Weathering storms is not only something our family has gotten used to, it is something that actually excites us. I admit that sometimes this excitement is not a pleasant sensation, but whether at anchor or tied to a dock, a storm never fails to add a bit of the unexpected to our daily lives. Jay called me a “storm junkie” last night when I suggested we walk in the wind instead of do dinner dishes, but I would argue that he is the not-so-secret admirer of wild weather. I remember a year just after we moved back to Florida, during one of the many hurricanes that season, Jay took our two boys (2 and 3 at the time) outside to “play” in the wind and rain. I am sure I objected (“a tree could fall on all of you”), but he initiated them anyway, and every storm that has approached since then, I’ve noticed that gleam in their eyes—a mixture of nervous excitement and pleasure.

We took all five of our little adventurers out to the jetty today to observe the effects of 48 hours of steady breeze from Hurricane Sandy, sometimes gusting in the 50-knot range. The waves were crashing up over the sidewalk that skirts the rocks and the wind was so full of salt spray that we could actually taste it. There were the ubiquitous storm surfers out there fearlessly enjoying kite boards and windsurfers, but everybody else looked a little anxious. I had Rachel in the carrier, and though she kept asking to get down and walk, I said no—I was actually afraid she would blow away! Even the big kids couldn’t walk straight.

There were a group of manatees hiding out in a protected corner created by a right angle in the south jetty, and it looked like they would be stuck there for awhile. It made me wonder—did they go there looking for shelter, or did they get trapped there by the surge? Do manatees have enough warning to escape heavy weather? I would have expected to see them in intracoastal waters, maybe up Taylor Creek where we see them all the time, or in the mangroves, but sometimes storms catch one unprepared.

We’ve seen several incidents over the years of humans on boats being caught in that state, whether from lack of know-how or good sense I can’t say. Someone had their jib shredded last night in the early stages of the storm and it was only because of the kindness of strangers that they didn’t lose their whole rig. Another acquaintance who was out of town for the storm will have to deal with the sad fate of his vessel when he returns—she dragged anchor and is currently lying on her side in the muck on the other side of the channel.

We do the best we can to prepare Take Two for storms, and to brief the crew so that they will be mentally prepared, but we are not arrogant enough to believe we are immune to the damage caused by the tantrums Mother Nature throws each year in Florida. We have scoped out a couple of hidey-holes nearby where we could tie the boat up in the mangroves if we felt that the storm would be too strong to weather in a marina. But even with all the planning, sometimes by the time you decide the weather is bad enough to take drastic measures, it’s too late. You do the best you can to get ready, and then all that’s left to do is go outside and bow before the sheer power of wind and water. One lesson storms have taught us over the years, and which our children will no doubt remember for the rest of their lives: don’t mess with Mama Nature.

While our intrepid captain has been working around the clock on the boat and at his job, I have been driving all over Florida, packing and unpacking the car, doing laundry as we go, and trying to help with cooking and cleaning in our host homes (trying not to be a parasite). It’s a lot of work to be on vacation! The kids, on the other hand, seem to be suffering from vacationitis—all play and no work is just as bad as all work and no play. I never thought we would be so excited about getting back to a “regular” schedule of school and chores.

We spent the last week or so visiting good friends in the keys. They live and work at a state park, homeschooling their three children and supplementing their diet with fruits de mer—fruit from the sea. That means, at this time of the year, lobster. We went out twice looking for “bugs”—at the beginning and end of the trip. The first day was too windy and the water was choppy with limited visibility. The day before we left, the wind had finally died down and we spent the day going from hole to hole in the Florida Bay, out beyond the traps in clear water, searching for nice-size lobster. I got in the water twice, but encumbered with a toddler, didn’t see much more than sea grass and a few small fish before I had to get back in the boat. It was a really fun day, though, and a successful one—we took home three dozen lobsters, and Eli earned dinner for our family! The other kids snorkeled, measured lobster, helped with gear, and jumped off the boat and swam around when not busy.

