Sailing Korvessa

Is there a condition in which you suddenly convert everything happening in your life to metaphors? I seem to be doing this, and against my better judgment, I’d like to share two of them. Perhaps it is because I haven’t put pen to paper in 6 weeks and my brain is purging its (not necessarily good) creative juices. But I find these are apt metaphors for what life feels like right now.

My most recent metaphor came to me during a morning swim workout, during which our coach had us doing broken 200’s at race pace. For you non-swimmers out there, this means: sprint your fastest for 75 meters; grab oxygen for 10 seconds and think about how great this set is for helping you reach your goal; sprint your fastest again for 75 meters; grab oxygen, pant, and curse your coach for 10 seconds; sprint your fastest again for 25 meters, feeling the burn spread like lava into your legs and lungs; grab what little oxygen you can, wonder why on earth you got up at 5:15 a.m. for this, why on earth anyone would swim anything longer than a 100, and, while you’re at it, why on earth you started swimming in the first place; sprint your last 25 meters; grab oxygen, pant, get really excited when you find out you actually hit your race time, and know definitively – once the oxygen returns to your brain – that this set will help you reach your goal. Repeat. With more pain each time.

Our lives right now are currently at the “wondering why on earth” phase.  We feel like we are in a constant sprint that allows us short gasps for air before we have to put our heads down again and do yet another sprint, and another, and another. We’re tired. We hurt. Our house, cars, and minds are complete mess.

I haven’t written in a while. Perhaps it is because I have had my head down trying to get to each wall, perhaps because I’ve been a little depressed and struggling to manage the transition away from work into an unknown future, perhaps it is simply because I haven’t had the time to let enough oxygen get to my brain before the next sprint. But in this brief moment of oxygen, I’d like to share where we are on this journey. We have ticked a lot off the (capitalized) Multi-Tab Google Sheets To-Do list:

• We have new sails and running rigging from UK Sails and Black Line Marine in Sidney, BC (pictures to follow later); we’ve installed a chart plotter, AIS transponder and receiver, and new anchor roller; we have (but have not yet installed) a Hydrovane, SSB radio, VHF radio, line cutters for the prop, and material for new curtains. We also have our first offshore insurance quote and an out of water survey scheduled. Next up: buying and installing a functioning anchor windlass and new chain. Hooray for not spending 4 years at anchor on rope! The Fortress anchor has served us well, but it’s better as a secondary anchor, and we’re looking forward to being back on chain and our 85-pound Mantus anchor.
• We have researched and bought our curriculum and have begun organizing the books and crafts we’ll have aboard.
• We have our new passports, as well as all necessary doctor’s and vet’s appointments scheduled.
• We designed and ordered our boat cards and have researched and purchased (but not yet had time to test) new toys that we will we use for videos and vlogging. We even created our first test video so I could play with fun editing features. Next up: stay tuned for a video post in a few weeks!
• With the help of parents, friends, and contractors, we painted the inside of our house, made it look pretty, painted the outside, cleaned the roof, cleaned up the yard (okay, gutted all the weeds and overgrowth), signed a contract with a real estate agent, and are ready to put the house on the market tomorrow.

All the while, we have also been working full time, dealing with the emotional upheaval of leaving jobs, attending swim meets, and making time for important events, like friends’ bar mitvahs, baby showers, birthday parties, and just simple time with friends and family.  

Something had to give. We’re not super-people. Meal planning has gone the way of the dodo, cleaning is something I vaguely remember doing in a former life, caring about odd unknown smells no longer takes priority, sleep is even worse than it was before, and when we thought Dylan lost his second-favorite lovey “Friday Harbor,” what gave was my sanity. I felt like I was about to collapse emotionally. And that’s when the other metaphor struck me: both our boat and our lives are boatyard mode: torn apart, pieces everywhere, so many things in the process of being fixed, planned, dealt with, or thrown away. But this is why you do repairs in a boatyard, on solid ground, so that when a wave or an unexpected gust of wind hits you, all those torn apart pieces don’t go flying; maybe they just jiggle and shift a bit, but they stay in place.

