Someone Else’s Sky [#39]

On April 20th, La Cruz Boat Yard channelled its inner Strong Man and hauled all 39 gross tons of Ruby Vi’s girthy self out of the water, gently placing her on dry land for a short, but hard-earned rest. While her crew occupied their own nervous energy scrubbing barnacles from her hulls, Rubes waited compliantly for her doctors to arrive.

It was supposed to be so simple —

change the seals on both sail drives and give an extra once-over to the port drive in case there’s something more serious going on than just a leaky seal.

It took only moments for two different boat doctors to agree: the bearings are shot and the entire drive needs to be completely replaced.

Boat Life hearts clichés. Like heart hearts them.

Like, B.O.A.T stands for Bring Out Another Thousand. 

Like, "The two best days of your life are the day you buy your boat and the day you sell it."

Like, "A sailor's plans are written in the sand at low tide." 

So, true to Boat Life cliché, in with the tide and cambio de planes. Again.

There’s really a host of items on the Overall-It’s-Not-So-Bad List, not the least of which is, despite our killer run of good luck earlier this year, we definitely remember that we’ve spent an embarrassing amount of boat time getting our asses handed to us.

Consequently, we’re pretty adept at being inept.

Plus, we’ve since landed at a spectacular marina-resort in Nuevo Vallarta, are 20 minutes from an international airport — just a two-hour flight away from family we haven’t seen in over two years, and we (and the boys!) have friends summering here as well.

So, definitely some glass-half-full-of-rosé attitude warranted with this particular wipeout.

That said, there’s also some nauseatingly disgusting strawberry Spumante being served.

Most notably, sail drives are not free. Plus, you can’t just order one from West Marine; they’re not on the shelves at Home Depot; and, in a damn near crime against boat folks, they do not exist for purchase anywhere on Amazon.

Then, of course, there’s the new reality that we’ll no longer be spending the summer sailing the Sea of Cortez, sippin’ sweet tea on Sundays with our people. Instead, we’ll be sitting — sitting by one of several pools with a cocktail in-hand no doubt, but still sitting.

So what?

Ultimately, that’s the question of the hour. Literally, so what?

For two years, we’ve set aside the basics.

(Well, to be fair, we set them aside for the first year and COVID put them off for the second, but -- sixes.) 

Granted, the pandemic leveled the playing field on this one — wandering sailors aren’t the only ones who passed on last year’s wellness checkups and airplane travel and birthday parties for their nephews. An entire planet just skated through a year without being chastised by a dental hygienist for not flossing enough.

Soon after our departure from land life, it became glaringly apparent that we’d have to temporarily shelve not just the basic life-maintenance little things like trips to doctors and dentists and hair salons, but also the basic social-life little things in our relationships with friends and family on land:

the daily chitchats

the how was work?

the wanna grab a quick coffee? 

— the tiny but significant ways we were accustomed to connecting with our tribe. We did so with eyes wide open, trusting that in three-point-five years when Ruby Vi literally came full circle, we’d get them all back.

We were on the move and on a mission so good enough had to be just that — good enough.

And, to be perfectly honest, when we’re busy — sailing, traveling, exploring, playing, diving, even planning — it isn’t all that hard. It’s pretty easy to lose track of time when countries and miles and time itself pass by like shooting stars.

Those brief but frequent glimpses of sparkly space dust are enough to convince us that all that extra non-glistening sky can pretty much be ignored.

But these days, when we tell stories of our own shooting stars, we can’t even recall which sky we were under when they streaked past.

Remember when we landed that insane swordfish off the coast of Guatemala? Wait -- were we still in Costa Rica then? Or were we already in Mexico? Ugh -- hold on, I'll check my notes...

Remember those 12-foot following seas on our passage to Panama? Wait -- no -- that was on our way to Jamaica, I think. Wasn't it? Ugh -- let me check my notes...

We text these updates with our people, of course — perhaps through even the occasional-though-ever-dwindling-in-frequency FaceTime date — but we know we’re barely scratching the surface of being truly connected to each other’s lives in the way we once were. We’ve recounted our comet sightings (or at least some of them) but it’s been a long time since we’ve shared idle chitchat beneath a nondescript layer of cloud cover.

Until recently, I’d been resigned to willingly making that offering in service of the dream. Goal-getting requires a level of sacrifice, of course.

But the infant nephew I mushed close to me in a teary goodbye in early 2019 now wears dinosaur undies and speaks in complete sentences.

And each time he calls me “Moo,” my heart-seal leaks a little more than the time before.

When we talk, he regularly demands to visit the boat so he can “drive the big wheel” at Ruby Vi’s helm. Even though he’s only seen it through blurry video chats, he recognizes this shiny chrome spoke (that’s bigger than he is) as a beacon of toddler toy wizardry. And it calls to him. Loudly.

From afar, I’ve learned he loves airplanes and dump trucks and usually prefers blues and greens to those other less-desirable colors of the rainbow. I know he’ll dip a strawberry in mayonnaise if you let him (which I’m fairly confident my sister does) and that he can recite and recognize every letter of the alphabet in proper order.

