Attending our first Annapolis Boat Show a few weeks ago, I felt like Alice following the rabbit, (in this case our sailing/racing friend and wannabe pirate, Isaac), down the proverbial rabbit hole...and Wonderland did NOT disappoint! I am still reeling from the legends that we met, the information we got, (the painkillers and beer that we downed), and the inspiration to “take the leap and wait for the net (read "money") to appear”.
I was first introduced to the concept of the cruising lifestyle back in 2011 when my former life had been somewhat upended. After growing up in Florida for the first 28 years of my life, I had settled into motherhood, with three young children, and moved to East Tennessee. Though landlocked, (which I endured with a silent suffering, though the distance from the water was an ever-present irritation, like a splinter I just couldn’t completely remove), it seemed the ideal place to raise a family. I enjoyed actually getting to experience seasons, especially through the eyes of my favorite little humans. After a little more than 4 years of blissful, easy living in the mountains, my then-husband had an opportunity to move to South Bend, Indiana where he could go into financing, earning lots more money. Though the idea of yet another landlocked state, (only this time with the promise of much more difficult winters), didn’t sound particularly enticing, the children and I headed up to meet him. He had gone up in February, leaving the kids and I to pack up the house, tie up loose ends, and enjoy a lovely vacation at the Outer Banks of North Carolina, (filled with hang gliding, fishing, and turtle hatchings), before making it to a new land in late June of 2011. Everything fell apart. Even looking back, I can’t fully explain how destabilizing the whole situation was. Our marriage began to quickly unravel as he become even more immersed in work and chasing the almighty dollar, while I was left to find myself in a new world without connections, without sweet tea, and without any proximity to the ocean where the kids and I had so frequently found solace and made memories. There was a lot of ugliness that unfolded. I hated enduring and won’t bother to drag you through it either, but after 4 years of homeschooling my children, I ended up sending them to public school and going back to my previous work as a teacher. I was fairly miserable, and probably fairly miserable to be around, but I had one person that, as only a truly kindred spirit can, recognized what I was missing even though I wasn’t able to really put a finger on it until years later.
This person introduced me to some really wonderful, life-changing elements during my time in South Bend. First, was the freshwater oceans of the Great Lakes, particularly, Lake Michigan. Coastal Michigan became my absolute safe haven. I remember the first time I drove into St. Joseph, Michigan. It was after a full day of school in late fall, and I was able to watch a beautiful, red sunset sky develop on the crest of ACTUAL DUNES with ACTUAL SEA OATS spreading out before, (for all practical purposes), an ocean in my hour of need. It was amazing…and a little bit of a mind-trip…I mean, it was an ocean, but with Canada geese flying overhead, and no crabs scuttling about. Unfortunately, a week later, the big snows started and stunted what I had hoped would be frequent trips to the “coast”. But on top of giving me directions to St. Joe, this friend also showed me how winters are spent in what felt like a frozen tundra to my little Florida girl soul: reading and daydreaming. He gave me two really great gifts. The first, was a copy of Cruising in Seraffyn by Lin and Larry Pardy. The second, was directions to a few boatyards in Benton Harbor, Michigan. And THAT was when the cruising bug bit me…HARD. Here, as my marriage was falling apart, and my whole life felt like a swirling snowstorm, blinding my ability to find any familiar landmarks to navigate by, here I found what had been missing all along: sailing.
I came to understand sailing as a means of being not just in proximity to, but in complete communion with the wind and waves that seemed to make up my being, my essence. It was also a means by which to establish relationships with people, and not just any people, but people who GET it. People who have similar priorities and place a premium on the same types of things as I do. It provides a way to travel to these people on the crest of the water that I was beginning to realize I desperately needed; and sailing could allow me to see the ways these other people, MY people interacted with the elements. Maybe most importantly for me at that time, I came to understand sailing as a means to do all of these things in a way that I could have some control. I could be in the presence of these huge entities like crashing waves and howling wind and yet I could still have some say so in which way I went and how far to go; it provided a sense of security and control that at that point seemed completely absent from nearly every other aspect of my life.
