Three Years Out

Evenstar leaving Greenwich Bay for the last time. Thanks Betsy Rafferty for the picture!

No matter which side of the dateline you are on now its been three years since we slipped the lines and went cruising.  The date was Sunday, July 22nd, 2012 that we actually cast off the lines from Brewer’s marina in Greenwich Bay and didn’t look back.

When we left our plans were “cross the Pacific and get to New Zealand and maybe Australia before Will goes off to college.”

Dune surfing with family in New Zealand

Well its three years later we’ve been to New Zealand though we haven’t made it to Australia, we are now bracing ourselves to send Will off to college.

More friends along the way

For three years we’ve seen and done some amazing things.  Swimming with sharks, sailing with whales, swimming with dolphins, climbing volcanoes, touring swamps, attending carnivales and new celebrations like Divali, tasting countless new types of foods, meeting so many new people, seeing rare and endangered animals, having visits from family and friends, shopping in open air food markets, touring LOTR movie sites, surfing down sand dunes, camping, home schooling, snorkeling, learning new drinks, dancing with the locals, buying food from the fields at an organic farm, missing our families, catching large fish, traversing the Panama Canal, hiking in jungles – the list goes on and on.

New friends in St. Lucia after a day of sailing.

Cycling in the Galapagos

It has been a fantastic experience and we have no regrets, though we can say with certainty there are a LOT of places we could have spent a LOT more time.  From the Maine to the Caribbean to Central America and the South Pacific I can count on one hand the number of places we were happy to move on from – and even some of those were because we were there so long that we wanted to see something else.  Even the long stay places we would love to go back to  – like St. Martin (six weeks there), Panama (four months), and French Polynesia (six months).  And the

Dinner in St. Martin with my parents.

places we missed – we only caught part of the Caribbean and didn’t make it to Costa Rica just to name a couple.  There is still so much of the world to see.

Has it all been drinking rum drinks under a palm tree on a beach and listening to ukeleles?  No, of course not.

We’ve had our fair share of challenges, difficulties and hard work.  It is a very common misconception that we are on a permanent “Holiday”, that this is one long vacation and we play all day, every day.  Nothing could be further from the truth, as the day-to-day parts of living still need to be done.  You are just doing them someplace different, which is wonderful in some ways but provides its own challenges in other ways.

And sometimes the work is more than we can do.

Certainly things like fixing the boat – a never ending to-do list – are much, much easier in the U.S., where West Marine is ten minutes way, Defender will get you what you need for a reasonable price the next day and if you have really painted yourself in a corner you can find a skilled professional to try and bail you out.  On a remote atoll in the South Pacific, in Panama, or on a Caribbean island you don’t have quite the same resources at your fingertips and what you can get costs you a lot more.  If it breaks you have to fix it or find a way around it, somehow.

Camping in the Puketi Forest, NZ

Routine tasks that those living in a house take for granted can become big deals on the boat.  When you turn on the tap water comes out, when you turn on a light there is power – we have to make our own water and electricity; it is not hard, but it is another checklist item on the “To Do” list.  To do a load of laundry you can just go to the basement and toss it in the washer and resume your day; it isn’t a full day commitment that requires enough change to pull your pants off your hips.  Grocery shopping from your house is generally a short task where you can actually find everything on your list while engaging only one form of land transportation; shopping for us usually involves a full day commitment with buses, walking, taxis and visits to multiple stores and markets.

Don’t even get me started on school!  That is our largest time consumer, and the number one reason for some of the things we’ve missed.

Getting our Panama hats in Panama City.

Is it a whine?  No – it is an observation, life goes on.  Its not all palm trees and blender drinks, but we do get to see and do a lot more than anyone locked into the land bound 9 to 5 lifestyle.  We spend a lot more time doing basic things like laundry and shopping than the land bound do, but we also have more leisure time.  And a LOT fewer bills, without a house and cars with all that insurance, jobs to dress for, and all the other obligations that come with a normal lifestyle.

Danielle and Kathy dressed for a birthday dinner on shore in Grenada.

What would we do differently?  The biggest thing would be to have done it sooner.  Three years with Will wasn’t enough time, though we still have Danielle for a few more years  there is a lot that he will miss out on.  We waited for a more opportune financial moment, then we realized it was now or never to do it with the kids and had to pull the trigger.  Timing-wise we could have put our house up for sale earlier and got the whole process moving when the kids were younger and more likely to be out here with kids their own age.  Though at the time it seemed risky, and mentally we still weren’t ready to commit that firmly at that point in our lives.

Divali in Trinidad.

There are a few places we’d do differently too.  For example we really missed the Caribbean coast of Panama, it is supposed to be lovely and we didn’t even realize it until we got there.  We loved that side of Panama, but we made a plan to cross through the Canal then go to the U.S. on a certain time frame.  In hindsight it wouldn’t have cost much more to leave the boat on the North side of the canal and cruise there before heading to Panama city.  Just one example of how with some hindsight we can see how we would have handled things differently.  We would have spent less time in Grenada and more in Trinidad too, but we can’t know things like how much more we liked Trinidad that we expected to until we got there.

But it has been a fantastic three years and we look forward to keeping on sailing, though we will miss our best crew member when he heads off to the U.K.

Will at the Northern tip of New Zealand. Quite a ways to the U.K. from here.

So where do we go from here?  That is the subject of another post, but here are a few more pictures from the last three years.

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