there were some wonderful moments, but mostly it was the most relentlessly grueling thing I’ve ever done, and I did it with my wife (who’s deathly afraid of water over her head,) my eight year old and two year old daughters, a very big dog and a small cat. It was never truly dangerous, but danger constantly lurked at the edges of our trip. Stress makes people make mistakes, we were under nearly constant stress, and mistakes on a boat can kill you.
Yet somehow we made it. Things were often bad, but not once did things go from bad to worse. My hydrophobic wife is the same person who shot the beautiful and award-winning “Ashley and Kisha” the very first time she raised a film camera to her eye. My wife is nothing if not resilient, adaptable, and able to rise to a challenge. Yesterday I wrote about falling asleep while the boat made way under a starry sky; well that was on our run back across the Gulf Stream to Port Canaveral, and Peggy was at the helm.
My girls drove back from Georgia. I posted a noticed to a boat-building list that I needed crew, and four weeks later we were all together again, 1000 miles from where we first got on the boat. Who knows what our two year old thought of the trip, but our eight year old thought it was wonderful, says she’d do it again in an instant. (Has she already forgotten how scared she was when the last front that we endured started spinning off water-spouts at a rate of about one a minute, or just come to an early understanding that life is a rich stew of varied experiences? Or maybe sitting on the bow while dolphins splashed and lept was that good.)
Yesterday afternoon she and I went out to boat for study-hall (she is bedeviled by the same inane reading comprehension assignments that tormented me when I was in the third grade.) The weather’s just nice enough to be on the boat (with a sweater) but it’s still too early to be in the water. But those days will here soon enough, and they’ll be no insipid reading comprehension homework to muck it up.
I’m home, and it’s good to be home.
