Author Archives: Melissa

A Bucket-Load of Fun! Another Product Review

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As much as I love how beautiful it is when we’re out on the water up here in the Pacific Northwest, there is one thing I am looking forward to experiencing when we voyage to the other parts of the world: warm water. The water up here is killer cold. This water is so cold that the idea of swimming or snorkeling in it makes me want to run screaming to my hot shower. But I love snorkeling and always wish I could see under the water when I’m in shallow areas in the kayak or in puddler. My secret dream is that I had been a marine biologist. Alas, another life perhaps.

So I was very excited when my daughter gave me this Reef Scope bucket from Top Shelf Marine for my birthday, just in time for our trip to the Gulf Islands.

We stopped at a marina in Seattle so Claire could give me her present. Yep, that’s our girl.

I was so excited that she thought about this as a gift for me! She knows I’m always wishing I could see all the little animals that hang around the docks. The view from the bottom of this bucket is awesome! It’s just like wearing a good scuba mask, without the fogging up and getting wet problem. And the bucket is big enough that an adult can put her head down inside it. Also, I don’t have to remove my jacket!

We couldn’t wait to use it so we flopped down on the dock together and were rewarded by seeing a beautiful jellyfish swim by. Do you know how gorgeous those are underwater?

The Reef Scope is a sturdy 5 gallon bucket with an extra strong, yet totally soft handle. The acrylic lens is 1/4″ thick, and you can actually use this as a bucket as well as an underwater viewer because it’s that well made. I appreciate that the handle is soft enough that it doesn’t hurt my hands when the bucket is carrying my treasures. The bucket comes with a lens protector made of expanded PVC. I understand from Brad at Top Shelf Marine that it is completely waterproof and UV stabilized, so it sounds like it will last a long time. But I’m probably going to get one of those canvas bucket inserts you can buy at the hardware store because I don’t want to take a chance on scratching the lens. It’s protected on the bottom by a little rubber ‘foot’ that holds the lens above the ground. Nice touch!

Lest you think this bucket is just for kids like me, think again! Mike can use this bucket to check our hull and rudder. If you are in warmer areas and you are lucky enough to scuba dive or snorkel, you could check for the presence of dangerous, toothy marine animals by using this bucket from the safety of your dinghy.

Mike hanging off the back of Puddler, watching the fishies. We both spent a lot of time in this position.

I got this photo hanging off the dock up in Sidney, BC. The lens makes everything look bigger, which is cool until a spider crab suddenly appears in your field of vision. Yikes! They are pretty scary looking up close and personal like that. Also, looking underwater is so hypnotic it’s easy to forget yourself and lean WAY over. Children should not be left alone with this thing.

Yes, the water is beautiful but deadly cold.

If you don’t have a useful bucket on your boat, you can probably find a place for one of these. It would be a dandy place to store hats and gloves on the boat. At $49.99 it’s a pretty pricey bucket, but because it is so well built and useful, it’s completely worth it (especially since Claire paid for it). Now that I have mine, I will never be without one.

 

This one is from the Top Shelf Marine website.

 

 

The Menopause Sucks!: A Series of Rants*

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This is a blog about our plan to transition from being a couple raising children and owning a home to a couple sailing around the world on a yet-to-be-determined boat. As we reflected on our Who Are We page, we are firmly in the middle of life. This has its pleasures, more free time being the biggest one. But this can be a dark time for women, a dark and dreadful time. This can be a time filled with horror and fear, and not just because Halloween is closing in on us. What, you may be asking as you shake in your shoes, could be causing this otherwise sensible and even-tempered woman to be filled with horror and darkness? Is it criminal activity in her neighborhood? No, sweet readers. It is not. It is criminal activity in my body. This criminal is known by the sobriquet ‘The Menopause.’

‘The Menopause’, as we call it in our house, sucks. I am not making this up.  No one could possibly make up the cosmic joke that is menopause. I am the first woman in my family to go through ‘natural’ menopause. While the the other women in my family have had their lady parts taken out, I still have mine, not that they are doing much for me. Therefore I had no idea what to expect.  I avoided reading about it  because on some level I must have known it was going to be filled with expletive-type experiences.

Craziness. It’s not just for PMS anymore.

What, you might be asking yourself, does The Menopause have to do with sailing? It has absolutely everything to do with it, even down to the fact that after menopause there is no need to take up three square feet of space storing those unmentionable feminine hygiene products. So far this is the most positive result I’ve experienced. Consider the following chart of accurate data:

What is needed in order to be an effective sailor: (a knowledge of the boat and sailing basics is assumed)

  1.  Use of language
  2.  Memory
  3.  Emotional strength and containment
  4.  Muscles
  5.  Body visibility, ie the ability to be seen by others
  6. Bladder strength

What The Menopause will take from you without your permission: 

  1. Use of language
  2.  Memory
  3.  Emotional strength and containment
  4.  Muscles
  5.  Body visibility, ie the ability to be seen by others
  6. Bladder strength
Are you seeing an overlap here, a pattern? Do we need to break out the Venn Diagrams?

