Beach Bummin'

St. Augustine Beach

Since we arrived in Florida two weeks ago we've tried to hug the coastline as closely as possible, driving on A1A down much of the East coast and stopping at any interesting beaches that caught our eye.  It's been a laid back time for sure, which would explain the absence of blog posts.

We visited family in Jacksonville, saw dolphins play in the surf off New Smyrna, saw some ginormous houses in West Palm, went to an awesome free concert on Miami's South Beach (Zac Brown Band & Nic Cowen), and finally made our way down to the Keys.

The Florida Keys were another of those places where we could really see ourselves hanging out for a while.  If not for the ordinance against overnight parking, and the impending Thanksgiving Day holiday, we probably would have stayed longer there.

It's a bit as if we had driven out of the US and gone right into the Caribbean.  The water alternates between shades of turquoise, green, and gin clear; there are coconuts to be found around the palm trees; roosters walk the streets of Key West; there are very few box stores; and almost everyone seems to have a boat of some type. 

We thoroughly enjoyed the laid back vibe we experienced in the Keys.  There was no traffic, so many sounds of the mainland that bother us were absent, and we have a new found appreciation for Key Lime Pie (Snapper's in Key Largo has some of the best we've tried). 

We also treated ourselves to a Hobie Cat rental on the beach and got in an hour or so of sailing.  The wind was piping along pretty good, I'd say 15 knots.  After a bit, I dropped Trish at the beach to warm up and went back out and I got to have a an inadvertent man overboard drill as the extra life jacket flew off after crashing through a largish (from a Hobie Cat perspective) wave.  My technique wasn't perfect, but I managed to snag the jacket back by my lonesome.

We also took the opportunity to try out Stand up Paddleboarding, or SUP, through SUP Key West.  Trisha was a natural, whilst I was the first in the water after falling off the board.  I only managed to fall in twice, and took the stance that if you haven't fallen off, you aren't really trying.  All in all it was a great experience.  We traveled across the flats and saw Pelicans dive bombing the water for their meals, went through mangrove tunnels, and saw Jimmy Buffet's old house on a canal (pretty small, but so are a lot of houses down there, another thing we like).  SUP is definitely a new water sport that we will have to try more of.

Now we are in the Tampa area on the West Coast, visiting with more family for the holiday, without a destination in mind for where to go next.  Time will tell...

Zac Brown Concert

Rose on South Beach

Oooh I wanna take ya

Not a bad campsite

Obligatory stop at Margaritaville

Do you think Manatees have statues of Humans to hold their mailboxes?

Only 90 miles to Cuba!

End of the road on the old bridge at Bahia Honda State Park

Key West Sunset from Mallory Square

Down to the Water

There's something about water.  Something that binds us together as humans, that seems to bring out the best in people.  There is an optimism, a free spirited, good time feeling around water.  Whether on a river, lake, stream, or ocean; water seems to have a good vibe.

It's the power boater who waves as they pass you by when you are becalmed in your dinghy.  It's the guy playing with his dog next to the boat launch who wades out to give you a push when you are starting to drift towards the rocks.  It's the members of a sailing club who have your trailer already in the water when you get back to the launch because you had to be towed in by the committee boat.  These are the same people who would cut you off and give you the finger on the interstate, but around water there is something different.

Water gives us recreation.  It gives us hope.  There is a reason that the Man and the Boy in Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road' are always heading towards the coast, away from the desolation of a post apocalyptic world.

Perhaps it is that we are mostly water?

There's a great story from Jimmy Buffet's autobiography, where he talks about his grandmother telling him to go down and wade into the salt water if he got a cut or had skinned his knee, and (paraphrasing here) "Later on down the road of life, I made the discovery that salt water was also good for the mental abrasions one inevitably acquires on land."

I owe a lot to water.  When I was five years old my parents moved from Long Island to the mountains of central NY to start a bottled water company.  In some ways water literally gave me life.

