McCall, Idaho
We are finally (we hope) looking at the backside of the collective insanity that has put numerous boundaries on our pursuit of happiness in the past two years. The dreaded bat flu felled us well before it was a topic on the nightly news, but worse, it put our plans to return to the South Pacific on hold. What we thought and hoped would be a hiatus of only a couple of months at most turned into a lot longer, so long that Harl can’t even remember where he put the notebook with the cruising plans scrawled in my illegible hand.
So, now we start with a blank sheet of paper, a couple of ball points courtesy of our local bank (best free pens ever), Jimmy Cornell’s World Cruising Routes, the Pilot Charts for the South Pacific Ocean and the ever helpful, but often scary, internet, all within an arm’s reach from where we sit on the couch, 2,207 nautical miles from where our Deerfoot 63, Kailani, tugs against her lines in Annapolis.
When we pulled into Norfolk in the late fall of 2019 after a five-month leisurely coastal dalliance all the way to Halifax we had planned to resume our travels the following spring. Any sailing plans we made in Norfolk, however, were trashed after the Great Shutdown started in the late winter of 2020. With no end of the lockdown restrictions in sight, we opted to sail Kailani up to Annapolis and get some work done. It took until May of that year for the all-knowing wizards in state government to lift the restriction which prohibited movement of vessels into Maryland from anywhere outside the State. In hindsight, this sounds surreal.
Of course, once the work started, it took on a life of its own. The refrigeration system which we had fixed in Marmaris, Palma, St. Lucia, Colon, Panama City, Cabo, San Francisco, Neiafu (twice), Savusavu, Opua, Singapore, and Simonstown got junked, and a brand new, water-cooled system with digital controls (so 21st century) got mated with our 30 year-old big box reefer and freezer cold plates. Now we can keep ice cream, and the redundant refrigeration gauges hang forlornly in the engine room.
Although the refrigeration was our personal nemesis and needed replacement if for no other reason than to preserve the sanity of the crew, the rig was getting a bit long in the tooth and while we never had a hint of a problem, insurance underwriters are not so easily persuaded that 16 year-old over-designed rod rigging is an acceptable risk. So, we bit the very large caliber bullet and decided not just to replace the rod, but heck, pull, strip and repaint the mast and boom and rebed all the fittings on both. We also had new chain plates made up; we kept the old ones, four massive slabs of 316 stainless, although Harl is still not sure why.
And then there was the air conditioner. Rarely is it needed but try hanging out in Colon for two weeks waiting for a Canal transit or for a month in a marina in Malaysia waiting on parts without air conditioning. And as a matter of fact we found a lot of the North American east coast in summer ranks right up there in debilitating heat and humidity. Anyway, we have a brand new 16,000 btu water cooled a/c unit.
Those were the main items on the getting-ready-to-sail-away-work list, and they were all largely completed by the spring of ’21 when we returned to Kailani with big plans. We got after a bunch of the small stuff but unfortunately, we once again found ourselves all dressed up with no place to go as the world (at least the Caribbean, the South Pacific Islands and our ultimate landfall, New Zealand) remained stubbornly closed to ocean crossing sailors. So we piddled about the Chesapeake for a month or so (which is not what Kailani, or the two of us for that matter, were designed to do) before making the heart-wrenching choice to give up the life and sell the boat. Just before the 4th of July 2021 we stripped her clean, loaded up our truck and trailer, shed a few tears and slogged our way back to the mountains of Idaho, our lock-and-leave stateside home.
There are two reasons a boat doesn’t sell. One, it’s priced too high. But if we were to receive our asking price and even managed to stiff a broker or two along the way (just kidding), we wouldn’t have enough cash to buy anything close to her, at least anything that is purpose built to cross oceans in comfort, safety and with a turn of speed that is the envy of most monohull sailors. The second reason a boat doesn’t sell is that fate has a different plan. Being suckers for the fate argument, if she doesn’t sell by September 1, we are convinced we are destined to drop the dock lines and make a late February Canal transit.
But making the decision is the easy part. The reality is that two years is a long time and things don’t remain static. Pushing us off the dock is our daughter who, after being raised on the ocean and getting through eight years of Kailani Boat School graduating number one in her class, is off to a boarding high school this fall. We should point out that this is her decision which as parents who have counseled independence, we must, of course, support. We will miss her terribly for the usual reasons, but as we resume the three-on three-off watch system we’ll particularly miss the extra sleep a reliable third crew member affords.
Which brings us to the force pushing us on the dock: age. When we sailed around the world the first time almost twenty years ago, life was simple. The boat, our Hans Christian 41, Manu Kai, was slow and forgiving and admittedly, we were a lot younger with no kid on board. We were 10 years older when we left on our circumnavigation aboard Kailani with our young daughter, and now we are 10 years older than back then, although we are back to no kid on board. The back side of seventy can bring health issues, although the sailing life seems to have been easier on us than on many of our landlubber friends. Nevertheless, the prospect of one of us getting injured or falling ill while thousands of miles from the nearest port and the other having to single-hand Kailani the rest of the way gives us pause. On the other hand we have had the privilege of making the acquaintance of numerous septuagenarian and octogenarian single handed sailors around the world and they manage quite well, often under far more difficult conditions.
There is the suggestion that we take on crew for the ocean passages, and this may wind up being our own type of insurance. But insurance has a cost, and the price we must pay is sharing our life at sea. This probably sounds selfish but there is a magic in two crew who are life partners sailing long distances together. There are a few sailors/friends out there who would be great crew for weeks on end, but in over thirty years in the sailing/cruising community, we’re hard pressed to name but a few, and most of those are out there still carving their own wakes.
There is also the saying that you can’t go home again. It’s somewhat disheartening to think that anchorages we found empty are now cheek by jowl with sailboats from everywhere, and that some of the remote islands where we made many close friends now have cell service and the cultural dislocation it brings. Not that we begrudge progress; we’ll just need to adjust our expectations accordingly because it is the time with old friends that matters (although we would still prefer a deserted anchorage).
There is also the question that often comes up: what do we do if Kailani sells? The thought of being without a boat for the first time in thirty plus years is disquieting. There is something about living aboard and knowing that you are connected to every land mass on the planet that gives comfort. Would we get another boat? Maybe, but it would have to be because we wanted to do something different: like cruise the Bahamas in the winter and the high latitudes in the summer for which a trawler would be best suited (perish the thought say our sailing friends). Or maybe we get past it all, load up the camper with our kayaks and stay close to our mountain home waiting patiently for an invitation to join one of our sailing friends in some exotic locale for a brief respite on the water.
In the end, we’ll let fate decide.
