Author Archives: Melissa

Hardship is Over Rated

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Recently I was reading this really entertaining, if a bit anxiety provoking, story I found on Digg.com. It’s a story about a young couple who wanted to experience life on the road, #vanlife style. They wanted an “authentic” experience, one with no frills; one that wasn’t “instagram ready”. While they would be inspired by #vanlife, they would do their travels on a low budget. My anxiety began for them in that first paragraph where the author describes the super cheap van they bought with an engine that leaked fuel at the first fill up. My God. What were they getting themselves into? As the title explains, they wanted to do van life ‘right’, but it broke them down.

I passed the story on to my son and daughter-in-law because they had traveled the country in their Honda Element before setting off on their travels to Europe. I felt like they would probably relate to parts of this story after traveling for almost a year. Jill had seen the story and read it already and as we dicussed it, I thought her takeaway was appropriate: “Don’t get in over your head because you think the vision of your dreams will carry you through”. Man, such truth. Spot on. That’s what a year of travel by land, or maybe two years of cruising by sea, will teach you. This story spoke to me.

Are we in over our heads? Do we still have the underlying dream? Some days we do, and then the next day we don’t. I speak for myself, of course. Lately I’ve struggled with what I can only describe as ennui. While Mike has experienced it as well, he doesn’t ‘do’ ennui as deeply as I do; at least where anyone would notice. He’s got too many projects going in his mind. I have a few, but I’m not as engaged with them as he is, although it says something that I really look forward to sitting down with a needle and thread and getting those cockpit cushions recovered with fabric I bought in the states. I’m not sure exactly WHAT it says, but it’s something. Maybe a glimmer of hope, a small piece of a dream that is still alive?

Galapagos was in great condition when we got back to her. That’s always such a big relief.

Anyway, I’ve been trying to put my finger on what these feelings are about. Am I not as adventurous as I thought? Am I just tired of cruising? Is it the heat of Mexico? (Because let me tell you it sucks.) Am I going to be able to get back into what I love when we are on the boat? Would a good snorkel experience put me back in the groove? There must be some reason why I was like a dog on a hunt for extra snorkel gear during our recent travels in the states. I had a dream recently that the boat had been tossed way up into the air and I had fallen into the water, all the way to the bottom of the sea. I was trying to swim for the surface but I was getting nowhere fast and was afraid I would drown. It was very scary, but on the other hand the water was super clear and warm. I hate these kinds of dreams. What gives, White? Take a salt tablet and snap out of it!

After sidling up to the topic on a number of occasions over the last year, we finally had the conversation about whether we are done with cruising. Spoiler alert: We aren’t. Whenever I am openly miserable I must give the impression that I want to quit and go home. I don’t want to quit, I just want to find a solution to the current dilemma. I’d like to hide my suffering, but unfortunately I wear it on my face. Please see photo below. So while I’m not ready to throw in the towel,  I do sometimes believe that suffering is over rated as a tool for personal growth. And yet give me one example of something that has caused tremendous personal growth that has not involved the fires of  suffering of some kind? I’m hard pressed to think of one but I’m open to your opinions on this subject.

Two down. A few more to go. As always, I do this stuff by hand.

I’ve been thinking deeply about this lately as we make our way through the work that is getting the boat back in order so we can actually be cruising again rather than sitting in the lovely Marina Real in San Carlos. The current situation is this: It’s blessed hot in the boat. Two days ago it was 97F with humidity of 87%. Michael and I could not drink water and electrolytes fast enough to keep our bodies in order. Even standing still we literally dripped sweat onto whatever we touched and there would absolutely be zero touching of one another. “You want to hold my hand? Surely you jest! Step back; crazy man! ”

I struggle with nausea in the heat. My feet swell. I finally experienced what I had only read about before: ” It’s too hot to eat.” WTF. Nothing gets in the way of me and my food.  I had not been sleeping well and was close to tears way often. I found myself hunkering down in the cabin just trying to keep cool, then I realized that all the fans were just circulating hot air. It felt like I was literally in a womb of a smelter. All I wanted was to be born again into a cool, refreshing breeze. I began to question the sanity of what we were doing. I mean why was I even here? I felt like I was just surviving the weather conditions, certainly not thriving in them. Is this how I wanted to spend my time? (Which, by the way, feels super short lately.)

