Bahamian Independence Day

by Tanya on July 28, 2014 in Recipes

We missed our 4th of July celebration this year, but managed to celebrate Independence Day anyway—Bahamian Independence Day—on July 10th. The Bahamas broke away from the UK only 41 years ago, but retained its status as a Commonwealth Nation. A large segment of the population is made up of descendants of Loyalists (to King George) or their slaves, who left the American colonies before the Revolutionary War. So there’s not a lot of drama or rhetoric surrounding their holiday.

We found ourselves in the small island community of Spanish Wells with new friends (an American family who are renovating a 100-year-old cottage on the island), wearing turquoise, gold, and black and enjoying local traditions like swimming races, the slippery pole contest, coconut ice-cream (slow-churned with real coconuts grown on the Island), a children’s talent show, a local band playing the Bahamian National Anthem, steel drums and rake-and-scrape music, and, of course, fireworks. The island is a small and safe place, and the children were free to run around and find playmates without a lot of supervision.

Despite its feeling like a foreign country—Spanish Wells has its own dialect, cars drive on the left side of the road, local food and culture are different—it also reminded us of small-town America on Independence Day. Maybe that’s part of what we like about the Bahamas: its landscape, architecture, and customs are different enough to feel like we’ve gotten away from the norm, but the similarities in language, currency, and friendliness of the people make us feel comfortable traveling in the islands. The natural beauty and ability to find safe and quiet anchorages is likely to be a draw for us for years to come.

Spanish Wells Haulout

by Jay on July 3, 2014 in Recipes

It’s summertime, so it must be time to haul Take Two. Last year we hauled out to replace the engines, but didn’t touch the bottom paint. It was two years ago when we blasted all the old paint off, refaired the bottom, and repainted it.

Two years is about the life expectancy for bottom paint, and Boot Key Harbor in Marathon, FL is about the worst growth conditions you can find. After sitting there for 5 months, our bottom growth was looking pretty wicked. The picture below is not one of Tanya’s homemade pizzas, although it does look tasty — it is the bottom of the kids’ Minifish sailboat after about a month in Boot Key Harbor.

There are five places I know of in Florida that can handle Take Two’s beam, and we’ve used three of them. Some we'd do again, some we wouldn't.

This time we decided to mix it up a little bit and try the boatyard in Spanish Wells. There are several advantages to this. First, it’s in the Bahamas, and so is a destination in itself — we wanted to swing through after leaving the Keys anyway. They use a lifting platform, which in theory is easier on the boat. A bottom job is cost-effective — materials are expensive, but labor is cheap. And they’ve got the good paint.

We rented a great house, only 100 yards from the boat yard, where we can be in vacation mode and I can still supervise the work on the boat. Take Two can be seen easily from the front porch, and it’s only a short walk to go check on things. We’re right on the waterfront, so there’s lots of activity to watch. Ferries, mail boats, tankers, and barges. Oh my!

When Take Two is in the water, the house has a dock where we can tie her up. Which is highly convenient when we have the necessities for seven people, plus almost the entirety of Tanya’s galley to transport between the boat and the house.

We’ve really enjoyed being here. We had stopped in Spanish Wells twice before, but it was only to drop off trash or buy eggs. This time we got a much better feel for the place.

As haulouts go, this was a winner. The previous occupants of the house were the owners of the previous boat on the lift and have been hauling out here for 10 years, so we are not the first to figure this out. I can’t say for sure that we’ll do this again next time, but our future haulout options have officially been increased.

Into the Rabbit Hole

by Tanya on June 26, 2014 in Product Review

Oh, how I look forward to long, boring passages. Really. Time seems to telescope as the instruments count the tenths of nautical miles to the destination. And what shall we do with all this time? Eat very slowly? Talk? Read aloud by the hour? Fish? Watch the fabric of the ocean for the interruption of flying fish or the dolphins of Happiness—or, maybe, if we’re lucky, a whale? Stare lovingly into the deep-blue water and wonder, "what are those specks floating all over the place?" This morning, as we glided over the glassy surface of the Gulf Stream, for lack of anything better to do, I grabbed a bucketful of water, dug the microscope out of the science bin, found some slides, a petri dish, and an eyedropper and opened the Ocean Lab.