I’ve definitely seen a handful of his shooting stars — but a handful no longer seems like enough.

I don’t know what it feels like when he plops down on my lap so I can read him a story. I don’t know what face he makes when he tastes a new food he thinks is gross (or isn’t adequately covered in mayo) or what toy he picks up first after he wakes from a nap. I don’t know what it sounds like when he sighs or what it’s like to run my fingers through his head of bouncy curls.

In the most generous scenario, Ruby Vi’s crew has managed to trade enough big-star-stories with our family and friends to survive our extended absence from each other. But we know we’ve lost years of the little ones:

the funniest thing that happened today at work...

the weirdest thing my kid said...

the chats about nothing over coffee on the deck or everything-and-then-some over wine on the big gray sofa... 

Since leaving the States, we’ve been resetting the Check Engine warning light on our lives’ dashboards without actually checking the engine.

We picked magic over maintenance, distracting ourselves with the ceremony of the stars, while the rest of the less-flashy night sky waited patiently to be noticed.

Because they're phenomenal human beings, our friends and family have graciously tolerated our compulsory blindness and lack of attention to the principles of basic human and relationship preservation. 

But now that we’ve practically stopped dead in our tracks, we’re recognizing the opportunity desperate need for a thorough checkup — one where we actually look past the glossy gelcoat and dig around under the hood; one where we drain off what’s left of our murky two-year-old oil and refill it anew in hopes that we might keep our moving parts moving — even while we stand still for a while. Less deference paid to the stars and more to the microscopic matter that surrounds them.

With any luck, we’ll even be able to adjust the gears that once afforded us the pace to search the sky for more than just space rocks on fire.

While this certainly isn’t the first time we’ve been “stuck” at a marina, it is the first time being stuck feels more like a gift than a punishment.

When Ruby’s boat doctors moved her onto the transplant list, they simultaneously allowed us to carve out some time to take and analyze a few life-scans of our own. With any luck, we won’t need major organs replaced — though I imagine some crazy-long hugs and in-person chats with friends and family are gonna seem just as life-saving.

(Probably a trip to the dentist wouldn't be the worst call either.)

So, for the next six months, we’ll stop staring at shooting stars and instead try to rediscover the too-long-neglected space that allowed those stars to exist in the first place.

While Ruby Vi slows to a literal halt and takes time to heal, we’ll obviously be slowing down, too, and working on some personal restorations of our own. There will be pluses to our change of pace:

we'll provision for two days at a time instead of two months and buy real half & half for our coffee; 

we'll eat (a lot of) one-dollar tacos, walk on sidewalks, and wear real clothes -- sort of; 

we'll remember what it's like to have WiFi and cell service and unlimited water and power. 

Best of all, we’ll visit family and friends; they’ll visit us, too. When they do, I hope they remember to bring their skies with them — stars, dust, clouds, and all.

We’ll talk for hours and hours over coffee and cocktails, about nothing and everything — relishing the time and space to do so.

For the next several months, we won’t be able to show our visiting crew Sailboat Magic in its intended form. We can’t sail them to deserted anchorages or give them the chance to trim the jib sheet as Ruby waddles her way across the SoC; they won’t be able to dive off of her sugar scoops to swim beside a curious whale shark. They won’t see meteors dance across our night sky.

But we will introduce them to the glories of having “resort privileges” and they will know intimately the kind of mixed-drink mojo that happens when I have enough power to use my seventeen-dollar plastic Jamaican blender.

Perhaps though, our greatest offering to all who visit, will be the miracle that is access to toilets where you’re allowed to actually put the toilet paper in the toilet. And flush it.

In the fall, once Ruby Vi and her crew have completed their treatment and recovery plans (and hurricane season abates), we intend to sail the Sea of Cortez — but we’ve let go of our rush to get there. Like us at present, the Sea’s not going anywhere. When we finally do arrive, I’m confident our eyes will involuntarily refocus on fireballs once more.

In the meantime, I’m gonna work up to feelings of gratitude for the hazy beauty of Puerto Vallarta’s light-polluted midnight sky, accepting with relative grace complacency that I probably won’t be catching a falling star here, even if I try. Instead, I’ll savor the opportunity to rediscover the view under our friends’ and family’s skies. Also, I’m gonna relearn learn how to do an oil change.

(Just kidding. I absolutely am not gonna do that.)

I might, however, recommit to flossing between all my teeth and not just the ones with visible food in them.

(You are welcome in advance for that, Dental Hygienist in My Mexican Future.)

When I’m not too busy flossing like a boss — or flushing toilet paper down one of the resort’s 97 available-to-me toilets, I’ll be camped out at Ruby Vi’s helm, bottle of Collinite and a cleaning rag in-hand, polishing that big wheel so it’s bright and shiny for the day my sweet nephew shows up to “drive.”

After all, just because we can’t see the shooting stars in our own sky these days, doesn’t mean we won’t catch a glimpse of one in someone else’s. We just have to make time to look.