Cruisers are just normal people who have wonderful adventures
Issue 40 : Jan/Feb 2005
Is our lifestyle suited to cruising? Or is cruising suited to our lifestyle? Which inspires the other? We haven’t the slightest idea nor does it matter. We know simply that we are happiest on our boat.
Even on the Chelsea Creek, surrounded by rusty barges and generators and cranes, a salt yard across the way, and Exxon Mobil’s holding tanks up the road, we couldn’t be happier because we’re close to the water.
We don’t particularly like to work, though we’ve both pushed 50 hours a week in the past two years. We’d rather be passing time together, doing the small things we do to maintain our home and ourselves — cooking, sanding, sewing, reading, talking, working on our boat. We’ve agreed not to raise our children in a traditional way, if you can call parenting in 2005 “traditional.” We’ll be sure to impart upon them the spice of American life — our love of cheeseburgers, an undying devotion to the Boston Red Sox, the freedom to write and speak and live the way we choose to live. So we choose to cruise, and after two years of talk, preparations are finally under way.
We are living aboard the boat we both love, paging through endless chronicles of other folks’ adventures at sea. On the shelf: Dave and Jaja Martin’s Into the Light, Alvah Simon’s North to the Night, Eric Hiscock’s Cruising Under Sail, Don Casey’s This Old Boat — about a boat very much like our own, Nigel Calder, Robin Knox-Johnston, Tania Aebi, Lin and Larry Pardey . . . all the usual suspects. And the remarkable thing we’ve found as we’ve read is that these people are normal. They’re endowed with normal (to above-average) intelligence, normal earning power, and normal ingenuity. They are down-to-earth, regular people, who do remarkable things and live remarkable lives on sailboats.
Never crossed oceans
Most aren’t rich. Some have never crossed oceans. Some sail in boats smaller than ours. The Martins have three kids; by all accounts they sound totally normal — not the unsocialized precocious “shrunken adults” our friends imagine when they hear we hope to have a baby soon and cruise as a family. Tania knew less about celestial navigation when she left New York than I do now. Lin gets seasick. Alvah was lonely in the ice. They have flaws, just like us. Yet they manage to live blessed existences — blessed by our terms at least. Our celebrities are people with whom we could share a cup of our Folger’s instant coffee. They do nothing we can’t do.
We plan to go south in the fall, under the power of an engine we have yet to install and a rig we have yet to inspect. We hope to chronicle our preparations in occasional reports: “Dispatches from the Chelsea Creek” or “How I Sailed Away from a Successful Career in Boston.” Not that any of our ideas are new or unusual; perhaps they will provide a wee bit of inspiration, if not a few laughs. As Lin and Larry Pardey said 30 years ago, “Go small, go simple, go now!” The getting ready to go is half the pleasure.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