This morning’s victim was what I might call a “Floating Puffball from Inner Space.” I suspected it to be algae of some sort. It was a globe of greenish-brown with fine hair sticking out in all directions, about the size of a poppy seed. I sucked it up into the eyedropper and deposited it on a slide in a drop of water. At 40X, it looked like a mass of very fine tangled hair. At 100X, I began to see other, smaller things moving in and out among the hairs, and at 400X, the thing looked like a forest with small animals running in and out of the trees, changing direction mid-stream, diving and flying between the foliage. Each tree trunk was a hair—it was only a few cells thick, and it was clear from the cellular structure that it was plant-kind, but there was movement within each stalk and each moved like a tree waving slowly in a breeze. The tiny one-celled creatures within the forest of algal stems moved with incredible speed and energy. I felt like I was looking at Horton’s Whos down in Whoville. It was mesmerizing.

Once, at a local farmer’s market, I bought a head of heirloom broccoli, not because I wanted to eat it, but because I wanted to look at it up close: its stalk was a perfect spiral staircase of florets, with each floret a perfect spiral of buds, and each bud, in turn, a spiral. It was a perfect fractal repeating to the microscopic level. We have, for school and for fun, looked at inner cheek skin cells (animal), onion skin (vegetable), salt crystals (mineral), a honey bee’s stinger (barbs on barbs!), tiny brine shrimp (with compound eyes), the statue of Lincoln inside his Washington D.C. Memorial (on a penny), no-see-ums (look at those jaws!), hairy spider legs, fleas, and anything else we could capture and study. The C & A Scientific “My First Lab” Duo-Scope portable microscope with battery-operated LED bulbs (allowing you to look at both opaque and translucent objects) is probably the best science purchase we have ever made. It is so easy to use that even the youngest of our children has been able to view the tiny things on the slide—with the instant reward of discovering something strange and new.

The more I stare at that bright circle at the bottom of the dark tube into the magical world of the unseen things, the more I wonder how deep the rabbit hole goes. If a tiny alga can be home to animals as numerous as squirrels in the woods, what else can be possible? I read that we are, by genetic material, only one percent human. That makes me a planet-home to microbes more numerous than the population of humans on earth. Is everything a microcosm—a world inside a world? I feel like a peeping Tom peering in at a Creation too great for my limited intellect. This is usually the point at which I have to put the microscope away and look at the horizon because I suddenly feel a bit dizzy.

Bird Brains

by Jay on June 25, 2014 in Recipes

One of the fun things about living on a boat is you never know what problems you’re going to face. Maybe it’s keeping your boat from sinking, and maybe it’s keeping your hammock in the shade. Every day is an adventure.

This morning we woke up to the twittering of little birds, and soon realized that they were building a nest in our rigging. Cute, right? How about baby birds falling on the deck during the next strong breeze? Or rotten eggs up on our mast because we’ve moved the boat and mom & dad can’t find their nest? And what about the poop? Not so cute.

So we spent a significant part of the day trying to get the point across to these little birds that our mast is not a good place for a nest.

We started by sending Sam to remove the nest-in-progress from the second spreader, and to sit up there for a while and play scarecrow. The birds were quite perturbed by Sam’s presence and wanted to peck him, but he’d shout and scare them off each time they tried. They gave up, but it was only temporary.

They’d go away and come back, go away and come back. Eli took a turn playing scarecrow. We tried Nerf guns. We tried an air horn. They weren’t getting the point. Itty bitty birdy brains.

Eventually the female gave up and only the male would return periodically. He’d alight on the mast and chirp an “all clear” to his mate, which simultaneously alerted me to his presence. I’d go out and shake the rigging until he went away again.

Finally, I managed to whack him by swinging a halyard. There was a small puff of feathers and he fluttered away, beaten but unharmed, to the distant trees. He fell victim to one of the classic blunders, the most famous of which is "never get involved in a land war in Asia", but only slightly less well-known is this: "Never go in against a Sailor when his deck is on the line"!

Chore Chart

by Tanya on June 16, 2014 in General

Jay and I are both hard workers, and come from families that value hard work, but this value doesn’t appear to pass to the next generation through the genes; work has to be taught, and to people who really would rather lounge around and play all day with toys someone else paid for, eating food someone else prepared, wearing clothes someone else bought in a home that someone else keeps tidy. But to enter into the life of a family one has to do the work of the family. And real life doesn’t reward sluggards, either. To the best of our ability, we will raise people who can leave our home able to do a myriad of jobs, efficiently and with expertise.

One way we do this is with the chore chart. People ask us how we can have five children on a sailboat, and one answer is that everybody has to pull their own weight. Of course, a 3-year-old “helping” with the dishes is hardly the same thing as a nearly-13-year-old scrubbing down the cockpit, but the principle is the same: if you don’t work, you don’t eat.