 

 

Our minds are in boatyard mode, too. Everything feels torn apart; some of it is in the process of being fixed, some of it is being planned, some of it is being dealt with, and some of it will be given up or thrown away.  And when your life is a complete chaos like that, it helps to find your stability on dry land, so that when that big wave or wind gust hits you, things may jiggle a bit, but they don’t topple you and everything aboard. When I lost it over missing Friday Harbor, my friends and community helped me find perspective, support, sympathy, and my dry, stable land.  I also realized that – despite the havoc that our lives are now and have been over the past few years – that our family is on solid ground, that we have a foundation to keep us stable when the waves and wind hit. And part of the joy of this trip is exploring how to strengthen the set of that foundation even more and have our kids add to the strength rather than weaken it. I recognize that I could take the metaphor further: that when we find a place for everything and aren’t in chaos mode, that it’s time to find the strength not in our foundation, but in our hull, challenge the dips and swells of life, and figure out how our little boat can ride with them.

In this time of questions and “why on earth!” musings of why we decided to do this, there has been some children’s poetry to remind us.  Dylan’s teacher told me that he is talking about how he is “going to explore the world,” and it made my heart happy to imagine him with wide eyes and an open mind asking questions about forest mushrooms, new languages, kangaroo pouches, and why starfish don’t have eyes. And when the kids were asking questions about their great-grandma the other night, Andy said:  

GG’s body is in the ocean.
We’re going to sail on the ocean.
We’re going to sail on top of GG!
Maybe we’ll hear the water talk.

This is why we’re going. Because when you have a dream, you put your head down, push for the wall, and remember – even when you’re short on oxygen or when you need to find your personal stability when you feel the waves and wind coming –  that you’re going to explore the world and listen to the water talk.

 

Boat shows are a sailor’s candy store. Chrome gadgets sparkle. Boats loom large. Wise seminar speakers beckon. You can’t help but dream about a future on the water, whether an afternoon escape to an island or a long blue water voyage. I imagine most people must have some equivalent – the thrill of walking into a bookstore, an REI, a college campus, a kitchen store, or a travel agent. Just name your passion!  You drool over the sweet smell of possibility.

I’ve wandered the Seattle Boat Show before, perusing accessories whose purpose I didn’t understand, buying one or two books to feed my imagination, attending seminars that might be interesting. Sometimes feeling like an impostor because I was a neophyte surrounded by too much technology and expertise, but always feeling the desire to set sail.

This year felt different. Better. We went down to Seattle with a purpose – and armed with a credit card and a strict budget. We had a lot of shopping to do and specific knowledge to gain. We manipulated, learned how to work, and bought the Hydrovane that will be our self-steering and emergency rudder. I got to see and move the new anchor windlass we will install soon. We visited at least ten booths looking for an affordable watermaker (which we found!). We packed our cart with charts and cruising guides of the coastlines we will sail. We bought only what we needed, and we kept our spending to the budget we had planned – but it was still difficult watching each of those BOAT Bucks fly away (BOAT = Bring Out Another Thousand). But these are all pieces of safety equipment.; they will contribute to keeping us safe and alive. And that is worth is the expenditure.

We had skills to gain, too. I learned tips on how to cruise without refrigeration, even in hot Mexican waters. I took copious notes at a seminar with writers and editors on how to write and publish your travels, finding inspiration in their advice and guidance. Tom and I listened to Nancy Erley tell the story of her Red Sea passage on one of her circumnavigations, plus countless other stories from her trips, and felt our excitement rise as we chatted about our plans with acquaintances who have done this before us. We found inspiration in the company of friends and strangers passionate and curious about the same things we are and encouragement oozing out of every booth and PowerPoint.

