I struggled with the letter P. I wanted to make this something fun like P is for Porpoises, or P is for Parrotfish, but clearly I’m not the least big scared of those two things and really hope I see a lot of them. I am, unfortunately, worried about feeling like I’ve been sent to the ‘poorhouse’.  People who are ‘out there’ cruising on their boats say that it’s all worth it, and that they love living on less money and living a simpler lifestyle. I truly hope they are right and that I love it, too, because we are taking a serious decrease in income in order to make this happen.  I’m also giving up a career that will be difficult to return to in the same way if I ever need to start practicing again.

P is also for our dinghy, Puddler, which Mike is selling since we can’t take her with us. She’s a great dinghy.

Even though we feel pretty old, and are anxious to get going before true old age hits us, Mike and I are actually young to be ‘retiring’. We are not independently wealthy.  It’s probable that this will not be a permanent retirement, but only a hiatus from the daily grind and level of responsibilities that make us both just, well, tired. As the day when we stop bringing money in through work gets closer and closer I think more and more about how we’re going to be living on less than 1/4 of what we live on now. I try to imagine it, but when I do, my imagination gets the better of me. Will I never go to Starbucks again? Will I forgo Costco? Perhaps this is what is currently being referred to as a ‘First world Problem’, but I don’t care. We have worked very hard to be where we are in life financially. It’s something I continually have to talk myself off the ledge about. “It’ll be okay. It’ll be okay. Stop worrying. It’ll be okay.”

Not high, but definitely something I can waste a lot of energy thinking about.

If we were in our ’30’s, or even our ’40’s, it would be easier to wrap my head around taking a few years off from a career. We would still have many years of earning potential left and still be young when we returned. At this point, however, I worry that coming back to work might be hard for us in terms of finding jobs, mostly due to ageism in the workplace. Mike feels confident that he can get a good job, and he does have excellent skills as a programmer/developer, as well as good job contacts.

But I have absolutely no idea at all what kind of employer would look at hiring me, someone who has been in private practice for most of her career. What do you do next when you’ve had a career as a psychotherapist? Do any of those skills even transfer to anything else? It takes a long time to build a practice. I have given up all my insurance contracts, something that fills me with an odd combination of joy and dread. (No, I would not be able to get those back. The networks are all closed.) Will I even want to continue to practice if and when we come home? And if not, then how will I make money? I’ve worked since I was 16. I don’t yet know how to not make money. It makes me feel ‘poor’ to even think about it. And yet…the freedom…

In terms of what keeps people our age at the dock until they are too old to go, I’m betting this is the number one fear. It would be so easy to convince myself that if we just stayed put another couple of years, we’d be financially so much better off. But of course, we could also be dead. There’s that. And I’m pretty sure Mike would die of pure misery.

Cost to have this view? Nothing. Worth? Priceless.

Perhaps this anxiety is more about my own identity in the world than it is about being in the ‘poorhouse’. Actually, as I write this I get a little excited to see what’s next. There is a very fine line between anxiety and excitement. And sometimes where you are on that line is dependent on how you look at things. That’s where psychotherapy can really help. It teaches you to look at things from another perspective.  If I focus on the money, I’m going to be very anxious. But when I focus on the freedom, that’s where the joy is.

What’s the next thing I will do, that I can’t do as long as I continue the job I have? Looking at it that way, being “poor” might be just the right thing.

Just joined us for the A to Z challenge? Want to know more than you ever thought you wanted to know about Anxiety? Start with the letter A, here.