A lot of training is required to get the kids to be actually helpful, so that Jay and I don’t feel the need to go around behind them “fixing” things. For a while at least, it is harder to help a kid learn a chore than to just do the chore yourself, but doing it for them or cleaning up after them would be shooting yourself in the foot long-term. A kid who is given a token chore will quickly learn to slack off—if they know you’re going to go back and do it better later, why bother doing it at all? But teaching a kid to do a task and requiring it to be done to your satisfaction is an investment that pays off pretty quickly. I read recently about the Amish expectations of children: a child is a net “loss” for the first six years, but a seven year old “breaks even” (contributes as much as he costs) and by ten, an Amish girl can do all the tasks her mother can, a boy can work a full day on the farm, and they are giving back to the family—a net “gain.” We’re not Amish, but we do have high expectations for our children—we‘re banking on the principle that early training equates to later independence.

A crew member on Take Two gets his or her first official duties at three years old. Rachel just made the chart for the first time. She helps with groceries, sets the table, washes windows, folds kitchen towels, and puts away forks and spoons. The older kids are used to hard work at this point, although they still complain from time to time (complaining usually earns them an extra job). They vacuum the whole boat, do dishes, load and unload the dinghy, take trash ashore, scrub decks, set up for and clean up after meals, and stay on top of the laundry. One would think that I would have time to sit in my hammock more often now that I have such able helpers, but actually, their taking some of the cleaning chores frees me up to do other tasks, like reading with Rachel and schooling Sam, making homemade tortillas or baking bread, writing, or helping Sarah with her quilting project.

For years we have used a monthly rotation with each person getting four or five jobs (some require teamwork) because we found that a month is long enough to get really good at a chore, but not long enough to grow bored with it. We’re doing an experiment this summer with quarterly chores; the kids had more input as to which chores they like to do and I got to assign some chores according to who is the most capable at each task. We’ll have another family meeting in the fall to decide if that system is working.

If someone shirks a chore, there are real and immediate consequences. A chore half-done must be re-done, a chore forgotten costs one a “reminder fee” of 50 cents, and a chore done with a bad attitude earns one more chores. We do offer a monthly allowance to teach money management, but that assumes that the kids are meeting expectations—keeping their cabins tidy, folding and putting away their own laundry, helping with meals, and doing assigned chores “immediately, cheerfully, and quickly.”

Another of our favorite sayings is “Work hard, play hard.” When the work gets done quickly, there’s time left over for skating at the park, snorkeling on the reef, surfing at the beach, riding horses, kayaking, and lots of other adventures, the natural rewards of a job well done.

Terns of Endearment

by Tanya on May 3, 2014 in General

It is Tern mating season. Here in the Keys, we have Lesser Terns, and their “hotel room” of choice is the yellow E or J bouy that marks the extremity of the mooring field, usually off of one of our sterns. Imagine trying to teach astronomy or Greek mythology and being constantly interrupted by a sound not unlike squeaky bedsprings—my lessons are relegated to basic “birds and bees” biology.

We’ve had lots of time to observe mating behavior as we homeschool in the cockpit on these lovely spring mornings. Their routine goes something like this: the male and female bird stand side by side on the poo-encrusted buoy, bobbing wildly in the wind and chop and fishing-boat wakes. They begin by bowing politely and singing a squeaky little song back and forth to each other. Then the male bird disappears for a few minutes and comes back with a small bait-fish (still wiggling) in his beak, which the female bird tries to grab, but which he successfully keeps just out of reach. They then bow and chirp a few more times, after which she ruffles her feathers as a sign of assent and he responds by flapping wildly and trying to balance while reenacting that timeless dance of love—getting her to hold still by offering the fish at just the right moment. It lasts mere seconds, and then he flies away. She cries disconsolately. (Pardon my anthropomorphism, but doesn’t it sound familiar?)

But this is not the end of it! She continues to call for him, and, sure enough, he comes back—with another fish in his maw, which he offers this time without requiring anything in exchange. He does this not once, but over and over and over again. One morning we noted a male who came back to his sweetheart with a dowry of 19 little fishes before they flew off together, ostensibly to their waterside nest somewhere to start a family. Now here’s a strange wooing-in-reverse; usually the male must prove his worthiness before the wedding night, not after!

One morning, as we watched the process for the umpteenth time, Rachel looked at me sadly and said, “Why did the daddy fly away?” I was startled by her response, but Jay’s recent travel schedule has made her sensitive to separation. She was on the verge of tears, so I had to come up with a reassuring answer quickly. “He’s not gone-gone. He’ll come back in a minute with a little fish. Just wait and see.” The relief was visible in her face when, just as I promised, the daddy came back and offered his prize. I asked her, “Doesn’t your daddy fly away on the airplane? And doesn’t he always come back with money to buy food? He’s just like the daddy bird.” Satisfied, she toddled off to play with her Legos while we continued with school and chores. If only all of life were that simple.

