I have just gone through my closet. Again. This marks… lessee… every three months, we’ve lived aboard four years, um, and then there was the big purge before we moved aboard in the first place…
Sailing to me means getting rid of the sheer amount of stuff that landlubbers take for granted.
We’re getting ready to move. No big deal, it’s just a quick sail 500 or so miles south to a new marina. Not even really all that intrepid. We’ve been, therefore, prepping for two months. Rebuilding both engines. Redoing the dodgier of the electrical issues lurking in the depths. Redoing the berths so the boys can move into the bigger room. Figuring out what the dosage of meclizine is for a child under 12. Making sure we have enough M&Ms stored away to handle the number of watch rotations we have to make to get downcoast while simultaneously not dropping the waterline significantly.
Sailing means massive infrastructure overhaul. All the time.
We won the Dyneema Experience contest a while back, thanks to all of you, my dear readers, and Jason and I spent days, and days, and days, discussing the fine points of line. I sat, sort of in awe, as my man trotted out everything he’s been learning as a full time rigger at West Marine, about why we’d want one kind of rope instead of another. The amount of information about what’s hip in high-tech line he’s soaked up in the last few months is almost encyclopedic, and by the time we’d figured out what we wanted, he and I both had a better understanding not only of what we have in terms of rigging on this boat, but in terms of our expectations for how we want to be sailing in the future.
Sailing means meeting your spouse, again and again, and being eternally inspired by what they bring to the table.
My kids are 9, 6, and 3 (almost… all of their birthdays land within a month of our arrival at our new marina. It’s what we refer to as “the birthday season”). They’ve never done an ocean passage before. Our jaunts around the Bay indicate that they have their mother’s resistance to mal de mer. So that’s one less thing to freak out about. But they also have the attention spans of, well, 9, 6, and 3-year old kids. So it’s not just “read a book, kid”, it’s figuring out how to keep them entertained for the duration. I actually stockpiled three spare sets of mancala pieces, to account for pieces skittering across the salon sole and vanishing into the bilge.
Sailing means figuring out how to make the boat interesting from their viewpoint, not necessarily mine. And also how to retrieve teeny game pieces from the bilge before things get dire.
I’ve begun to dream of the sea, like I do before any sail longer than a day trip. Last night, it was dolphins at the hull, sun on the water, the kids and I on the foredeck. It was that perfect moment, where they get why we live on a boat, why we’re not like other families. Where they feel the joy I feel when the wind hits the sweet spot in the sails and the boat leaps up and surges forward, a living thing. When they see the stars twinkling their reflections on the waves, and realize that they are precisely where they belong, and that all is right with the world.
Sailing means sharing a bigger world with those who are going to inherit it.