This inspiration was a needed lift. Though our departure date is set, our daily lives haven’t changed much yet. We are both working a lot, getting home too late, getting the kids to bed too late, barely (or not) managing to keep the house out of disaster mode. And we all got sick again this weekend, for the umpteenth time this winter.  In the midst of all of this, the visit to our candy store was essential. To remember our love of being on the water. To focus on the future for a few hours. And, above all, to revisit – on a dark and rainy midwinter day – that sweet smell of excitement and possibility.

“I’m a minimalist hoarder,” my husband said sheepishly to me as I stood staring at boxes full of old boat stuff. And climbing stuff. And brewing stuff. And backpacking stuff.  But I can’t be one to judge. If he is a minimalist hoarder, then I am a sentimental collector. Boxes of books and small knick knacks from travels around the world still sit in our garage and shed. German novels from college, orange Swedish candlesticks, a silk doily from China, a painted rock from my best friend in high school, an award from a middle school essay contest. This does not even include the hundreds of books and pieces of art that made the cut to get out of boxes to adorn our shelves and walls. These boxes tell the story of our lives – as do our shelves and walls. So many parts of our lives went dormant when we had kids; perhaps the boxes hold the seed of hope that we may someday rekindle or revisit those things, or perhaps they just allow us to remember who we are even when our middle-aged lives look so different.

Still in the overwhelm phase of trying to pare down a full house, garage, and shed into a live-aboard existence on a 40 foot boat again, I can’t help but question what of all of this should stay and go.  I find, however, when I allow myself enough time to pause and think, that it is not the boxes full of books, knick knacks, and old hobby equipment that bothers me so much.  It is the boxes of toys only played with a few times, stunning amounts of kids’ equipment, bags and bags full of child and adult clothing to donate, and containers full of mismatched Tupperware tops and coffee mugs that make me question the nature of Stuff in our lives. As I try to strategize how to get rid of things, I wonder why I bought it or needed it in the first place. I remember.  Sanity. The plastic baby fence, the swing, the toddler potty that was never used but that we bought because we thought it might inspire potty training (wishful thinking), the toy that I thought might buy me five more minutes to make dinner in peace (also wishful thinking), the portable coffee mug (because there was never enough coffee or mugs).

Why have we acquired so much Stuff? And yet why is it so hard to get rid of? We are products of more generations than just our own. We are products of our grandparents’ generation, who lived through the great depression, were extremely frugal, and saved everything because it might be useful.  We are products of our parents’ generation when advertising was deregulated and Stuff became desired, cheap, and available in a world economy that continued to improve. We are products of our own generation – Generation X – when globalization came full force and over-consumption went from a status symbol to the social norm. We acquired Stuff out of social habit that convenience and speed directed and out of the desperation that a two-income household with two small children dictated. But we can’t throw our Stuff away because we feel guilty for throwing it away, because it wasn’t used to its full extent, or because it might still find a use.

How do we now take a cue from the next generation – the Millennial generation – who are building tiny houses, living within their means, and building sustainability into our everyday vocabulary? How do we take a cue from our children, who (though they may not admit it) are more content to build sandcastles on the beach than they are to play with the toy-chests full toys at home? “Mommy, I only want one present for Christmas,” Dylan announced to me when he was three. At five, he was already writing a long list to Santa of everything he wanted.

My goal is to find the happy medium. The minimalist hoarder and sentimental collector, who keep and acquire the things necessary to keep their histories and memories alive, because, they are, after all, our form of autobiography. But also the sustainable family that makes an effort to avoid new stuff that isn’t necessary,  that minimizes consumption in order to reduce our footprint, and that recognizes that what we need more than anything is each other. And maybe a few books. And art. And camping equipment.

We set our departure date as May 14, 2018. In the midst of planning for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and a New Year’s trip to Colorado – not to mention dealing with the emotional roller coasters of giving notice at work and accepting the massive change in front of us – we hardly had time to make a dent on the endless to-do list. But four months one week out from departure, it is time to start working.