Author Archives: Melissa

Travel Ninja

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What are parents to do when their adult children decide that working 9-5 for someone else isn’t the way they want to spend the best years of their lives and the traveling thing is the right thing for them; eschewing all previous conventions and throwing caution to the wind? Especially what are parents who are currently planning their own grand adventure and wishing they had known they could have done this years ago, possibly taking the kids with them, supposed to do? (Did you follow that?)

There are lots of blogs written by young people who have made a life out of traveling and becoming world citizens. Here’s one, and here’s another one and even another one and if you are so inclined you, too, can do the Google and find more blogs that will claim to teach you how to be a travel ninja.  Some travel on sailboats, some travel on land. And probably all of them had parents who had minor melt downs when they decided to take the plunge. WhhhAAATTT? You aren’t going to have some sort of ‘stable’ career in a system that will treat you like a number and steal your youth out the top of your head? Are you crazy? We ARE those parents. So instead of wringing our hands in despair because our oldest child, Claire, has embraced the traveling lifestyle rather than a boring desk job in some soul-sucking environment we decided to throw her a party instead. Complete with pony show.

This is not a new decision Claire has made. Oh no. She got the travel bug early when she studied and traveled in France. That was her first trip. Then there was the additional trip to France where she got certified in Business French and then stuck around for a few more months. She’s good with languages. Then she graduated from college and ‘real life’ settled on her like a curse. With it came the crushing realization that traveling was either for the independently wealthy or for some lucky people who found jobs that allowed their creativity to flow as they traveled. She went to work for Nordstrom as a personal shopper. It’s not as fun as it sounds. Oh, she could tell you stories…

Enter the ‘head hunter’ and a job for an insurance agency in Tacoma. Let the soul sucking begin. On a vacation for two weeks, she went to Ireland and fell in love with traveling again, coming back with many stories about people she had met, places she had seen, castles she had explored. We hope she kept notes because she is a good writer and some day she will need them. Memories fade.

Claire sees pony and knows it is really happening for the first time.

Not moving up fast enough in that agency, she landed “THE JOB” in Seattle and moved from sleepy Tacoma and her little Victorian house apartment to the big city and a beautiful apartment overlooking Elliot Bay. She had ‘arrived’.  She worked her ASS off. But time was passing and her best hours and years were being given over to someone else; someone for whom she was simply an employee. The good money she made wasn’t enough. She took a vacation to Scotland and came back a changed woman. That’s when the planning began. Money began being saved. Designer clothes were left on the racks at Nordstrom. Dreams began to be plotted. Then a one way ticket to Edinburgh was bought.

Claire’s apartment building in Seattle. The trappings of success.

She let her apartment go, had a huge garage sale and sold almost everything she owned. She moved home with us, back in Tacoma, where she could save more money. She stockpiled travel ninja skills, left the job-of-death,  and then took off for Scotland. That was last December. Alas, post-911 no one wants people from other countries staying too long, so she had to leave Edinburgh behind for awhile, but she already has her return ticket.

To welcome Claire home, we had a gathering at our home and invited her good friends from Seattle and beyond. It was a dandy group and made me look forward to the days when we will be able to entertain people from all walks of life in our own cockpit on Galapagos. And yes, there was a pony, too, because our family has a running joke when either of the kids are off traveling. The joke is that we bought a pony while they were gone and everyone is having fun with it except them. It’s one of those ‘inside’ jokes that mean ‘we miss you, but we’re having fun with our lives, too’. But when planning this shindig, I thought it would be brilliant to have a pony show up at the party for snuggles and photo ops. Fortunately, Andrew’s girlfriend, Jill, has ‘connections’ in the horse and pony world. And so it came to pass that a cute pony named ‘Norm’ made a grande entrance in our backyard just as the festivities were getting started. A good time was had by all and Claire  was completely surprised in the best possible way!

It was like a Pier One advertisement.

It was like a Pier One advertisement.

So now that the party is over she has to replenish her ‘cruising kitty’.  Just like cruisers who have to stop and replenish their bank accounts, no matter how cunning a ninja you are, traveling takes some money.  So, aside from skyping the main squeeze boyfriend back in Edinburgh (who will be coming to visit us in September!) she will be spending considerable time and energy figuring out how to find temporary jobs, or creating a way to keep this gig going. She would like to find some kind of employment that would allow her to work virtually. College educated, excellent customer service skills, great people skills, National Merit Scholar; quick learner and that internalized sense of responsibility that most employers wish they could find, we take the leap of faith with her that the world will offer up a way for her to follow her heart. How can we do any less? I mean, that’s what we’ve been teaching our kids all along. So it better work! Come on Universe! We’re counting on you!

