Clutch [#20]

The Disclaimer

The problem with being lazy in general is multi-fold, but the problem with being a lazy blogger is mostly this — sometimes, when you don’t write for over three weeks, a lot happens. When a lot happens, there’s invariably a lot to say. When there’s a lot to say, blog posts have to be long in order to say it.

But — lazy bloggers don’t like to write long blog posts. Therein lies the rub.

So here’s how I’m gonna handle this one — today, we’re gonna catch up a little. I’ll try (but not too hard) not to wax-poetic about the upside to hard-learned lessons at sea or romanticize the Sailboat Magic that happened as I offered a little bit of my father’s ashes to the Atlantic Ocean as we set sail from Charleston.

Instead, let’s connect the dots to get us all back to the same coordinates.

If you’re anything like me and like to read the last page first, here’s a spoiler — this particular chapter ends at 26.7164° N, 80.0502° W.

For those of you who’d sooner stab your eyes out than prematurely know the ending of a story, well — here’s hoping you can’t translate GPS coordinates on the fly. And, if you can — that is awesome. And you’re amazing. And also, I’m so sorry I doubted your special ability and spoiled the surprise.

The inherent beauty of this one-way conversation we're having is that if you're complaining, I can't hear you. Turns out, lazy bloggers are also a smidge rude. Who knew.

The Re-Cap

After two of the world’s largest Costco runs, selling the Raptor (John maybe cried), installing a dive compressor, filling the dive tanks, buying a bread machine (a life-changing decision, by the way), and placing our last Amazon order for the foreseeable future, our intention to leave the blindingly comfortable safety of our Charleston Harbor nest — marina, friends, boat wizards, and all — became reality.

On Sunday, October 20 we set out on our first solo passage from Charleston to St. Augustine, Florida.

Minus a few early jitters and 10,000 last-second calls to our go-to Boat Gods at Charleston Sailing School, we enjoyed a magnificently mostly-uneventful sail.

The boys took a 24-hour dose of Dramamine while they rediscovered how to walk on sea legs. Our trolling lines caught ocean muck instead of fish. Everyone furled and hoisted and trimmed sails. John and I survived two nights of night watches. (Barely, but we count it.)

Two hundred nautical miles, 40 hours, and a few unimaginative canned pea recipes later, we found ourselves anchored just outside historic St. Augustine, just as we’d planned.

Miracle of miracles.

The boys swam in the harbor and kayaked to explore a tiny island. We barbecued. We fixed some things. And we slept.

Then, knowing St. Augustine was merely a quick stopover, we found our weather window and set out again. This time, hoping another 200 miles and two days would land us in West Palm Beach where we hoped to cross the last of our must-do items off The List before making the jump to Bimini (Bahamas).

We fueled up and left St. Augustine at dinnertime, expecting to ride a beam reach on a port tack in gentle seas for the next 40ish hours.

Instead, we beat into 20 knots of apparent wind, 25 degrees off our nose, while five-foot swells juiced up in the locker room and transformed into 14-foot monsters before midnight.

Enter The Fear Factor

For every two people who tell us we’re living their fantasy, two others say The Boat Dream is their worst nightmare — a sentiment that seems entirely foreign to me. How could literally sailing off into the sunset be anyone’s nightmare?

Full-time Boat Life has required more than a handful of adjustments — emotionally, physically, financially — but dealing with fear hadn’t been one of them. Until recently.

Perhaps, we were a bit emboldened by our successful first passage. Perhaps we were naive. Maybe marina life numbed us to the realities of open water.

Probably all of the above is to blame.

As night fell, cloud cover swallowed any would-be moonlight like a hungry black hole and Ruby Vi blindly slammed her way through the swollen ‘roid-raged seas. Fresh off of her Hurricane Dorian win, and true to form, she beat them down like a heavyweight champ, but it wasn’t pretty. And it certainly wasn’t comfortable.

Ruby Vi in battle mode is shotgun-loud and dynamite-jarring. And also borderline terrifying.

In theory, the obsessive approach to safety John and I adhere to — everything from knowing the weather to proper passage routing to wearing our PFDs on deck when we’re in open water — should mostly eliminate cause for fear.