Lest you forget what you learned in Algebra I.  In this case, imagine one circle directly over the other circle. That’s right, you’re catching on! It would be just one huge circle with a thick edge. If you are a math type, then in my case A=B.

I started to do one massive post on this topic and then realized that I had way too much material. Really, The Menopause offers so many rich opportunities to rant, whine, and stomp my feet in frustration that there is simply no way to say it all in one post. So there will be multiple posts fleshing out some of the subjects so accurately stated in my data charts above. It may be that I will come up with more. I can’t remember everything just now. Or ever.
Not much has been written on the interweb about the effects of menopause on sailing and/or vice versa. Doing the ‘google’ on those two topic words produces an irritating number of websites devoted to ‘sailing through menopause’. As if. They have nothing to do with boats and are useless to me. Suzanne Giesemann, Navy Commander, World Sailor, and professional Medium/Psychic,  wrote a blog post about her ennui due to Menopause Mood Disorder™ back in 2009. I felt I’d found my kindred spirit! But then she followed up in the comments section that she found a little supplement that made it all better. Oh, come on! Really, Suzanne? I mean, you are one of my personal heroines! I’ve read all your books on sailing! Hell, I OWN your books! Your name is the SAME as my middle name! Et tu? I was crushed with disappointment.
I feel like The Menopause is a good topic for this blog on occasion. Think about it. Many of the women who are out there cruising around are middle aged women. They’re either looking forward to menopause, are in the middle of it, or have already said goodbye to it. I wonder how some of them are faring? (And their partners, too.) If I had a research grant, I would perhaps do some study of the effects of the sailing/cruising lifestyle on the  sufferings of menopause. My hypothesis? Cruising might make a lot of it better. On the other hand, having a hot flash down in the tropics cannot be anything but hell on earth.
Between this series, the product reviews which are still in the works, and the series on cheap tricks, I should so busy in the coming weeks I might forget to apply my hormone creams. Be warned. We try to keep this blog ‘family friendly’, light and fluffy like marshmallow cream,  but emotions run high on this topic and you’ll note number 3 above regarding emotional containment. So if you are the sensitive type, don’t say I didn’t warn you.  I may have to break out choice expletives to get my points across as sometimes those are the only words that manage to surface through my menopause fog. I’ll try to remember to disguise them with the use of ***, but no promises.
*Your experience may differ, and if it does, consider yourself lucky.
  

It’s Our Anniversary!

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It’s the one year anniversary of our blog! Since our first blog post last October, we’ve posted 90 times, had almost 250,500 views, and increased our traffic to an average of 3000 hits per month. That might not sound like much to people who’ve lived in the blogsphere longer, but to us it represents what can happen if you just keep plugging away. In spite of the fact that I do most of the posting, Mike holds the record for the number of hits on a post in a single day. His post with the photos of Orcas in Commencement Bay got 646 hits. I have yet to forgive him for that (both the record number AND the fact that he was alone on the boat when those Orcas surfaced right by him).

This is still the goal.

As anniversaries are times of reflection, I thought I would do a sort of interview about our progress in the last year.

Question:  How happy are you overall with your blogging experience so far?  What is the easiest thing about blogging? What is the hardest thing? 

Melissa: Well, overall I am surprised at how much I like it and how many ideas I can come up with to write about. I think that’s the easiest thing; coming up with topics. Since not all of them are any good, choosing what to write about can be challenging.  I never thought of myself as a writer, so it’s a whole new world.

The hardest things are keeping the length of the posts down to a mild roar, and also sometimes keeping a light and upbeat tone. I can have some dark days in this process, but no one is going to want to read about that.

Mike: I’m at a 6 out of 10 in terms of happiness. The hardest thing is keeping up with the patches and fixing the bugs. The easiest is writing posts, but I haven’t written that many.

Question: What is the most enjoyable part of blogging?

Melissa: It’s the feedback from readers and making friends with other bloggers, hands down. I know we have a lot more readers than we do commentors. I wish more people would post comments because without them it’s like putting a part of yourself out into a black hole in the universe, never to know where it lands. It sort of like that philosophical question: It a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to hear it, does it make a sound? I think the answer to that question is, ‘Who cares?’. Same think with writing a blog. If no one reads it or comments on it, then who cares?  I also like the way blogging makes me organize my thoughts. That’s a benefit I would not have predicted.

Mike responds:  Getting nice comments from readers.

Question: What have you not liked about blogging?

Melisssa: Sometimes I can have a pretty twisted sense of humor. When I’m writing, I have a certain tone in my head that sometimes does not get translated well onto the page.  I always assume that people will know when I’m being humorous, but sometimes they don’t. I guess that’s part of the learning process for me. Believe it or not, my sense of humor is nothing compared to my kids’.

Mike: Trouble shooting the site.

Question: Reflect, if you will, on how satisfied you are about your progress in reaching the goal of voyaging. What feels solid to you? What frustrates you?