Just not a good look for anyone.

Conversations about throwing in the towel should not be had in sweat-dripping, sleep deprived conditions where my core temperature is hot enough to convince my body that it is ill. But have one we did, and it didn’t go particularly well for me. I had to call it off because: getting angry, which never helps. Then there is the feeling that because we have the absolute privilege to be able to make this choice at all, we should just take our lumps and never speak of them. It’s not lost on us in any way that we were born at the right time, in the right country, and are the ‘right’ color when it comes to the downright luck that gave our lives the right trajectory that we could actually put our shoulders to the plow, as it were, and work hard to make this happen. We take credit for what we have done, but we also know that others work much harder than we ever have and will absolutely never have this opportunity because the obstacles in their path are that much greater than ours ever were. So even sounding like we might be complaining feels somehow wrong. And the work we did put into this choice, not to mention all the money we spent, makes the decision of when to stop a weighty one, indeed.

Fantasies of renting an air conditioned condo swarmed in my head but in some intangible way, that felt like a failure. Did we come all the way to Mexico to live in a condo and drive our car around? We did not, but I admit the temptation is strong and that could still happen. Mike was doing OK in the heat. I mean, he was hot and drippy, but he wasn’t suffering overly much. Or maybe I was just suffering enough for both of us. I don’t know. Our Andrew/Jill combo are coming to visit in September and it’s also going to be just as hot then as it is now.  I need to get it together so I can enjoy this time with them. We need strategies in place that will help them stay cool so they don’t suffer overly much. I’ve been waiting for this visit for a year now. I cannot let heat get in the way of having fun. I want to snorkel with them and show them the best that the Sea of Cortez has to offer. (And no, it’s just not possible for them to come later in the year. They’ll be back working for a living.)

But back to the story of life’s struggles from the van-traveling couple. One of the thoughts expressed in this story crystallized for me what I’ve been experiencing in the past few months but had trouble putting into words, heat and humidty aside. Something about seeing this in black and white in another person’s words struck home with me and maybe, if you are cruising, for you as well. It’s pretty simple:

“ …transient living can wreak havoc on anyone….it’s harder to maintain healthfulness when you don’t have stability—when trouble can come at any time, in many forms.”

Well, slam bam. That’s it in a nutshell. We definitely feel attached to the boat and consider it ‘home’ for now. But the constant transitions, the moving from place to place by land, sea, and air, sleeping in a new place every few days, the continual focus on preventing trouble, the problem solving in a foreign country with few resources where language is truly a barrier; the logistics of accomplishing the most simple task, they all tend to wear on us over time. When you add adjusting to hostile weather conditions into the mix, it can tip a person over the edge. And that’s what’s been happening. These inescapable hot, sweaty days pushed me over the edge.

Just a fond memory of that air conditioned AirBnb with the king sized comfy bed in Puerto Peñasco. Land living. It makes a body soft. 

We discussed renting a condo and that’s still an option. But I do want to be able to adjust to this. Maybe my body just needs a more gradual acclimation? To solve the immediate problem of no relief we bought an air conditioner that we can use while at the dock. I had been sleeping in the main cabin because it’s cooler and last night I actually was able to rest with the AC going. But I think we will put it in the aft cabin for now because it struggles to keep the salon cool. It’s small. And the heat is big. It would probably handle the aft cabin just fine. Then we can have a cool room to go to when the going gets tough. We can actually run it with a generator as well, but that’s not going to be a regular occurrance. Still, it’s nice to know that if one of us succumbs to the heat, we have a way to escape it. And if the kids come and they, too, have trouble accomodating the heat, we can give them some relief. One of the previous owners of our boat posted to me on Facebook that it was too bad the central air conditioner he had installed on the boat when he was in the Sea of Cortez was no longer on board. I tell you, I cried real tears when I read that.

Installed in the main salon, our fantastic Ryobi rechargeable fan helps circulate the cool air.

Air conditioning, boat style. When this happens you are no longer cruising. You are living at the dock.

