Living aboard and cruising is NOT what would would consider to be a focused, driven and goal oriented lifestyle. Maybe it is for some – I’m sure there are people out there with checklists of what islands they want to visit and what they want to do when they get there.
Not us. This morning’s discussion revolved around whether we wanted to clear out of St. Vincent and the Grenadines and make the four mile sail over to Carriacou and enter Grenada. The key points of the discussion were 1) the predicted 30 knot squalls, 2) the predicted 8-10 foot waves, and 3) how OK we are anchored here in Union Island and what we could do if we stayed. True, it would take less than an hour to get to Carriacou so even if it was horribly snotty weather it wouldn’t last that long. But why bother? We’ve got food, water, power and there is a cool looking bar on a tiny island about 200 yards from where we are anchored.
It turned out to be a good call; the sun was shining when this discussion happened and now it is overcast, windy and raining. But this is how life tends to run – day to day, with an overall sort of general fuzzy goal (get to Grenada some time in June) but quite without specific plans.
So how do we know how far we’ve come? Some people measure how many miles they’ve cruised, or where they’ve gone. Other benchmarks and milestones may be more fuzzy.
Mileage
According to the logbooks kept by my electronic charting software, since leaving Rhode Island last July we’ve sailed 3,702.1 nautical miles (remember – those are bigger, so that is 4,459 “statute” or highway miles). I’ve always wondered how the claims of “last year we put 10,000 miles under our boat” came from. Did people measure point to point? Did they calculate mileage totals every day and write them in their log books then add them all up? We’re way too lazy and disorganized to do that. Fortunately Maxsea, our PC navigation software, will log all of our movements as long as it is up and running – it usually is. So with the exception of a few short moves where we didn’t bother to fire up the ship’s PC it has tracked us everywhere.
Of course it tracks ALL the movement, precisely. Sailing rarely takes you in a straight line. In our case if we were to measure the distance from St. Kitts to Antigua by a straight line course we might come up with a number like 49 miles from one anchorage to another. But that was a LONG upwind sail, we were zig-zagging all over the place to sail upwind so when you add up the log entries for that trip you realize we actually sailed more like 66 miles that day, not 49.
I like our way though – it is easy, low maintenance, accurate and properly inflates our numbers. We passed 1,000 miles before we even left the U.S., I suppose 5,000 miles might be a next nice milestone. If we notice.
Maple Syrup
Back in St. Martin we met another cruising family, when talking about breakfast it came out that we had syrup with our waffles that morning. “You guys really haven’t been out here that long, if you still have syrup left!” exclaimed the other mom.
True, we stocked up on pure, real maple syrup before we left. We rightly figured it would be expensive beyond all reason down here. Apparently we were not the only ones to reach this conclusion – newbie cruisers are syrup hoarders! We left with four or five one quart bottles on board. Expensive enough in the states, it truly is obscene down here. You can find it but you won’t be able to afford any other food to put it on if you buy it.
Evenstar finished our last bottle of Real Maple Syrup about a week ago. In some ways watching the kids try to nurse the last bit of syrup out of the very last bottle made me feel a lot farther from our old home and life than a lot of things we’ve experienced so far.
Captain’s Note: Disturbingly, Pure Cane Syrup was found to be an acceptable waffle/pancake alternative to Maple Syrup in a pinch. Cane Syrup is a key ingredient in Ti’Punch, an important part of the evening cocktail hour ritual. We will need to monitor supplies. It takes more syrup to cover a waffle than it does to make a drunk drink.
Places & Passages
Getting to Maine, the Chesapeake, the British Virgin Islands, St. Martin – those felt sort of milestone-ish. They feel that way because they generally involved a long sail, a passage of more than a few hours to some place you couldn’t see and over night travel. Sailing from Mayreau to Union Island in the Grenadines? Not so much…I’m still using the Wifi signal from Mayreau here on Union Island. I can see it from here.
Our next major passages will be the crossing to Panama. It’s about 1,100 miles from where we are sitting now. We’re hoping to do it in stages, breaking the trip up in to less unpleasant chunks with stops in some pleasant places along the way. I haven’t felt like we’ve made a ‘destination’ milestone in a while, through Grenada and/or Trinidad may kick off that feeling.
Anniversaries
Definitely the easiest to track, though if you have a marginal memory for these sorts of things it can be a struggle. Thanks to the help if things like computers, the internet, and Facebook though we can go back and look things up to help remember when exactly they happened if it wasn’t a nice round date like the start of end of a month.
We’ve passed one important Anniversary so far (beyond our 20th wedding that is!) on this journey. One May 31, 2012 Kathy finished her job and walked away from practicing medicine. This was pretty huge, it’s been such a defining part of our lives that the change was profound. For the entirety of our married lives – with the exception of vacations – we rarely went a whole week without spending a couple of nights apart. I compare this to my parents who have been married for fifty years and complain they don’t sleep well if they’re apart for more than two days. It is a big change to a little thing a lot of people don’t even think about unless you’ve got a spouse that travels or stays up all night taking care of other people. It also means that we’ve all been together for dinner every night, and every night she gets to say goodnight to the kids in person instead of sometimes on the phone and join them for breakfast. Little thing, huge change.
Certainly she misses aspects of practicing medicine – special patients she had long relationships with, friends among the other doctors, nurses and staff and the job satisfaction. Her practice was something she worked hard to make succeed, now life goals change a bit.
We set sail from Rhode Island on July 22, 2012. Still about five weeks until we reach that one! It might merit some special attention.
Log Books
Captains are supposed to maintain logs for their vessels – where you go and what you come across, as well as maintenance performed, fuel consumption and the like. We ceremoniously started a brand new log book on July 22nd when we left last year. For years we’ve preferred the Evergreen Pacific Log Book, also known as the “Walker Common Sense Edition”. It has good organization for maintenance and fuel records and a Daily Cruising Log page that is quite well laid out for everything but long, multi-day passages.
We have four pages left in the “Cruising Log” section, then the book is full. Four more days of traveling. Past log books, using the same format, took us a few years to fill. Each weekend trip would use two pages (there and back again), a week or two of vacation might use 6-8 pages depending on how many stops we made. This one is done after eleven months.
This is a nice log book format, I’m concerned that I won’t be able to find one down here and I need to find one fast! I may bring a few back with me from the states when we visit over the holidays if I can’t find a new log I like in Grenada.
Well that’s enough waxing philosophical for today; it’s not my strength. To date it’s been a great experience and well worth it, and you can’t really measure and quantify that.