The Grass is Greener

by Tanya on April 4, 2014 in General

The Grass is Greener on the Other Side of the Hill: a Poem for Jay's 39th Birthday

You’re at the peak of the hill,
You’re at the top of your game.
And after the climb,
I still feel the same:

So much to look back on,
So much still to do,
I’m right where I should be,
On the hill-top with you.

No regrets lurk behind us
No fears lie ahead—
(We made it this far!
We did what we said.)

No matter what the future holds,
Be it joy or sorrow,
I’ll gladly go down-hill with you
On into tomorrow.

Sailing Promise: A Book Review

by Tanya on March 22, 2014 in Book Review

Every couple living aboard a small boat who spends any time on the ocean will recognize that there are circumstances which test the relationship. We know lots of single-handers whose spouse jumped ship after a long passage. In her book, Sailing Promise, Alayne Main tells the story of her circumnavigation with husband Alec in the 90s aboard a Prout 33 named Madeline. While the book chronicles their travels—new places, new friends, new cultures—it also tells the inside story of how the journey affected their relationship. The following is a quote which sums up, for many, what it’s like to live in close quarters on a small boat with a spouse who may or may not handle stress well.

Despite my seasickness and the uncomfortable ride, it was only three days. Although many of the same fears plagued me, I could tough it out for a short passage…I thought of a girlfiriend of mine who had spent a year backpacking with her husband, spending 24 hours a day together, every day. She had said there wasn’t one moment when she wanted to be away from him. Envious as I was, our circumstances were vastly different. All my possessions, my lover, and I were contained inside a tiny 33-by-15-foot boat, which was put to the mercy of the wind, waves, and weather. The only certainties were that things would break and the wind would change. With an added dash of seasickness, a little thunderstorm or a ripped sail, a kind of stress was created that would cause even the most pleasant of people to get irritable. Alec and I dealt with stress differently and this often aggravated things even at the best of times (from the chapter entitled "Wild Horses").

Anyone considering a life aboard would be wise to read the book, whether they have dreams of circumnavigating or not. It is an honest look at a side of the sailing life you seldom see in a cruiser’s blog or travel book. Most of the people who buy a boat to travel the world think long and hard about what kind of boat they want, which of their belongings they want to keep and which to get rid of, where they want to go, how they will provision, what tools and gadgets they want aboard, and so forth and so on. But less thought is given to something that may have the greatest impact on whether the people going will be happy at all.

It is important to think about what isolation might do to your marriage, how each of you responds in a crisis, how well you communicate, what kind of outlets you or your spouse needs to reduce stress, how to find contentment in a difficult setting, and how to overcome fears and surmount obstacles so that you can strengthen your close relationship instead of tearing it apart. Through Alayne’s thought-provoking inner journey, it’s possible to envision how good communication and compassion can help two people pass the tests they will surely encounter on their adventures.

The First Ski Trip

by Jay on March 6, 2014 in Recipes

Our trip to Maine was a huge success. We made it there and back, nobody got sick, nobody got (seriously) hurt, and everyone had a great time.

We didn’t play it up beforehand because of the disappointment we suffered when last year’s trip was cancelled at the last minute. But now that it’s behind us, we aren’t able to stop thinking about it. The gratitude we feel toward everyone who made it possible, makes me feel almost… effusive. Almost.

The instigator of the plan, and major player in its execution, was Heather, Tanya’s best friend from college. She once visited us on H-Dock, where she was known as “Heather from Maine”, and helped make stories that will never be forgotten. She and her husband, Nathan, have a boy about Aaron's age and run a brewery in Portland. Her parents split their time between a trawler and their condo at Sugarloaf Mountain. They are all skiing fiends.

We were welcomed to spend the first part of our trip to Maine at the Sugarloaf condo. We didn’t let ourselves believe it was really going to happen until our plane was descending into Portland. The kids’ excitement reached critical levels when we broke through the clouds and they could see the snow-covered landscape below. The first snowball fight erupted on the sidewalk just outside Baggage Claim. Another 2-hour drive, and after fourteen hours of travel we had arrived at Sugarloaf.

Our first day on the mountain was spent just playing in the snow. It was a day of testing unfamiliar gear, having snowball fights, sledding, and making snow forts. Basically getting oriented and working out all that childish delight about the white fluffy stuff. We received several comments from jaded Mainers telling us how nice it was to see kids enjoying the snow. By the end of February, all the locals are pretty much sick of winter.