Out here on the water we are constantly doing what we can to make sure we don’t ‘get in over our heads’. This isn’t a vacation we’re on. It’s a continual balance between what is worth it in the long run, and what might be dangerous or just even not very much fun. When people consider cruising on a boat as a lifestyle choice, these times that are between actual cruising trips are frequently discounted or missed altogether in the dreaming and the planning stages. I know that we didn’t even really think about them at all. Our entire focus was on being on the water and making the boat safe. It’s taken us a bit aback to understand that there is so much time where you are actually doing other things; not sailing or anchoring or snorkeling. There are way more than I imagined of these other, less fun things that you have to get through to get back to those things you dreamed about. These things have been, for me, the ones that have made me feel more like we are in over our heads, and where we have to struggle to keep the vision of the dream alive until we can go out and sail, anchor in a sweet little cove, and slip silently, once more, into the silent water to commune with our fishy friends under the sea. I hear the water is clear this time of year.

Sea Fans keeping the dream alive.

I leave you with an appropriate joke I read on Facebook:

When you’re under the sea,
And an eel rubs your knee,
That’s a moray.

Get it?

S/V Galapagos, Standing by on Channel 22A

Oh, The Humanity!

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I just logged into this site for the first time in weeks and suddenly the website insisted I prove my humanity. I mean, Okay.  Make me do math to prove I have a brain and not a bunch of circuits. It’s not that there’s any harm in doing a simple arithmetic problem, it’s the whole ‘prove you are a human’ thing that gets me. I guess that’s what I get for not logging in for weeks. But hey, I’ve been mildly busy lately. We humans. We’re known for ‘doing things’ and for not reporting them on the internet.

Back in Mexico. For the uninitiated, this is what the streets look like outside of town. That gate hides our car.

But we’re back in Mexico as of today. After a stint in Mike’s home town in Tennessee, then a visit to my family up in Washington, we finally decided we were simply putting off the inevitable and bought a ticket home. And by ‘home’ I mean back to Galapagos and the sweltering heat of Mexico. Do I look forward to being back aboard? Sure I do. We have missed having our own place where we can spread out and have our privacy. And we have missed the water.

Do I look forward to being hot and sweaty again? Not so much. So I’m enjoying our last few days of air conditioning sitting here in our cheap AirBnb in the barrio outside of Puerto Peñasco. Drive a little, save a lot and get a really sweet little place for about half what a room down on the malecon would be. I tell you land living makes you soft.

Behind the gate: this!

And then open the door to this! Two bedrooms, one with a nice king sized bed. Be still my heart! I wish we could stay longer. Alas, this place is booked. 37$/night. WHATT?

Is our boat here? It is not. Galapagos sits sweetly in her slip down in San Carlos at Marina Real, awaiting the day we arrive with our van full of supplies, load her up, and sail her into the sea again. But first, we wanted to be on the ground in Puerto Peñasco to check out the boatyard here and the marinas. I mean, we’ve paid for moorage through the end of August. What else do we need to do with our time?  Nothing being straight forward in the world of cruising, we are getting the lay of the land so we can return with the car after we unload in San Carlos. We hope to leave the car somewhere safe here and bring the boat up,  and find a place to park it for a few days. Why? Kids coming to visit! Hurrah!

The next adventure on our agenda is having our Andrew and his wife, Jill, aboard Galapagos for a three week tour of the northern Sea of Cortez. They arrive in September and we have been waiting PATIENTLY. FOR. OUR. TURN. to see them. We are the last stop on their year long travel adventure, which has been such an epic trip!  Currently at a lovely Workaway in Spain, they have completely rocked this whole travel thing. If you know young people who want to travel and do Workaway stays, they should check out Andrew and Jill’s blog. Lots of great travel, Airbnb, and Workaway stories (the good and the ugly), excellent photos, and some advice from seasoned travelers.  I’m sure the Sea of Cortez, while not exactly Europe, will not disappoint.

We stayed in a casita at this property in Tucson. What a beautiful place. We loved it.

Wherever we go we take notes about what we love in the places we stay. We love this architecture, the use of line, the curved walls and spaces. And the pool. I loved this pool so much. Damn, I already miss that pool.