 

Gasses, Burps and Other Noises

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Sometimes Galapagos is downright embarrassing. We’ve never heard a boat gurgle, burp, and probably fart as much as she does and it’s taking us awhile to figure out whether these are noises of distress or whether we are just ignorant like first time parents; focused on every small nuance a newborn exhibits. She’s trying to tell us something, but she speaks with foreign tongue. More on this later.

This weekend, determined to do not a lick of boat work and just enjoy being on the water, we took Galapagos to visit Anderson Island, just south of Tacoma, and home to our favorite boat surveyor, Tony Allport of “He saved us from buying the beautiful but high maintenance Flying Gull” fame. We were secretly hoping for a ‘Tony’ sighting, but I guess Anderson Island is bigger than we thought because none of the people we sighted were Tony.

Most people who travel to Anderson Island choose to pull into protected Oro Bay or Amsterdam Bay, but we are not ‘most people’ and don’t mind anchoring in a little current if the weather is fine. So we chose Thompson Cove at the south end of the island. That way we could enjoy the sunset.  As we pulled in a woman on the shore waved at us and yelled out ‘Beautiful boat!’ and something about anchoring. The tone was welcoming; she seemed friendly with a good attitude toward sailboats. Anchor set for the weekend, I pulled out my hammock, opened the new Kindle Mike got me for my birthday, and commenced to some hardcore reading. The light sound of laughter wafted by on the breeze, coming from the house on the shore. My hammock rocked gently.

Mike, waiting for the mother ship. Perhaps we have room for two hammocks.

She holds on to her doggie’s tail and he pulls her through the water. He seems to love it!

After a few hours I felt eyes upon me and noticed someone floating on a swim toy in the water, holding on to what appeared to be a dog. This is the Pacific Northwest. Anyone in the water is either in trouble or is a hardier soul than me. This was the woman with the good attitude and she and her dog were floating our way. I stood up to greet her. Smiling hugely, she said “Welcome to Thompson Cove! Your boat is lovely! I’m an old sailor and I love seeing a sailboat anchored in the cove.  Here, I brought you some freshly picked blackberries. If we have a bonfire tonight, be sure to come and join us!”

She exuded warmth. I wanted immediately to be her friend.  The current was taking her, so we had a quick conversation that assured me that she and her dog swam Thompson Cove every day and she would have no trouble getting back to shore. Still, we watched her carefully, since it was hard to believe anyone could be close to the actual wetness that long without becoming hypothermic, and the current was swift.

That's right. All day long.

That’s right. All day long.

I couldn’t help but compare this open and friendly welcome complete with fresh berries to the one we received last year when making the late fall trip up to Anacortes on Moonrise to deliver her to her new owners. At the end of a long day of cold sailing, we needed to anchor for the night and wanted to be on the protected side of the land. Orcas Island offered our best solution and we pulled into a bay filled with empty mooring balls. Choosing a spot well away from them we dropped anchor.

As Mike was snugging up the rode we were greeted by a woman standing aggressively on her porch on shore. Her weapon of choice was a large cheerleader megaphone apparently kept on the front porch, shotgun like, just for this purpose. The megaphone was as big as she was. Her echoing voice grated on my last nerve as she informed us that 1) this wasn’t a good place to anchor (Yes, it was), 2) We might touch her mooring ball. (No, we wouldn’t.) 3) Were we in trouble? (No, just exhausted.) 4) People had been known to get blown off the anchorage there as storms came out of nowhere. (Clearly she was a conjurer of the first degree. )   This woman was one who would eat the souls of young children lost in the forest. I hope we didn’t destroy her precious view of the empty mooring field. You know, sometimes it’s okay that I don’t hear very well. It makes those people easier to ignore. Poor Mike, with his preternaturally good hearing, bore witness to several of her impromptu speeches before the night got too old for her. We retired to the cabin for a little scrabble.

Back at the welcoming Thompson Cove, we enjoyed a lovely sunset/moonrise. Let the photos speak to this.

On Sunday we had set a date to pick up some friends at the Steilacoom Dock.  Chere Clark and Edwin Nieves have been good friends since Chere came to practice with me 10 years ago.  They’d been on the Saucy Sue, our Catalina 27, on Moonrise, our Cal 34, and now we would have them as our first guests aboard Galapagos! It is exciting to finally be at that stage in this game.

