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.

The answer to the unspoken question: yes, we are still here at the dock. And yes, it was driving me crazy. I have—as I always do—finally gotten to the place where I don’t care one way or another and will be ready to go when the time is right. Until I arrive at this peaceful place of surrender, though, I tend to wallow, or, worse, drive Jay crazy asking, “When?” We are still trying to leave, but, as usual, I know very little about my own life or what is best for me, so I am trusting God’s timing, which is rarely early and never late.

It’s taken me awhile to figure out why I get so much more worked up about leaving than Jay does. It’s true that I am more excitable than he is in general, but there is something else at play here. It has to do with the contrasting patterns our lives have taken on during the last decade or so. I commented recently to Jay that his work must be very rewarding: he flies to some city far away, fixes a complicated technology problem for some big company and flies home victorious. You could say that his life follows a linear pattern. Even on the boat his projects have a beginning, middle and end. He sits down, takes the winch apart, cleans and lubricates it, and puts it back together again. Voila! Good as new!

Very seldom do I have that kind of linear project. My life’s shape (at least for the season in which I find myself) is a circle. A dizzying, whirling circle of cooking, laundry, cleaning, diapers, cooking, laundry, cleaning, diapers…throw in homeschooling and baking and you can see why I never have trouble falling asleep at night. I finish one task and go straight into another, turning around to see that the first one needs to be done again. I finish the dishes for breakfast, and it’s time to make lunch. Even the schooling, try though I might to keep it interesting, can become repetitive. One kid moves out of long division just as another moves in. The history lessons which have become our home-schooling mainstay seem to go from war to war to war—the names and dates change, but the pattern doesn’t vary much. My work is certainly rewarding and meaningful, but circular just the same.

That must be why I love jigsaw puzzles so much. In just a few hours, you can see a jumbled pile begin to take shape and within a few days, you have a beautiful picture: order out of chaos. You can then put it neatly in the box, call it finished, and go back to the cycle of daily life, refreshed. Traveling helps me break out of the circular rut, as well. Of course, my tasks stay the same no matter where we are (though making a passage does affect how I do them), but adding the exciting element of exploring, changing the scenery, and unexpected problems or wonderful surprises really throws my circle for a loop. I love every part of voyaging, from planning to passage-making, to arriving and exploring, through to the homecoming. Even when they take me geographically back to the place from which I left, journeys tend to be wonderfully linear, and sometimes I don’t mind being thrown from the carousel.

We’re beginning to see a return on our investment. We started our family about eleven years ago, not fully realizing what we were doing, and not really planning ahead. We knew that humans don’t hatch from eggs and crawl away, of course, and that we were making a commitment to raise this new life by hand, putting all our resources toward making what I often call “a decent human being.” But we didn’t know how long it would be before we had a good night’s sleep again, or when we would begin to see members of the family pulling their own weight, or when (or if) they would begin to take care of each other. Something magical has happened this past year, but how or when it happened I can’t recall. Maybe it was gradual and I just didn’t see it until it came to fruition. We’ve begun to work together like a team. Not quite a well-oiled machine, but a team just the same.

This became clear to me just after Rachel’s birth. With the last couple of kids, I brought a baby home to a house-full of toddlers. There was no rest for the weary, and for the first year of childhood, everyone’s in survival mode. This time, it was different. With a four-year gap since the last baby and a ten-, nine-, and seven-year-old at home, I came home and really rested. We had planned ahead and talked about how adding a baby would mean everyone working harder to pick up the slack. The kids made breakfast and lunch, folded clothes, did dishes, kept things tidy, fetched cold drinks for their nursing mama, held the baby, and ran errands. They felt important, and we started to see the teamwork that we had always hoped for developing. It isn’t always smooth—there’s still push-back and bickering—but it is the beginning of something great.