Yet water is not always kind, just ask the residents of the lower 9th ward.

But by and large, people want water in their lives. It gives us hope.

So here's to you water, thanks for everything.  I'm looking forward to a lot more good times.

Dead Blog?

 

I've read a few times that if you don't keep up a schedule of posting that you will lose interest in your blog and lose readership.  It makes sense.  The internet is a fickle place, with boundless amounts of information for every possible interest...

Well here it is almost a month since my last post!  In looking back at the blog over the past few months it seems that I was posting pretty regularly just before we listed our house for sale.  In those days I was full of optimism and really felt that we would have moved past this point in our lives by now (July).  Well we haven't, the house is still for sale, we have dropped the asking price by more than 17k and can't go much lower before selling it will eat into a significant chunk of our savings.

Everything else is on track though.  We have been saving money and paring down our possessions. 

We actually should be really content and happy with the life we have.  We have both received promotions at work in the last year, we have a nice house, and lots of other things going for us.  The problem is now that this dream of living simply on a sailboat has gotten into our heads, it just makes so much sense and we can't get it out again.

But I digress. 

The blog isn't dead, it is just that there hasn't been much "Changing Course" to talk about.  In keeping with the sailing analogies:  It seems the wind has been knocked out of my sails.

On the bright side, we are taking a three day live aboard sailing class this coming weekend on Lake Champlain.  I think a re-cap of the class will make for a good blog post.

Till then...

Doldrums

The "Doldrums" are an area around the equator in the intertropical convergence zone that are known to sailors for their light and variable wind patterns, often resulting in the boat having to motor through, or wait for a favorable wind shift.

While we are some 42 deg. North of the equator, that is what it has felt like around here lately.  We haven't made any forward progress on the sale of the house, and while we have looked at some boats we haven't found any particular one of interest.

So here we sit, seemingly adrift and waiting for a favorable shift in the wind...

What do you do to keep your spirits up when you get stuck in the Doldrums?

The Search Continues

It was a little depressing to find what we though was "the boat" and then to have to let it go once the survey turned up some issues.  But, just like riding a bike, if you take a spill the best thing is to get back on and keep riding (barring serious personal injury of course).

So last weekend we visited Newport, RI, and Salem, MA, to look at some more boats.  In all we managed to look at four boats on Saturday, they were, in order of viewing:

Southern Cross 31
Pearson Vanguard 32
Bristol 29.9
Ericson 28

We really liked the SC 31 and Bristol 29.9.  The Vanguard, while a beautiful boat, was just not set up in a manner that would allow us to live aboard, and the Ericson was a mid-1980s model with a pleather cabin top.  Not happening!

It was good to see that many boats in one day and we are learning a lot about ourselves and what we are looking for in a boat.  We tend toward the traditional, with a full keel, nice lines, and sloop or cutter rigged.  We are also looking for a boat with a less than 5' draft, as we would like to go to the Bahamas and the water can get "skinny" there as they say.

We also have found that we really love the state of Rhode Island, and decided that if we find a boat there it wouldn't be half bad to have to stay through a winter to get the boat in shape for the eventual sail south.  Another bonus is that if you keep the boat with a hailing port in RI, the purchase is tax free!  You've got to love a place that supports the boating community that much.

To that end, we are heading back to RI this Memorial Day weekend to look at a couple of other boats.  In searching on Craigslist this week, we stumbled upon a listing for a Down Easter 32, which is the same type of boat that we had the offer in on, but this is listed for about half that price.  So we are going to check it out.  We are also going to take another look at the Southern Cross 31, we really love the look of the boat, the practical layout, storage space, and great reputation.

One other item of note:  While in Newport last Friday evening, I surprised Trish by taking her on a sunset sail aboard the schooner "Aquindeck".  The really cool thing about that was that one of the crew members is a blogger that I follow, over at I Hate Shoes.  Scott, the blogger, recently quit his job working in a "cube farm" in Boston, sailed his boat down to Newport and is now working on the schooner.  A bold move and one I hope to follow shortly!  Anyway, check out his blog if you have the chance, it is well written and pretty funny at times.