One of the coolest things for me was seeing how our friends work as a team: Ken or Amy drive the boat (while wearing baby Kai in an Ergo carrier), Mia (10) searches for lobster in their hidey-holes while the grownup not driving helps bag the big ones. When they come up with a specimen, Max (7) swaps the full net for an empty one, empties the lobster on deck and measures the carapace. If it’s big enough, he plops it into the live well to join the others. It’s a smooth operation, and reminds me why we love to homeschool—to be on our own schedule and live and work as a family, learning in real-world situations.

Our friends took us on other fun excursions—bridge jumping, the Dolphin Research Center, dinner at the Hurricane, Homeschool P.E. at the local city park, and walking through the state park. You’d never know that school is in session! But even school can be fun when you have a class of six buddies working together. Homeschoolers aren’t used to that kind of setting, but it seemed to work well, with everyone finished by lunchtime and back to LEGO building, knitting, drawing, frog-collecting, game-playing and all the other creative things homeschool kids think up to fill the time they aren’t on a school bus.

[flickr: 8017856520]

After a week or so of fun, we returned to the beach condo to visit Dad and recuperate from sleepless nights and get ready for yet another week on the road…more play in store for the crew of Take Two. Phew!

There are several family traditions that have developed over the last couple of years as we’ve begun to travel. They are things that make us feel that tingle of anticipation for getting underway the way that Mom’s famous cinnamon rolls do for Christmas morning, or the smell of turkey and stuffing do for Thanksgiving. Traditions give us mountain-peak vistas—we can look back at happy memories while simultaneously enjoying the moment and looking forward to some future time. Whether it is a special food, kind of music, or a ritual, a tradition can also help us through big or small changes.

At best, making a passage is somewhat boring, and at worst, it can be uncomfortable and even frightening. Traditions have helped us and the children to prepare for the unknown and to look forward to something that might not otherwise be a pleasant part of the journey. And they give family memories a strong foothold.

Food usually plays a big part in tradition. For example, Chex Mix, a snack food I never buy normally, has become a hallmark “underway food.” Typically, I make everything from scratch and never buy anything with an ingredient on my black list (corn syrup, MSG and its ilk, soy, hydrogenated oils, artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives, etc.) which pretty much means you can’t buy anything in a box or bag. But when we’re sailing, convenience is the name of the game, and I buy things that I know will be easy and make everyone happy.

I also bake a big batch of cookies before we go. My original intent was to make gingersnaps, since ginger settles the stomach, but any cookie will do. Our newest tradition has us each taking two cookies at the beginning of the trip, one to eat and one to toss into the sea, a sort of offering to Poseidon to ensure calm weather, with hopes that these will be the last cookies we toss on the journey.  The other cookies I bake we’ve come to call “Category Four Cookies.” If a big storm is coming, I bake like a fool. (Don’t ask me why—maybe it’s left over from when we lived in a house and a storm meant power outages. On our boat, we make our own power, so running out of bread isn’t a risk.) The recipe gets better with each storm upgrade—the tropical storm oatmeal cookies are rather boring, but by Category Three they’ve got chocolate chips, coconut and almonds!

Usually, we listen to certain music when we’re traveling. It puts us in the mood, so to speak. It’s good to start off with Tom Petty’s “Time to Get Going” and move on to Styx’ “Come Sail Away”  and then play Boston’s “Peace of Mind.” Our “Best of the 70s Super Groups” album, the Beach Boys, and Bob Marley seem to get a lot of play time during a sail, but we usually save Jimmy Buffet for arrival at an anchorage and pour a beverage of choice with which to toast a successful trip.

All-night passages have their own special rituals. We all gather on deck to watch the sun set or the moon rise (or both) and then get ready for watches. Usually, bedtime is at 8:30, no matter what. But on the first night of a long voyage the kids are allowed to stay up as late as they want. They watch a movie and snack and each take a turn at the helm, preparing for a time when they will be ready to take a night watch of their own. For whatever reason, the movie of choice has come to be Swiss Family Robinson—a movie about a family who shipwrecks and encounters pirates! When it is their turn at the helm, we might share a cup of hot tea or cocoa and a cookie, talk about what the instruments read, look at the stars, or use the navigation instruments to figure out how long it will take to get to our destination. Hopefully, we’ll have crewmembers who look forward to, instead of dread, the night watch.