One morning, after an interrupted night’s sleep, I came upstairs to find Rachel on the potty eating cheerios out of Sarah’s hand, and Aaron pouring the coffee he had made for me. Eli had already put the clean dishes away, and he and Sam were working on their school work. I blinked a couple of times and then pinched myself. Another time, I sent the two oldest boys to the farmer’s market for bread and fruit. They came back with the needed supplies and had used the surplus to buy a gift for their sister. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but again, I was incredulous. We’ve recently developed a new docking plan which capitalizes on this team ethic. We leave the three oldest children on the dock with fenders in their hands while we take the boat out of the slip and then out the entrance to the marina. The kids get into the dinghy and make a rendez-vous with the mother ship in the river. Coming back in, we take the same steps in reverse: launch the dinghy full of dock hands and then come into the marina with helpers ready and waiting, fenders and lines in hand. The last example is probably my favorite: Jay suggested something we call “team shop.” This works well when he is out of town and I can’t sneak out to the store by myself. Since the kids know exactly which products I buy at the grocery store, I can make out several small lists and split up into teams to divide and conquer. I send two kids to the dairy, two to produce and wait in the line at the deli/bakery with Rachel. People at the store have started to notice this and I’ve become somewhat of a celebrity. Whether we’re famous or infamous depends on who you ask!

This teamwork, more than being an end in itself, is also a means to an end: sailing this big boat requires an able crew. Eventually, we’ll have kids who can navigate, take the helm, trim sails, trouble shoot when there’s a problem, scrub the bottom of the boat, dock and anchor, make repairs, prepare meals, and take watches. It excites me to think that we’re already beginning to see the kind of teamwork developing that will make going on an adventure both fun and relaxing, as many hands make light work. What other rewards we may all reap from this experiment can only be guessed at, but I can imagine nothing but good in the future of someone who learns at an early age to work well with others toward a common goal. People get married partly because the couple can become more than the sum of the individuals, and having productive children can cause that family to become a formidable force!

A couple of years ago, Jay and I gave each other whimsical birthday gifts: he gave me a sextant and I gave him a guitar, both of them instruments which require a lot of time and practice to use. We thought, “We’ll be out sailing with nothing else to do.” Right…except keeping the boat afloat and feeding-clothing-teaching five children! I read a couple of books and went to a seminar, and Jay took some DVD lessons, but beyond that, neither of us made much progress learning to use these gifts.

I have always been captivated by the stars and love all things old-fashioned, so the sextant seemed like a neat way to get redundancy for navigation electronics. But for practical purposes, I will never get the kind of accuracy or precision from the sextant that we will from GPS. On the other hand, if satellite communications get knocked out by something like a solar flare, we won’t be completely without options for navigating.

A few weeks ago, an opportunity arose to take an informal class (more of a home-study course with a tutor), and I set aside any free time I might otherwise have had to work on my navigating skills and learn celestial. At first I had my doubts, but after learning noon sites, the basic method for working out lines of position based on the sun, moon, planets, and stars is pretty much the same. Add some chart work with universal plotting sheets and some running fixes and voila! There you have it! So simple, so graceful…if it weren’t for all the complicated games with tiny numbers, I might even say that it’s easy. Now comes the test—not the paper and pencil test—but the actual day-to-day practice which will make me proficient and not just a beginner. Of course, with all the distractions of home life, it will be awhile before I even finish all the left-over coursework.

What I have come to realize through taking this course is that I really don’t want to be the primary navigator, but that I would like to be more involved in piloting the boat and keeping the log. I don’t think I will really do a noon sight every day to keep my dead-reckoning on track, nor will I use Jupiter to check the boat’s compass. However, after taking a few classes and working out the convoluted problems to try to find a boat’s position using heavenly bodies, I’ve come to see why the practice of navigating by the stars has not died out despite advances in technology. There is something magical about finding my place in this world by things so far out of it, and being able to use a tool that connects me to the seafarers of old.

Regarding our romantic notions about sailing, I guess we’ve gotten more realistic. If we’re relying on Jay to make music, we’ll be limited to songs with two chords, and if we’re relying on me to find our way, we’ll be late and lost!

Note: My two favorite celestial books are by Tom Cunliffe (great explanations and full-color diagrams but not very practical) and David Burch (short on theory but very practical).