This season will be the deciding one in terms of what’s next for the Little Cunning Plan crew. We are hoping to do a Pacific Crossing next year, hoping Andrew and Jill will be able to crew with us for that, but there are issues playing in the background of our lives that may make us have to put that off for a year or so. And if we put it off, will we ever get to go? We are the generation that gets squeezed in the middle between our own aging process and that of our parents. Both oldest kids in our families, we are keenly aware of the vulnerabilities of our surviving parents as well as our own mortality that has crept upon us with the greatest of stealth. If we cannot do the crossing, will we continue to travel by boat? Will we be finished and ready to sell beloved Galapagos? How does anyone ever know how to make that kind of decision? We feel stuck right now, unable to move forward until things out of our control get resolved. That won’t be until at least October. So for now, we are focusing on the here, the now, the enjoyment of getting back to the boat and getting back on the water for as long as it lasts.

This is just to say we have a lot of balls up in the air right now, many of which will not appear on this blog or on our Facebook page. Like all people, our lives are very human, very complex, very much in-motion at all times. Blogs make things look so straightforward, even when they are not.  I wonder if  all this will cause me to have to do another math problem to prove my own humanity the next time I log into this site. Ah well. I can just about manage that.

I leave you with some photos from Tucson, a city worth visiting even in the heat of summer.

At the Tucson Botanical Garden on a day we played ‘tourist in the heat’.

In Marshall Gulch, on a hiking day. The mountains are a cool respite from the heat of the valley.

Is it a fly? A bee? We don’t know.

On the way to Marshall Gulch. Up where the air is cool. The next day was thunderstorms all day.

That to-die-for pool at the Airbnb. Did I mention I had a close encounter of the respectful kind with a beautiful wild Bobcat Lynx? Such a fantastic cat! I saw him up close and personal. I probably should have been afraid, but I was not.

A tile at the Tucson Botanical Garden. True words.

Until next time, S/V Galapagos, standing by on channel 22a. Damn, it feels good to say that.

 

 

The Bees Rule

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We were at anchor at Playa Bonanza on the back side of Isla Espiritu Santo having just come off a three night passage from Isla Isabella.  We were both ready for a rest.  Alas. Life can be unfair.

A sweet little Redside Blenny

I was below in the salon using the first cell service we’d had in a week; catching up on Facebook and the news, when, from on deck, Mike scared the pants just about off of me by bellowing out a loud, anguished “ARRGGHHUGG!”. I’m sure you are familiar with these kinds of screams. They are the kind that indicate the most foul mortal wounding. In the history of the Boyte-White family, there have been many occasions where I’ve been minding my own business, busy with a task,  only to be brutally interrupted by a loud, guttural cry from one or the other male members of the family. Honestly, I can think of 5 separate occasions without even trying. God only knows how many I’ve repressed so I don’t have to remember them. I accept this as my fate, a balancing of the scales of justice, my due for having put my own parents through this special kind of hell when I was growing up.

The men in my family have been, as they are referred to in medical circles, “frequent fliers”. These cries of terror are generally followed by a fast and expensive visit to the emergency room. When I am on the receiving end of a bellow of anguish, I am, to use a political word, triggered.

“MIKE!!” I screamed as I took the companionway ladder in one leap. “Oh my god what has he done? Has he cut himself? Is he currently missing a limb? Where is the nearest emergency facility? Is there anyone within radio distance?” These thoughts jockeyed for position as I levitated up the ladder. I met him coming around the front of the cockpit, pulling down his pants, all limbs and parts apparently in place and accounted for. No blood spattered anywhere. No arms held at a strange angle. Wait. What?

That’s right. He was pulling down his pants. My husband got a bee in his pants and it stung him on his hind end. That is all. Yes, the sting hurt. But it was the fact the insect was in his pants that did most of the damage. He bears no blame for his outcry. Mine would have been much worse had our positions been reversed. His look was a bit sheepish as I reached for the ice to put on his mortal injury. This was our third sting of the day, so I had it handy.

This was not the peaceful, restful anchorage we had longed for. No. It was not. This was the land of the bees, and it was a harbinger of the weeks to come, weeks we’d planned to enjoy going from anchorage to anchorage, snorkeling and making way north.