Since then, my three wonderful children and I moved back to East Tennessee. I met a mountain man, (who had NEVER been on a boat), that had two kids of his own. We got married, had one more baby together to complete our Brady Bunch, bought a sailboat, and then two more, (a story for another time…the one where I began collecting sailboats the way most women buy shoes), bought three more after that, and finally (just today actually) are down to our singular, Hunter 27, Nuala. We have sailed on a few other boats down in the Keys, made a summer AirBnB trip to the Abacos and camped for long weekends on our own mountain lake in Nuala. We have also planned our own “big” trip multiple times only to be thwarted by COVID, family issues, and health stuff. But we have never given up on our dream to go.
It's hard to believe that more than a decade later, here I am still as enthralled and in love with the cruising lifestyle as I came to be over that harsh, Midwest winter. Nearly 13 years to the day of that fateful trip to Lake Michigan, I found myself wandering the Annapolis City Dock, with a free beer in one hand, (Thanks Lats & Atts Magazine), and a strip of the S/V Delos sail in another. I stepped aboard boats I will NEVER be able to afford, and maybe more importantly, validated my desire to stay on a small boat. I met Lin Pardy. (Indulge me for a moment)…I MET LIN PARDY!!! I cried. I hugged people that have let us all into their lives, (looking at you Brady & Blue, the Shards, Joe Rust), to see what the world can be like when we give into the pull of the water and jump into the unknown. I listened to the practical knowledge and wisdom of how to do these things in a way that will make me feel like I’m giving my kids a gift and not some future anxiety disorder for a therapist to work out. All of that to say that 13 years after a seed was planted, the roots have fully taken hold, and something is growing.
We made it all of about 4 hours out of Annapolis when I just couldn’t hold it in any longer. “6 months”, I told my husband. “We take out a line of equity on the house, enough to pay our bills and take a 6 month trip. We commit to no more, no less, and we see how it goes.” Now let me insert here that I say these kinds of crazy things all the time. Usually it’s more along the lines of, “I want to go look at boats…we haven’t been to Charleston in a while…I know it’s 8:00 pm on a Wednesday, but if we leave now, we can be there by 1:00 am and find a cheap hotel room and spend the day looking around boat yards and marinas there.” (True story, obviously). Being the saint (and pacifist) that he is, my husband generally rolls right along with all of these things. But this time, I was nervous to ask. We’ve tried to “leave the dock” multiple times before, and every time something comes up. Every time we have talked about making “the trip” something has stifled our efforts. To be fair, in the past “the trip” has always been understood to be a permanent lifestyle change or an indefinite time frame. I felt, and hoped that he would feel, maybe something a little smaller might also feel a little more achievable. His response? “I don’t really like work that much anyway.” Sentences like that are what helped me fall in love with him to begin with.
The boat show, the people, the atmosphere, all of it gave me the push to jump back in. We plan to haul our boat out of the landlocked East Tennessee lake that it currently sits in, move it to the Tennessee River, go down the TennTom portion of America’s Great Loop, then out into the Gulf of Mexico and on to Caribbean waters. What I realized in Annapolis was that 13 years have passed; 13 years since the veil was pulled back and my heart finally understood the passion that had been placed inside of it and how to access it. I realized that in 13 years, 4 of our 6 children have grown up and started lives of their own…lives that didn’t include as much of this passion and the opportunities it unlocks as I had hoped to share with them. In 13 years, I’ve become…(gulp) middle-aged. There’s a frightening thought. I’m statistically halfway done. In 13 years, I’ve worked hard to hold onto and maintain things that really are far less important to me than they are to the rest of society and THAT is what creates my unrest and what is constantly pulling at my inner being. I realized that I really, REALLY don’t want to wait another 13 years. So with that…it begins. Wish us luck! We’ll need it! And I’ll do my best to keep you posted. To Annapolis and the Chesapeake: thanks for finishing what Lake Michigan started. I can’t wait to see where my soul meets the water next.
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