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.

Found this in an "unposted" folder. Always good to hear and heed one's own advice.

On Dirt and Love (August 19, 2011)

I am at home with dirt. I was never much of a housekeeper—though I had aspirations at the beginning. After three babies in three years, I pretty much gave up. I still make a half-hearted attempt each week to have a “cleaning day” when we team up to vacuum, dust, mop, hose down the cockpit, and wash windows, but the deep cleaning doesn’t really happen unless we have some sort of major spill that requires us lifting floorboards or emptying shelves.

“Clean” doesn’t really last, either. Maybe ten minutes. We usually finish the chores and then go for a swim. That way, I get the mess-makers off the boat and I can have a “clean” home for a few minutes. The minute we return, the mess returns as well. I try not to spend a lot of time or energy nagging, but I admit that it’s hard to balance training small people to clean up after themselves and being sensitive to how it might feel to be corrected constantly. Occasionally, I admit, I wish I could have a clean and orderly environment, and I look accusingly at my mess-makers.

I usually catch myself in these discontented thoughts and remember how awful it would be not to have them around. Sure, I’d have all the time in the world to keep my home environment spotless. But without someone coming around after I sweep to dump sand out of his pockets, the boat would simply stay clean and I’d be bored senseless. What I’ve come to realize is that dirt and love are inextricably connected. The very existence of small fingerprints, sticky spots on the table, glitter on the floor and crumbs on the cushions indicates that this home is full of love. Without all the evidence, one might miss that there are five happy, rambunctious people around here, living and working and playing and doing what kids do best: un-self-consciously making messes. Someday there will be no missing puzzle pieces to discover between the settee cushions, no more stray pencil marks, no Cheerios under the table. And then what? I hate to even think about it.

We have a saying around here: many hands make light work. Because we are all in it together, every day, we make the messes together and then we clean them up together. Perfection is a myth which leads to misery. Next time I feel like nagging, I will repeat this mantra: dirt equals love, dirt equals love, dirt equals love…

I took Rachel to the orthopedic surgeon last Monday to have some new x-rays taken of her leg to see how it was healing. We had been praying that the bone would be healed enough so that the harness would be unnecessary. Sleep deprivation was becoming an issue (not so much for Rachel, but for me). The good news? It's all good news! She grew as much bone in two weeks as it would take me six to eight weeks to grow. The doc declared her well; the injury will not cause problems for growing or walking, much to my relief. That night she slept on her tummy again and gave me a six-hour stretch and I awoke feeling human again. Each of the kids has tried a short-cut to heaven, but fortunately for me, none have been successful.