Abandoned hotel at Punta Chivato

The bees had shown up only a few hours after we set our anchor. They sent their scouts to report back to their friends: “YES! WE HAVE FOUND WATER, AMIGOS! COME IN FORCE TO THE BIG BLUE FLOATING ISLAND AND DRINK YOUR FILL TO COOL THE HIVE. PLEASE YOUR ALMIGHTY QUEEN!” I remember thinking to myself that maybe they would not go get their friends. Maybe these were not actually scouts sent to communicate with the hoards from the hive. Maybe we would truly be able to rest today. Maybe bees would not invade our cabin and make the boat hum with their tiny beating wings. Maybe they would not crawl over every surface and explore every crevice on the boat. Maybe they would not die by the hundreds in the soapy water in the sink, falling on their bubbly swords in service to their matriarch. Perhaps they would even stay out of the cockpit.

In a soothing moment of denial we called our daughter to have a nice talk and as we visited our hopes and dreams dissolved as the swarm descended on our boat. First a handful of bees, then a bowlful of bees, and finally we had literally thousands of bees flying around and crawling on every little thing they could land on. We had to hang up the phone. There was no way to concentrate on a conversation. We were too busy brushing the bees off of our person. Sighing greatly, we raised anchor to make good our escape.

Thanks for the water, sailors. Now give us your boat.

The struggle with bees is real here on the islands in Mexico. We are bee lovers, not bee haters. Still, our groove has been seriously impacted by our buzzing friends because there is great snorkeling at many of the islands and that’s what we love to do. You haven’t lived until you’ve tried to shower salt water off on the back deck with a million bees buzzing around you. One with nature, that’s us.

At our last anchorage, Isla San Marcos, the bees were not the docile almost domesticated insects we had encountered other places. These bees landed on us and crawled on us with impunity, seemingly marking us as their territory. All I can say to that is NO. At every single island anchorage we went to, we had about 1 day to enjoy ourselves before the bees found us. This is the literal truth. One day. After that we either had to become part of the hive, or we had to move along to another place. In order to survive the islands, we’d need wings. And possibly a stinger. At the very least we’d need to keep moving.

In case you were wondering, we did try to divert their attention; to deter them from taking over our space. We tried bowls of water on the deck. That encouraged more to come. We tried peppermint oil, tried by many other cruisers to some effect. Our boat smelled great. But the bees thought so, too. They landed all over it. We even tried putting sugar water on a part of the deck we didn’t need to access. They sure appreciated it, but they still came into the boat looking for more. Greedy bees. Many people close up their boats to keep bees out. But that doesn’t really work as they will find any way to get inside. And really, it’s just too hot for that. A closed up boat, even one with screens, is like a tomb. You need air circulation to survive inside.

Thus it is that I’m not all that sad that we’ve put Galapagos in Marina Real in San Carlos, Sonora for a few weeks and we’re flying back to the states to do some visiting with family. I remember last year when we put her on the hard for the summer and it felt like it was too soon, like there was so much more we wanted to do.

This year it’s different. It’s blessed hot here now. The sweat drips down our bodies constantly and this is no longer a novel experience. We have given up wearing clothing (which can be a serious problem if you forget to put clothes on when other boats are nearby).  You just cannot be in the water enough to stay cool, but I admit that showering in the altogether on the back of the boat is 10 minutes of pure bliss, as long as the bees haven’t joined you.

This fishing boat passed WAY too close to us on our brisk passage across to San Carlos. I was about to turn off, under full sail, when he finally adjusted course, paralleled us for a few minutes and waved, then passed in front of us at speed.

So we are currently in the marina, getting her ready to leave for awhile as planned, and not feeling particularly sorry about it at the moment, although I will miss the snorkeling.  I guess we need a break. We’re visiting our friends Curt and Lynn Brownlow in their air conditioned condo for a few days and it’s utter bliss. We’ll be back in the heat of August, we think, to take her further north into the boiling sea for the brunt of hurricane season. Maybe the bees are better on this side of the sea? There’s more moisture over here, so we’ll hold out hope. Our destination is Puerto Peñasco, above the historic hurricane zone. We’ll find a condo to rent with air conditioning and hunker down for a sweaty season in the boatyard. My birthday is in August. I’m thinking an air conditioner would be a welcome gift.