The serious work began on the second day, when we signed the kids up for lessons. We consider it our job as parents to help them find their loves in life, and sometimes they need a little encouragement to try new things. We did something similar with dinghy racing classes last summer, and the results were… meh. They learned the basics, but didn’t really want to pursue it. So we didn’t have huge expectations for skiing. If they were done after a day, we would have been okay with that. But that’s not how it turned out.

For three days Heather and her parents shepherded the kids as they progressed higher and higher up the mountain… and came down it faster and faster. Eli and Sarah on skis, Aaron on a snowboard, and Sam on both. Even Rachel got in on the action, wearing tiny skis and holding onto Heather. Tanya and I enjoyed every minute of it… vicariously… from the lodge.

On our fifth and last day on the mountain, we traded downhill skiing for cross-country, and the kids reaction was less wholly positive. Aaron and Sam asked how fast they could go and were not impressed with the answer, especially the part about going back up the hills, and decided they'd rather sit in the lodge and watch the fire. But we had mercy and let them slide on inner tubes down an icy slope onto a frozen lake instead.

In three days and countless wipeouts going downhill on skis and snowboards, nobody got hurt. But after fifteen minutes of tubing, both Aaron and Sam had injuries. Aaron flipped his tube over and landed on his head (no helmet) and Sam took a bad spill while dragging his tube back up the hill. Neither was seriously hurt, and both felt much better after a couple hot chocolates, but that was it for the tubing.

Sarah really enjoyed the cross-country skiiing. Eli I think would have rather smacked his head on the ice.

We always try to quit while we’re still having fun, and we were totally successful this time. Everybody wanted more. We really didn’t know how well the kids would take to skiing, so we didn’t plan to spend more time on the mountain. Next time we’ll know better. Yes, there will be a next time.

See all the skiing pictures here.

Rooted

by Jay on February 26, 2014 in Recipes

Leaving a place can be hard, like tearing out roots. But the bonds most difficult to break are often the ones that make a place worth visiting.

We left Ft Pierce on January 19th. We’d been prepared to leave since the day after Christmas, but with all the mooring balls in Marathon full, the timing never seemed right. I had business travel on the calendar, and there was the ski trip at the end of February to consider. We needed a secure place to put the boat, and bouncing around in the Keys was not appealing.

Then while making Sunday breakfast a few weeks later, we suddenly realized it was time to go. We had the right wind, the right waves, and the right moon. We had a couple free weeks on the calendar. Surely that would be enough time to get a ball in Marathon, right? If all else failed, we could park the boat at a dock behind a friend’s house down there. We left that afternoon.

The trip down was uneventful and our slowest to date. We didn’t really have anywhere to be, so we took it easy. We spent one night underway and made overnight stops in Biscayne Bay, at Rodriguez Key, and at Indian Key.

Our last day was our only sailing day. Reaching in 15-20, we were making about 8 knots. A couple guys on a 30-something performance cat spent their morning trying to catch us. Eventually they succeeded, but they paid dearly for the privilege. The other boat was certainly faster, but what was a nice comfortable ride for us, looked cold, wet, and miserable for them.

Of course, no trip in Hawk Channel is complete without snagging a crab pot. We hooked three, but could only clear two of them, and had to put Eli in the water to get the third.

Eventually, we arrived in Marathon and proceeded to re-establish our roots there. We got on the list at number 6 waiting for one of 15 balls.

Over the course of the next week, we carved out a space for ourselves in the Boot Key Harbor anchorage. As boats came and went, we gradually adjusted our position until we had established a comfortable buffer zone among longer-term boats.

We continue to be amazed by the difficultly some people have anchoring their boats. We’ve seen several that have had to make multiple attempts to get settled, only to drag during a midnight squall. We keep a wary eye on the boats we don't think are anchored well.

Our anchor has held just fine. In fact, one of the times we went to reposition ourselves, we were unable to retrieve it. The windlass couldn’t break it out and when we tried to motor over it, but the load on the chain actually caused our bow to dip. Not a good thing in a catamaran. We weren’t just dug in, we were hooked on some of the detritus littering the bottom of the harbor. Old moorings, sunken boats, bicycles, engine blocks; you just never know what’s down there. I was not looking forward to diving down to clear it. After much tugging and pulling, we finally got our anchor back, including a very large piece of old mooring chain.

It was good to have Take Two firmly anchored, because four weeks later we still didn’t have a mooring ball assigned.