I found this unfinished post from December and decided it was finished. We're ready to get outta' here, but getting ready to leave takes a lot of patience. My dad always said about vacations, "I can get ready to go, or I can go, but I can't do both."

Yearning for Adventure (December 30, 2011)

I’m practicing contentment. It’s a tough one for me. I have a real yearning for adventure, and when I feel like we’re stagnating, it takes concentration to be thankful for daily ups and downs. Just when I think I’ve got it—finally happy just where we are, even staying at the dock for another season, Jay says, “We gotta’ get out of this slip,” and off runs my active imagination, back to where we were this time last year (the Exumas) or somewhere else I’d love to go (French Polynesia).

Life with five children has no lack of daily adventure, but I long for the kind which takes us far from home and out of our comfort zones. Even the adrenaline-filled trip to the ER with Rachel brought on some kind of exhilaration that I had a hard time explaining until I recognized that the feeling reminded me of leaving the dock or navigating a shallow rocky coast. Some people like roller coasters, and some people like to go to sea. I hate roller coasters.
 

Jay and I are snowed in at the moment, which keeps us from posting. Not that we're not writing, just not finishing anything right now because we're up to our eyeballs in work.

Boat projects are his specialty, so I'll let him update when they're done, but they are tapering off at this point and we're thinking that it's time to stop working on the boat and go enjoy it for awhile.

In addition to the regular workload of home-schooling, bread-baking, and cloth-diapering, I've added a celestial navigation class to my schedule. It's really cool, something I've wanted to do for a long time, but balance goes out the window when I'm trying to work out the latitude from a noon sight. I'm feeling very compassionate towards my children right now, as learning something new humbles me. I think I know why they cry over long division and fractions.

When I come up for a breath of air, I'll write about why something so archaic as celestial made it onto our list of priorities.

I used to be very uptight about schedules. A woman with three children under three finds herself tied religiously to meal- and nap-times and doesn’t like the interruptions that make up a normal life. As I have gotten older, and have older children, I have become a little more flexible and laid back. I still have plans, but now I assume that something will come along to change them.

Today was Community Bible Study day in Sarasota, as is every Wednesday during the school year here. The kids have made friends there with other homeschoolers and I have a little time away from the kids to interact in a meaningful way with adults. But a nasty cough changed our plans—no way that we were going to go and share that with our new friends! Good thing, too, because this turned out to be one of those days that holds a beautiful surprise, not to be missed.

The weather being absolutely gorgeous, I decided we’d finish up a little schoolwork from yesterday and then go have a picnic. I am learning to make the proverbial lemonade with my lemons. So we went to one of our favorite places around here, Robinson Nature Preserve. It contains miles of hiking trails though salt marsh and scrub, boardwalks through mangrove estuary, waterways to kayak, a 70-foot observation tower, climbing trees, a small playground and plenty of interesting plant and animal life

On the way over to Robinson, I got side-tracked. Actually, I turned at the wrong place and accidentally found an organic farm co-op/CSA (community supported agriculture). So after our picnic at the preserve, a vigorous fig-tree-climb, and a hike, we headed over to the farm and investigated.

Aside from the produce they had harvested for the co-op and farm store (which included some of the prettiest red leaf lettuce, kohlrabi, beets, carrots, eggplant and broccoli I have ever seen) they also had pick-by-the-pint sugar snap peas and flowers free for the gathering with purchase of vegetables. Sarah headed off with the pruning shears toward the rows of red, orange and yellow chrysanthemums while the boys and I, with Rachel in my carrier, headed over to the row of snap peas. It was like finding buried treasure—the boys were delighted every time they discovered a plump pea pod hiding under the leaves of the plant, and they tromped back and forth in the rich black earth between the rows until they were covered head-to-toe with a fine, dark silt. Sarah returned with more flowers than she could carry, we filled the pint, and headed home for a fresh-picked snack and a swim.

Some days, despite the best planning, turn out to be a disappointment, and others work out better than you had hoped, but the best days are like this one—a gift to be unwrapped slowly and enjoyed, with just the right balance of work and play, a hint of adventure, and a memory to be made and set aside for later.