While we’re underway, there’s not much to do. Depending on the sea state, there might not be much we can do. So we eat. While we nibble, we play dominoes in the cockpit (cards blow away), read, or listen to audiobooks. If it’s a very long trip, there’s usually a lot of napping. Unless there’s bad weather, passages can be somewhat boring, so you have to figure out how to entertain yourself. One fun thing we do is sit on the transom and dangle our feet in the swirling water of our wake. It’s a little like a dog hanging his head out the car window and letting his tongue taste the wind. The kids will also spend hours lying face-down on the trampolines staring into the water, watching for dolphins or flying fish or counting jellyfish. Sitting on the boom when the main is up is another favorite past-time in calm weather.

Once we anchor safely at the end of a trip, there are the arrival traditions. If the water is nice and the season is right, we all jump in and go for a swim right away.  Actually, the kids don’t care about the water or season—once Eli and Aaron donned wetsuits and jumped in in November!  Usually an explore by dinghy is a must, either to check the anchor set with a glass-bottom bucket or to familiarize ourselves with our new surroundings. As the day ends, we all creep forward with blankets and pillows to lie on the trampolines and star-gaze. We use the green laser pointer, binoculars and star charts to identify constellations. This usually dissolves into story-telling of the “tell us about when you were little” variety.

All of these rituals and traditions have helped us to carve out some consistency within our unpredictable traveling existence. The hard parts of traveling—specifically long passages—become things we look forward to instead of dread, simply because we have tried to make them fun.

After an uneventful trip up the East Coast of Florida, we are safely ensconced in a new marina. So far, it seems like a great spot. The Publix (grocery store) and West Marine are around the corner (a quick bike ride), and the downtown area, with museums, a library, restaurants and a weekly Farmer’s Market, is a dinghy ride away, as are parks and beaches. The marina has laundry, showers, air-conditioned lounge, exercise room and even a small swimming pool. There is a great low-key restaurant at the head of our dock, with good burgers and an out-door bar. No pump-out at the dock, so we’ll have to move the boat to the fuel dock on a weekly basis, but that seems to be the only negative. Haven’t met anyone yet, so we can’t really get a feel for the place, but the geography looks good. Jay will have to do some travel for work, but we’re in a better position on this coast to depart when we can go exploring again, either north to the Chesapeake or south to the Caribbean. The Bahamas are hours, not days, away. That trip to or from Tampa Bay always feels like a big hurdle, one which we will not have to jump again for a while.

We have been feeling for some time now that it is time to leave the dock. All of us are itching for adventure after working hard this past year—whether it was business travel, boat projects, schoolwork, teaching or having a baby. Finally, we looked at our sorry excuse-of-a-list, knocked off the have-tos and decided to leave. We picked our weather so that we could have an easy sail down the coast, with a familiar anchorage waiting at the end of the day, and a safe place in case the weather deteriorated (which it had a strong chance of doing). After a false start on a rainy Wednesday evening (violated Rule #1: We only set sail in fair weather), we left on a calm and quiet Thursday morning, optimistically taking dock lines with us, with no fanfare or fuss, just the way we like it.

We got out into the Gulf, only to find the wind already shifting to the South, along with swells on the nose. It was going to be a long day of motoring upwind. We looked at each other and agreed that it didn’t make sense. We hated to admit defeat, but this wasn’t going to be the day to ease us back into our old rambling lifestyle. We both had a lot of unspecified anxiety about leaving the comfort of the dock, and a long, wavy day wasn’t helping. Should we tuck tail and run back to the marina? At Aaron’s request, we decided instead to anchor in Terra Ceia Bay, not three miles from our slip, but a world away by the feel of it. We were surrounded by mangrove islands, not another boat in sight, and plenty of breathing room. We dropped the new 80-pound Manson hook with 5:1 scope (all chain) near Bird Key, because it is nice to look at, close to good mangrove tunnels and coves for exploring, and because we’d been there before. We weren’t really thinking we would be weathering storm-force winds there, or we might have anchored on the windward side of the bay, and would definitely have laid out more chain.