One of the first rules of sailing is to ‘stay on the boat’. There’s a good reason for this. Should one of us fall off while underway at sea our chances of being able to get back on depend on many things, including weather and sea state, and whether it’s daylight, the water temperature, whether the person in the water is conscious or injured…all those things and more come into play. We have a Life Sling on board and sure, we’ll practice with it.  But what are the odds we’d have to use it under the circumstances that we’d be practicing in? Not very good, frankly. When I think of one of us actually falling off the boat, I feel like this:

The best we can do is to mitigate the circumstances under which we could or would fall off the boat. So we have safety equipment, and we have protocols.  Knowing that we’ll be using logical brains to create rules for safety, and that we’ll have the right gear, means that I can sleep at night and not worry too much about this. Isn’t it odd the things our brains choose to be freaked out about? This one doesn’t freak me out much because in spite of the fact that I would be freaked if it DID happen, I don’t think it’s GOING to happen.  So really, when I think about the chances of one of us actually falling overboard in the middle of the ocean, I feel more like this:

Maybe I’m in denial. That’s a good defense mechanism to have when it comes to leaving your home on a daily basis. I mean, if you think too hard about how dangerous a place the world can be, then just getting out of your bed becomes an exersize in throwing caution to the winds. Perhaps I’ve fallen under the spell of denial and it’s keeping me from perseverating on whether either of us would fall overboard.  On the other hand, we do have a few things going for us on this matter.

We have a big, well designed boat. We have high lifelines, which we will not be depending upon to keep us on the boat, but which help. How does having a big boat help? Well there has to be a good deal of wind to get our boat to heel over very far, and she can take bigger waves than our Cal 34 could. When she is heeled over, we stay on the high side if we have to move about the deck. We have high freeboard, which is both a blessing and a curse, so waves have to be pretty big to wash over our deck. Our cockpit is super protected. It would be really hard to fall overboard from our cockpit. And if you did manage it, I guarantee that being overboard would probably not be the only problem you were having.

Furthermore, there are lots of handholds and we are very good about keeping at least one hand on the boat. After all, we learned to sail on a Catalina 27, then graduated to a Cal 34. Both of those boats were much more tender than our 47 foot Galapagos. We developed the habit of holding on tight from the get go and don’t take that for granted. Neither of us is too proud to crawl on hands and knees to get forward if conditions require it. And we have mast pulpits. Actually those sturdy mast pulpits are a very attractive feature of our boat. We also have high bulwarks, which give us something else to brace against when sitting down on the deck.

Our center cockpit is down low in the boat, allowing you to hunker down and be protected.

When we are on a passage, we will have harnesses and jacklines and be attached to the boat in the cockpit. The lines will not be long enough to allow a body to fall overboard. We’ve all seen those videos where people use their harnesses and the lines are actually pretty long and they go overboard and then get dragged under the water. No thanks. I prefer to stay on the boat no matter what, so ours will be too short to allow us to go over. We’re just going to have to make the rule, which we had on Moonrise when doing that overnight passage across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, that when conditions are rough you cannot leave the cockpit without your harness and line on at all times, day or night, when on watch alone or not. And no one leaves the cockpit at night at all without alerting the partner, regardless of whose watch it is.

The most dangerous thing is not being in high wind/waves at sea. Everyone is on high alert then and thinks about things like falling off the boat. The most dangerous thing is complacency. It’s when things seem safe and calm that people let their guards down. This causes behaviors like forgetting to put the PFD on when it’s a calm day, walking forward without paying much attention because the scenery is so nice, and in the case of men, peeing overboard. Ladies, don’t laugh too hard at the  men. Women have been known to fall overboard this way as well, although on our boat this would be a mighty uncomfortable position.  Just use your head and use your head.

A sobering statistic from the US Coastguard tells us how easy it is for people to become complacent, fall overboard, and then drown. This, from their 2014 statistics:

Where cause of death was known, 78% of fatal boating accident victims drowned. Of those drowning victims with reported life jacket usage, 84% were not wearing a life jacket.

The mast pulpit, seen on the right of the photo, is completely sturdy and makes a huge difference to security at the mast. The high bulwarks give us something to brace feet against when sitting on deck and keep things from going overboard.

At the end of the day, these rules are only as good as the people who go by them. We will have to both agree that we will follow them all the time. Not just some of the time, but always. We’ve been discussing this lately and so far, we both agree to all of this. This summer we will be putting attachment points for tethers in the cockpit and deciding how to deploy our jacklines. If you’ve done this on your boat and want to give us your opinion of what would work for ours, please let us know or come by the boat.

