Before we were sailors, we were dreamers. Since we were teenagers, we had talked about buying a boat and sailing around the world. Even when we were young professionals in Atlanta, buying our first house and having our first child, we never forgot this dream. Jay satisfied his need to be on the water by crewing on a race boat on Lake Lanier, and I read books and magazine articles that kept the dream alive.
Like many people who dream of sailing away, our favorite periodical at the time was Cruising World Magazine. Jay would sit out on our back deck on a breezy day, angle his chair so that he could get a view clear of neighboring houses, and imagine he was reading on the deck of his boat. (In reality, better training would have been to get down on his hands and knees and use a sander, but I digress…) One column that was particularly memorable for me was Bernadette Bernon’s Log of Ithaca. Once the editor of Cruising World, she and her husband had bought a boat, quit their jobs, and gone cruising. Her articles inspired me, and I remember reading about the San Blas archipelago and going vicariously with her to the remote coconut islands and meeting the indigenous Guna Yala in their dugout ulus. At the time it seemed like an impossible dream, but here I am, 15 years later, sitting in the cockpit of my own boat, nestled behind a reef in the Lemon Cays, getting a daily visit from a Guna woman named Morales, who shows me her molas and drinks cool drinks while answering my questions.
On our first day here, a woman in a large dugout powered by a motor came by to welcome us to San Blas. She introduced herself as Lisa—the very same Lisa I had read about so long ago while living in suburbia! Of course, I had to buy some of her beautifully-crafted molas and tell her how happy I was to finally meet such a famous person! Tomorrow, we celebrate ten years since we first laid eyes on Take Two, the day we drove as a family to Fort Lauderdale to begin what has become an incredible journey of discovery about ourselves and our world. Perhaps I wax nostalgic, but who could blame me? Here we are: doing the very thing we had read about, and finding that it is exponentially harder, yet more rewarding, than we had dreamed from our back porch.