One thing we are learning with a boat this big is that we must remain flexible about how we accomplish things; like sidling up to a dock. Sometimes that just isn’t going to happen. When we approached the dock by the Steilacoom ferry it was clear that we would need a shoehorn to bring Galapagos into the space available. In situations such as this, I like to take the Nancy Reagan approach and ‘Just say NO’. The space was clearly too small. It would not be happening. Our friends were waving from the dock, and people were meandering down to watch the show. I hope we didn’t disappoint them as Mike dropped the dinghy into the water and rowed over to pick them up. I breathed a sigh of considerable relief that there would be no need to wedge our big boat into a small space. Show over with no drama.  I predict this will happen a lot. I especially like the ‘no drama’ part.

Chere lived on a boat in her college years in Bellingham. Boating is in her blood.

And here is a little blast from the past; Chere and Edwin enjoying a little Wednesday night racing aboard our old Catalina 27. The Saucy Sue was a perfect first boat.

Saucy Sue and Friends

Chere and Edwin on the Saucy Sue circa 2006

The plan was to go for an evening sail, taking advantage of the winds that kick up each summer night, then drop them back off at Steilacoom before tootling back up to Tacoma. We anchored off McNeil Island (careful to keep at least a football field’s length off the shore since it’s a prison island) and had a lovely dinner in the cockpit. We were having so much fun that they stuck with us all the way to Tacoma.

Edwin doing his best imitation of a boat captain spotting land for the first time.

And this is where those embarrassing noises come into play. There is so much gurgling! We had identified one source of the gurgling as the drain in the galley sink. It sounded like air was getting into the line and coming up against small quantities of water and we didn’t know how to make it stop. Then, in a brainstorm of epic proportions, I managed to think about putting the stoppers in the sink. Just give me time. Sometimes I’m a little slow, but problem solved. Still,  we can’t figure out where the other sound is coming from. It’s intermittant, no apparent rhyme or reason jumps out at us. So we’ll be sitting enjoying a quiet dinner in the cockpit, or the silence of sails up at an easy heel,  and suddenly the boat lets out a long, rude sounding burp. It seems like it’s coming from the cockpit drains, or maybe the vent to the engine. The sound is similar to what the bilge pump makes, but we’ve at least determined that it is not, in fact,  the bilge pump.  We have a mystery on our hands. I’d like to think that, like our son who was a gassy baby, this boat will outgrow this problem. But, alas, at her age, it is unlikely.

For your viewing pleasure, please enjoy a flurry of photos from the passage back to Tacoma.

Thankfully, the Narrows bridges are very high.

Still, it gives one pause.

Big moon over Salmon Beach. Probably a little blurry due to the boat moving through the water.

Just a little fun with color.

We know we’ll need to get back to our project list soon, but these weekends on the boat have a way of filling up the cup of energy required to keep that momentum going. We’re keeping a gimlet eye on the engine exhaust elbow and so far it’s holding. When Mike’s not looking I secretly use a magnifying glass to check for cracks around that recently welded joint. So far, so good. We just want it to hold long enough for us to get the final fix in place.

 

 

Work, Play, Semantics; Oy Vey!

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Sometimes when I meet people and they find out we are planning to live aboard a boat for awhile, especially a sailboat, I am faced with a little bit of eye rolling and generally a comment such as, ‘Sailboats? They are too much work.’.  Then I have to do a little eye rolling of my own because usually these are people who own their own homes, some even bigger than the 3000 or so square feet we have! Boats are a lot of work? Really? I think this is a matter of perspective. Unless you allow your home to literally fall down around you, (or you can afford a staff to do your bidding) homes are much more work than a boat ever will be. I know this to be true because as I sit here gazing at my beautiful home, I realize that it is falling down around me because, HELLO!, it’s too much work!

And you may find yourself in a beautiful house,… And you may ask yourself-Well…How did I get here? (Talking Heads)

I am so convinced that the ‘boats are too much work’ group is dead wrong that I set out to prove this point for you loyal blog readers so that you will be armed with scientific facts. That’s right. Due to the completely valid, evidence-based research I selflessly did just for you, when the day comes that you are faced with the complete blindness of others regarding this subject, you will be prepared to wow them with facts.  Please go easy on the persuading,  however, because sometimes it’s best to leave well enough alone. There are already a lot of boats on the water.

Let’s take a look at the data and define terms. The verb ‘ to clean’ here means deep cleaning, including scrubbing stains, ridding the surface of algae or moss, bird poop and the like. “All available time” means these tasks are unending and you could spend your entire life doing them if you have poor boundaries. Also this research is about on-going day to day maintaining of a decent living space, not about major repairs. Everyone knows boats need repairing regularly. So do homes, but no one wants to talk about that.