It was just what the doctor ordered. For two days, we swam, kayaked, and found our cruising groove—living without the A/C, power cord and water hose. Even if we had to go back, at least we left for a few days, right? And then the wind began to blow. Terra Ceia is one of our possible hurricane holes. Marinas, especially with floating docks, can be dangerous places in a storm. Aside from wind damage and boats breaking loose, the whole dock can float off the pilings with the high water of a storm surge. In a mangrove-sheltered bay, even if you break loose, the boat is not likely to sustain a lot of damage. So, even with our dubious location inside the bay, we were pretty comfortable as the wind began to climb and whitecaps began to form. I went out at one point to take some swim suits off the life lines and was pelted with raindrops driven by 40-knot winds. Ouch!

We watched weather forecasts and kept our eyes on the skies. It grew wild and wet and uncomfortable. The wind began to blow consistently 30-35 knots with gusts in the 40s. But it was exciting, too. Weathering a storm on the water has a way of making you feel very alive. As the wind shifted, we grew nervous about our proximity to the shore behind us. We used the GPS anchor alarm to make sure the anchor was holding because we didn’t want to end up in someone’s back yard. I wondered aloud if someone in one of those houses was watching us. Later that first night, we thought we saw a spot lite on the end of a dock, but didn’t think much of it.

The next morning, we had a funny email from the guy who lived on the lee shore. He had looked at our boat name, found our web site and contacted us to see if we were okay. He noted that our anchor seemed to be holding, but didn’t know if we had enough food/water for a long stay. He offered to float us a pizza if we got desperate. It was very kind, and we replied that we were fine, and were prepared for this sort of thing. The weather was unbelievable—it just blew and blew and blew, with no discernible lessening of wind or waves. How long, we wondered, could it last? We lost sleep and got cabin fever. While we waited for the storm to end, we traded emails with our new neighbor, finding out that he too had lived aboard a sailboat and cruised extensively, having survived many storms at sea.

What are the odds, I ask you? We anchor in a desperate move to avoid admitting failure, and find ourselves on a lee shore in a tropical storm, in the back yard of a world-traveler and fellow-cruiser! Life is funny like that. I stopped believing in coincidence a long time ago, but I still find myself pleasantly surprised. After the blow finally ended (day five of our unintended cruise to Terra Ceia), we dinghied over to the neighbor’s with a loaf of bread and introduced ourselves. The kids immediately started piling up tree branches that had blown all over his yard, burning off some of that pent-up energy. We ended up spending the better part of our day with our new-found friend, the kids climbing his tree, borrowing his canoe to go on an explore, and crabbing along his sea wall. They were as happy as clams, and we were glad to be ashore in the fine sunshine and gentle breeze and swap stories with an old salt. 

We had reached decision time. Looking at the calendar and the weather, we had to decide whether we had time to get anywhere new before Jay had to be on location for a new project. Our trip to the Dry Tortugas was looking impossible (violated rule #2: We don’t sail on a schedule), but did going back to our slip serve our new goals? Did we even have any new goals? We did what we set out to do this past year: have a baby and refit the boat. But what’s next for us? We were reminded this week why we like cruising, and why we bought a boat in the first place. We managed to break out of the marina, and we don’t really want to get comfortable with a land-based life or feel tied-down. We will never be totally ready and the boat will never be finished, so we just have to pick an arbitrary date and go.

So we went, with a tentative destination, but not really knowing what the future holds. But then, do we ever? And isn't that part of the charm of a roving lifestyle? At least surviving the storm cured us of, or inured us to, our jitters. We left and felt good about it. What a difference a week’s adventures can make.