False.

The ocean is the game maker. Always. She makes the rules. She changes them. We’re just pawns on her waterboard.

It’s easy to lose sight of the distinct fact that this is the game we gave up everything to play. For six months now, we’ve flip-flopped between two realities: the Candyland monotony of the day to day and the roulette wheel adrenaline rush of living out our Someday-Thing.

But now, as our passage south to the Caribbean and beyond is finally underway in earnest, we’ve met new players. And they are fierce.

We expected the arrival of Palm Trees and Mega-Yachts and White Sands and 80-Degrees-All-Day. We welcomed Anchorages and Provisioning and even the challenges from Now-We-Don’t-Have-a-Car.

But we forgot about The Fear Factor. We forgot that the ocean is scary. We forgot that sometimes we’ll get forecasts and models and route plans wrong. We forgot that the rules can — and will — change on a dime and without warning. We knew, of course. But we forgot.

This game requires us to suit up every day with more moves than ex-lax in our playbook. But only now are we getting a chance to put that sort of forethought into action.

We didn’t make it to West Palm Beach from St. Augustine. We bailed out in Daytona.

Somewhere between sheer luck and sheer luck, we made it through Ponce de Leon Inlet in the dark. (Not our finest hour of decision-making. And, if you’re familiar at all with this particular inlet, you might argue this was actually our worst.)

Bygones.

We motored up and down a bridge-less stretch of the ICW in the dark looking for an open anchorage, aided by two hundred-dollar spotlights and an unnecessary amount of nervous yelling loud-talking.

At 6:00 a.m., delirious and defeated by crowds of already-anchored boats, we ended our search, tied up to a random marina T-head, and passed out.

After regaining consciousness, we made our way to a legitimate dock slip where we spent three lovely — and calm — nights. While happily playing the role of Daytona Tourist, we awaited our next weather window — one we’d undoubtedly be more critical in choosing.

There’s an obvious difference between knowing and experiencing — between learning and doing. Of course we knew — we’d studied, we’d learned.

But it’s hard to truly know how to furl in a headsail in high seas under a moon-less sky at 3:00 a.m. while being pelted with rain and waves until you actual have to do it.

Check.

It’s easy to understand that catamarans are inherently victims of loud and violent bridge deck slapping when beating into the wind and waves.

But, until you’re actually standing in the galley, holding on to a grab rail to stay upright, watching four 20-pound bar stools bounce about the salon like drunk pogo sticks, it’s hard to actually get it.

We get it now.

From Daytona, we painstakingly chose our next weather window, nervous but eager to finish what we started. On October 28, we set out for Solo Passage Number 3. Daytona to West Palm Beach.

Since I loosely promised no waxing poetic, I’ll leave you with this — we are better sailors today than we were when we left Charleston. We’re smarter and stronger. We’re more critical of information and more analytical in how we process it.

I wonder on an hourly basis if we could’ve prepared more or better or differently.

Of course we could have. But at the end of the day, there’s simply no substitute for actually doing. More times than I can count in my life, I’ve found myself in the middle of a game I can’t remember learning how to play. My options are always the same: walk away or fake it till I make it.

The lazy-in-general in me is a big fan of walking away — unless the walk it too far. Or uphill. Or, say, across an ocean.

So fake it till we make it, it is. We’ll continue to make mistakes, but they’ll (mostly) be different mistakes than the ones we’ve already made.

This week, we got off the sidelines. We moved past the stakes-free scrimmage and finally played the real game. We missed some easy shots, but we hit some too. We even sank a few lucky ones from outside.

As my earlier spoiler alerted, we made it to West Palm Beach. In a few days, we’ll make it to Bimini. From Bimini, we’ll make it to Nassau to collect dear friends. From there, we’ll keep going. And going.

We don’t understand everything about this game we’re playing, but we know we’re not going back to the sidelines.

We’re in the lineup to stay and we’ll keep launching 3s from the corner until they hit.

Lazy Molly reminds me constantly that it’s easier to warm the bench — that no one on the bench ever agonizes over missing the game winning jumper from the elbow.

Silly Molly. No one on the bench knows what it’s like to make it either.