I’ve given away all of my yearbooks. I don’t miss them one bit since I photographed all the pages that had anything relevant to me. Here I am as a senior in high school, doing actual school work before the invention of the personal computer. Dinosaur days, to be sure.

Melissa: That is a complicated question. This year we have done a good job of paring down our possessions and simplifying how we live in our home and we are still in the process of doing this. We’ve been married for 30 years and raised two kids, so we have a lot of stuff. We’re pretty much normal Americans that way. So there is still much to do.

On the other hand, we will still be living in this house for a few more years and I’m finding myself unwilling to give up everything as though I’m going to live on a boat, when the ‘living on a boat’ part isn’t in sight. I don’t want to live in a house with no furniture or give up all my craft things before I have to. And we got rid of our truck too fast. With the property we own, we need a truck. So now we are going to have to buy another one. That pretty much sucks, if you ask me.

Mike: We are making progress but I am looking out five years and that still feels far away. It would be nice to have the right boat that we could start making ready for our cruising life so that we could be working on and putting money into that boat. Of course, if we decide to cruise on Moonrise, then the money is going to the right place already.  I think our experience and confidence for blue water voyaging is actually pretty good and while finances will always be a little vague, I know that we will be able to make this adventure happen.

Frustration comes from not having certainty about having the right boat and the need to continue working a few more years.

Question: What decisions remain to be made in putting your cunning plan into place? Why have you put these decisions off?

Melissa: The thorn in my side is setting the date for casting off. We know from more experienced people how important it is to set a date and just go, but so far we have been unable to agree on a date. The problem is that Mike wants to go when he retires, which is in 5 years. I will retire from my practice when Andrew graduates from college, but Mike’s is the ‘big’ retirement. Five years feels like an eternity to me, especially when I think about all of the life events that could easily happen in that amount of time that would inevitably delay our departure: things like family illnesses, grandchildren (however unlikely), or our own health (even though we are both quite healthy now). I feel a bit like a woman who has waited too long to have a baby and is now too old to easily conceive: every month that passes is another month I will never get back.

This time last year I was having fun looking at boats, anticipating selling Moonrise. Now it’s possible we’ll keep her. We aren’t sure anymore.

Believe it or not, I also worry that I will lose interest. It seems impossible now, but there are lots of things I’ve been really into for several years, only to be done with them at a certain point. I remember meeting some people at a local cruising club raft up who just sail around this area because they have lost interest in going  further. They said they don’t want to be hot, or be cold, or be challenged anymore. They just want to relax and have fun. They were in their 60’s. The tone in their comments and glances at each other was that they didn’t think Mike and I would ever go if we waited that long.
That tone fell on the fertile ground of my own fears.  People grow and change throughout their adult lives and interests grow and change along with that. What I do know is if I die before I do something this cool, I am going to be one really pissed off ghost roaming the seas.  I soothe these fears by planning to be reincarnated as a child of a wealthy family who sails around the world as a lifestyle. Maybe the Bumfuzzle children will grow up to be  sailing vagabonds and one of them can be my new parent. They seem to come from good genetic stock, and the Bumfuzzles would probably be fabulous grand parents.  Hey, whatever it takes to get me through the night. Probably the more we get out there and sail together, and I mean sail away from Commencement Bay, which is getting to be a little boring at this point, the more I will remain interested.

 

It’s hard to take care of this yard when we’re on the boat. But it’s harder to walk away from this property when values are so low.

The other decision we haven’t yet made is what to do with our house. Aside from being our family home, it’s the only property investment we have. Mike thinks we should sell it; I’m not so sure. Much will depend on property values when the time comes, I suppose. We are in a great area for rentals and we have a friend who manages rentals to military families. If we could turn the management over to him, we would have someone we trust to keep watch over this property, and maybe we could eventually derive an income from it. I hate to give that up. And yet the possibility of being able to leave with no financial liabilities is very seductive, and it is doubtful that we will come back to live in Lakewood. We can’t really make that decision until we see what the market is going to be like in a few years.

Mike: We will need to know which boat we are going to voyage in within the next two or three years. If we can make Moonrise bluewater-ready, then we will be in pretty good shape. If we decide that another  boat is needed, then we have to adjust our finances to pay it off and get it ready.  Then there is the house. Do we sell or rent? Income during our retirement has to be considered. Which pot do we draw from while we are cruising and still relatively young? These decisions are put off because I have more questions than answers. As usual.

Question: So what’s the next step for you?

Melissa: The next step is to continue honing down our belongings a bit at a time, keeping the goal of voyaging in mind as we do so and simplifying our lives the best we can while still living comfortably in our home. We’ve taken Moonrise off the market for awhile, although we’d sell her to the right buyer. Meanwhile, Mike has been doing a lot of projects on the boat and his skill level with wood working is really improving.

Mike: The next step is to find out if we can make Moonrise the boat we will take. If it is, then I can continue to work on improving her and preparing for the major upgrades (Sails, Windvane, Rigging, Tankage etc) .

 

Last Christmas I cut down on the crazy gift giving. We didn’t miss it. This year I plan to cut back even more. If I put it in writing, I have to do it.