What are the rules and equipment you have on your boat that help you stay on board? Got a confortable offshore PFD that you don’t mind wearing all the time? Let us know what you have. They are on our to-buy list for this year.

Just joined us for the A to Z Challenge? Want to read from the beginning?

I have a love/hate relationship with night sailing. When the moon is full and there aren’t many clouds, it’s simply lovely. But when I can’t see anything, I get very nervous about it. I guess that’s pretty normal. Maybe everyone feels a little anxious about sailing at night. We’ve done a few overnight passages and for the most part, they’ve been fine, even enjoyable.

This is what we were doing before that night sail.

On the way home from Barkley Sound this summer, we did an overnight passage as there isn’t really any good place to stop between Barkley Sound and Neah Bay. We didn’t want to cross into the U.S. and were heading toward the Gulf Islands for a few days. So we decided to just go for it and sail all night. It wasn’t our first overnight passage and it’s a good thing because it was really dark out there. The cloud cover made me very glad to have working radar on Galapagos.

Our first overnight was aboard our Cal 34, Moonrise, and our son Andrew was also aboard. We were, as usual on the last day of a summer cruise, at the south end of San Juan Island just as the sun was going down. I believe we’d spent too much time whale watching, not really being ready to go home. (That always seems to happen to us on our cruises in the summer. We seem to wait until the very last minute to leave the islands.)

Andrew at the helm. Don’t you love the flying laundry on the back stay, and the scrub brush and bucket? Oh, those were the days! Circa 2009

If you aren’t familiar with our waters, the south end of San Juan Island has no protected anchorages of any kind. The western shore is hundreds of feet deep, right up to the rocks. The southern shore, while anchoring depth, is completely exposed to the strait with its high winds and swells. We had the choice of going around Cattle Point at a bad time with wind and tide (no thanks) or crossing at night. We decided to go for it.

It was a great crossing! We had about 20 knots of wind on the beam, really big swells on the aft starboard quarter, and we were screaming along with a double-reefed main and a shortened headsail  surfing down the face of the waves. It was actually pretty sweet, even though hand steering was required the entire time. It was intense.  Moonrise was in her element and, frankly, so were we.

To prepare for that crossing, even as relative newbies, we knew we had to have a protocol and rules and that everyone had to follow them. As the mom, who is equal to the captain when it comes to safety when a kid is on board, my rule was two people in the cockpit, jacklines and harnesses deployed at all times. No one leaves the cockpit. We agreed to two hour watches. Everyone did their jobs and we just had a ripping time.

A man happy with his adventure.

You knew, of course, that something would probably go wrong. And of course it did, and of course it was the engine. We were almost across and turned on the engine to help push us through the wicked current around Pt. Wilson so we could have a straight shot into the anchorage. Our plan was to get through the current, drop the sails after we rounded the point, and anchor for the night. We were hoping the wind, which was coming in from the Pacific Ocean, would die down as we rounded the point.

Halfway through the current the engine made a loud grinding noise, and died. It would not start up again. Let me tell you, when it’s night, and the wind is up and you are close to the coast, that’s not the time you want to troubleshoot the engine.

Taking stock of the situation, we agreed we’d just sail into the anchorage, one person would drop the hook, and another would backwind the sail to set the anchor.  We were wrong about the wind. It was actually worse as we rounded the point. But regardless, we put away the headsail and sailed in with the wind behind us, one person on the bow keeping a lookout for boats at anchor without anchor lights. There are always people who fail to put up anchor lights and there is a special place in boater’s heck for them.

Here’s Ruffles (Thanks, alert reader Dave Calhoun). I believe this male orca is no longer with us. We are so glad we got to see him.

We got lucky, avoided the dark boats, dropped the hook and set it and all fell into our bunks for a long sleep. The next morning, that engine started like it had never seen any problems at all. We still don’t know why it failed. That mystery remains unsolved.

I hope all of our night sails go as well as the ones we’ve had so far. Really, sailing at night is just lovely. My biggest anxiety is not being able to see other boats, like fishing boats, especially once we head south.

Got any suggestions for making night sailing safer?

This post is part of the A to Z Challange. To read from the beginning, go here.