Finally, a picture from our sunset cruise:

Plans & Schedules & Fate

"A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving" ~ Lao Tzu

"Those who fail to plan, plan to fail"

The second quote there is what I have heard from my Dad throughout my life.  I think there is merit to both.

As we get closer and closer to the start of our adventure, I hope to be able to transition more to Lau Tzu's line of thinking.  But it has been a mixture of planning, schedules, and the un-planned that has gotten us this far.

When we went to Jamaica for our honeymoon in 2006, I had never been on a sailboat, let alone to the tropics, before. There are moments in your life when time divides, when it splits to what came before and everything after it.  To me Jamaica was one of those.  It was totally un-planned but has largely determined the past four years of our lives.

Though our time in the Caribbean was transformational, the idea to actually live on a sailboat probably didn't hit until sometime in 2008, almost two years later.  We made a trip to the Newport, RI boat show and that was probably the beginning of the actual realization that we could in fact live on a boat.

Since that time, we have had a mixture of plans & schedules.  Our schedule got pushed off from last year due to the economy and real estate markets at large.  We deemed that it wouldn't be worth selling our house at the time for a variety of reasons.  So our plans and schedule changed. 

Our current schedule has us listing the house for sale within a month and to be moving south to find a boat by September.  That is, unless we find a boat here in NY before that (we have a few scheduled to be looked at in the next month), then our plans will be tossed aside and fate will have intervened.
 
There are people out there who spend so much time planning and preparing and trying to figure out the perfect conditions and set of equipment, that their boats never leave the dock. 

On the other hand, if we were to go buy a boat tomorrow and sail away with little experience it could be hazardous to our lives. 

But, yet again, there are people like Pat & Ali who bought a boat after a weekend of looking and circumnavigated the globe with a day's worth of sailing lessons.

For us, I think it will be a balancing act of these three approaches.  As of this writing, we have no intention to circumnavigate the globe.  We would however like to sail through the Bahamas and into the Caribbean, perhaps setting up shop in the US Virgin Islands for a while.  We believe that we can do that with a little more practice and "big boat" (30 ft. range) experience.

So, these are our plans, in no particular order:

• To buy a boat small enough to be in our price range, but big enough for the two of us. 
• To learn to sail said boat to the best of our ability.
• To live minimally and simply enough to make our lifestyle sustainable on less than $1000/month.
• To enjoy ourselves while we are young and try not to go back to "work" again.

 Who knows what fate will have to say about these plans...

One final thought:  I've read that the most dangerous thing you can have aboard a sailboat is a schedule.  This has to do with rushing to be to the next port despite the weather or other conditions.  I really cannot wait to not have a schedule.

How about you, have you had plans where you feel fate has intervened?  Or the converse, were fate has led to your plans?

Beating to Windward

For you non-sailors who might read this, sailing towards the direction the wind is blowing from, or "beating to windward", is a lot of work.  Modern sailboats can sail to within a certain angle of the wind, around 45 degrees to either side of where the wind is coming from; so to get upwind you have to go through a series of "tacks" where you change the direction of the boat to either side of the wind to eventually make your way to where you want to go upwind.

That is what the past few weeks have felt like as we prepare for our yard sale, and get the house in order to be shown for sale.  A lot of work.

All of the little fixes that we have been putting off forever now have to get taken care of.  Everything from taping down stair treads, to touch up painting.  Its a good thing that we have pretty much forsaken TV, because we haven't had time to watch it anyway.

What is key here is to keep our dreams in the fore front of our minds.  The easiest thing would be to do nothing, and stay where we are.  We could easily have a nice comfortable life, especially now that the house is finally nearing completion.  But the easy thing isn't always the right thing, or the best thing.

Just a few more tacks...