                    Scientific Data Measuring Amount of Work in Hours

 Task                                                   Big Boat                                 Big Home

Clean kitchen floor                               .0333                                         1
Clean roof (boat deck)                           2                                              5
Clean up after cleaning roof                   0                                              2
because it’s all on the ground now
Scrub bathroom                                   .25                                           1.25
Declutter-put things away                      1                                 all available time
Mow yard                                               0                                              1
Weeding/grooming garden                    0                                 all available time
Paint hull bottom/exterior                       2 days                         at least a week
Paint bathroom, special finish                2                                               8
Deep Clean galley/kitchen                     1                                               4
Organize garage                          what garage?                   all day long, many times
Totals                                      2 days plus a few hours                   22.25 + infinity

I could go on but by the time I had collected all this data the results were clear: If you are a home owner,  you are working too hard.

So much work to keep it looking like this.

So much work to keep it looking like this.

Seriously, though, the word ‘work’ has an interesting meaning in our American culture. It seems to have a negative connotation.  So many people have said to us ‘you have worked so hard on this boat!’. They wonder where we find the energy. I guess that’s true in some way, but the statement creates a bit of cognitive dissonance for me. It feels both true and not true. Actually, most of the time I don’t really feel that the statement is accurate. Then when I look back over the blog, I can see why they make the comment. We certainly have spent a lot of time and completed many tasks. But much of it didn’t feel like “work”. Interesting. What gives?

It seems like in this country one is either ‘working’ or ‘not working’; either ‘working’ or ‘playing’. Why do we tend to be all or nothing about this thing? Is it a problem with the English language or something?  And why is the word ‘work’ such a negative word in general? In popular vernacular, it is equated with ‘labor’ or ‘toil’, two words which certainly don’t bring up much to get excited about. In this country we tend to associate it with making money, which we certainly aren’t with S/V Galapagos.

A scary looking equation if there ever was one.

I prefer the definition of ‘work’ found in the world of Physics: an expenditure of energy toward movement; the transfer of energy from one thing to another. This is a much more neutral term that describes the fact that effort has been put forth and a result has been accomplished. (Yes, I’m being liberal with the definition. Don’t get your science knickers in a twist.)  That is a more appropriate way of describing what has been happening around here. We have expended a crap ton of energy on this boat and that transfer of energy has seen results. That feels true in a way that ‘you’ve really worked hard’ doesn’t always. One might wonder where we find all that energy.

The answer to this question is intangible. While the definition of ‘work’ is to be found in the world of Physics, the energy for that work is to be found in the world of Meta-physics. It has something to do with happiness, joy even. When something is a labor of love or passion, it rarely feels like ‘work’ in the popular sense of the word. The love of the task supplies the energy to put forth into effort on behalf of the goal. When you are putting forth energy into something that gives your life richness and meaning, the energy is put forth in joy, even if some parts of it become frustrating. When your entire being is engaged in a creative process, that’s where happiness lies. The bumps in the road are only part of the grander picture. Life is all shadows and light. How can you have light without shadow? At least in this dimension.

This project started to feel a little like work after awhile.

This project started to feel a little like work after awhile.

The focus of this energy changes over the course of a lifetime. What gives joy in one part of your life changes as life develops through time. For example, the amount of energy we currently put toward this boat is roughly equivalent to the amount of energy we put into our house and garden for many years. People would look at the garden or the interior of the house and say ‘my you certainly work hard on this’ and shake their heads. It never felt like ‘work’ to me. Now, because my energy is focused elsewhere, I try to make my garden simpler to maintain so that I don’t have to ‘work’ so hard on it, and I can’t seem to find the energy to do the minor remodeling projects our home needs.  Literally my ‘heart’ isn’t in it.  I’ll bet you can think of examples like this in your own life.

Moon rising over Useless Bay.

This blog is another example. Most people have no idea the amount of time we put into this blog. It is a significant amount, usually every day.  Some posts take days to finish, some longer, some seem to write themselves. There is the tweaking of the WordPress interface, the up and downloading of photos, the attention to internet security.  All of it could be considered ‘work’, and yet it is so rewarding that most of the time it feels like something akin to play, although that’s not really the most accurate word.  Perhaps in the future we will be finished with blogging and it will begin to feel like ‘work’ to us. That’s when we will stop and turn our attention to whatever else is calling to us through the portal of our hearts. For now, it is a source of great satisfaction and the hours spent writing and publishing posts are hours spent with the joy of purpose.

When you follow your happiness, the work is almost effortless. Frustrating sometimes, yes. Tiring? Many times. Challenging? You bet.  It is only when the heart goes out of the process and the force of will must stand alone that projects begin to feel laborious. So when people say ‘where do you find the energy for all that’, I will just reply: I hold it in my heart. While my house shows the sure signs of neglect all around me.

Time to summon up the force of will and do something about it.

For better or for worse, in work and in play, on the water or on land.