Last week I saw our boat for the first time. (In fact, it was the first time any of us have been aboard since we took ownership last June.) I arrived at the small, private marina in Puerto Vallarta where we are renting a slip until we move aboard. After the bump and surge and dust of the local bus, the marina was positively serene. It is a postcard of cozy multicolored villas, skirted by palms and giant bird of paradise plants, and with a small, still harbor home to fishing boats, sailboats, and a couple large power boats. I walked down a brick and stone path and stood for a long moment regarding our boat with excitement and a pinch of fear.
Until that moment, I don't think I'd acknowledged, even to myself, my quiet fear. What if upon boarding I realize we'd made a big mistake? What if I find the cabin dark and claustrophobic? Most of all, what if I can't imagine our family living happily there?
The long, narrow, plastic ports squinted at me. The teal canvas looked cheerful and sharp. And then I was aboard and turning the key and shoving the companionway hatch open, feeling so completely focused and thrilled to be there.
Excited to be there!
Heat billowed out of the hatch, carrying the smells of diesel, mildew, and head. I scanned the interior. Nothing obvious was wrong, but everywhere my eyes rested there were surfaces to oil, or polish, or clean. My strongest initial impression was that this boat really needed someone to inhabit it--which is what I was there to do, if only for a week. (Note: our boat sitters are excellent and conscientious. My impressions did not stem from any negligence on their part; on the contrary, they have gone above and beyond more than once.)
My mom arrived that evening and we spent a productive six days scrubbing, inventorying, measuring, and making a few simple repairs. Each evening we rested over a delicious meal and a margarita at a local restaurant, and each morning we started up again. By the end of the week, we'd covered every inch of the boat.
Aside from adding a thousand and one items to our to-do list, I learned that the Fuji 40 has an incredible amount of storage for the size of the boat, miles of headroom, and woodwork of rare beauty and precision--after 30 years each drawer glides smoothly into place and doors close with a satisfying click. The topsides are functional and free of ornamentation, with wide side-decks and and an expansive foredeck. In short, it is a lovely boat with a superb layout, and I can't imagine a better choice, either aesthetically (for me), or functionally (for my family).
Remaining are the needling fears I have been aware of since we began our 5-year plan. I fear for the safety of my children aboard--though rationally I know they will be safe. I fear for our finances--well that one isn't irrational at least. I fear leaving everything and everyone behind, not returning. Yet, I'm comforted that these fears amount to little compared to my overwhelming feelings of excitement for the adventure before us.
Police aboard a panga, enroute to s/v Adena, anchored in Laguna
Diamante, near the mouth of Honduras's Rio Tinto. La Prensa.hn, Tela, Honduras, December 4, 2010
This week, Latitude 38reported online that Milan Egrmajer, a 58-year-old Canadian cruiser of the vessel Adena, was murdered over the weekend by armed thieves. Adena, an Ericson 35, was anchored peacefully in a remote Honduran anchorage called Laguna Diamante. Little else is known at this time, but his adult daughter was aboard and survived, so we will soon learn more.
News such as this is broadcast quickly throughout the cruising community, via a real communication grapevine. Because friendships are made quickly before boats sail in opposite directions, the grapevine exists to shorten the seeming distance between geographically dispersed members of the community. In the couple years Adena has been out cruising, boats and crew she crossed paths with have scattered about the world. Some will hear about the tragedy via SSB radio nets, and will spread the news on morning VHF nets. Some will share recollections of their encounters with Adena and her crew in cockpit gatherings.
Cruisers will mourn the loss and be eager to learn where and how this happened, hoping to gain or reinforce knowledge they can use to safeguard themselves.
This tragic event is not isolated, but neither are attacks on cruisers common. In fact, these types of senseless, predatory crimes happen so infrequently, and their circumstances so peculiar, that their likelihood doesn’t merit much worry. What these crimes do is to:
open the big—yet quiet—debate among folks heading off cruising about whether or not to carry firearms aboard.
remind everyone to carefully consider whether or not you will fight intruders to protect your property, or cooperate fully to expedite the removal of your valuables and minimize the risk of conflict.
cause cruisers to evaluate the measures they can take to make their boat a bit less attractive to boarders, such as a very bright spotlight as a powerful deterrent to approaching vessels/people at night, such as alarms that are set to be tripped by boarders, and which can potentially scare off bad folks who aim to be stealthy.
encourage people to adopt best practices wherever they go, such as not flashing your relative wealth nor engaging in criminal commerce, such as buying drugs.
We don’t consider the risk of a run-in like this to be high. But should those odds fail us, we will do, and will have done, all we can to lessen the potential for a tragic outcome.
I am very sorry for Mr. Egrmajer, his daughter, his family, and his friends. I cannot imagine.
Aboard the Casey J II in Tortola, BVI 1988, the year before Hugo
Like most, I'm loosely familiar with the devastation wrought by the biggest hurricanes to hit North America in my lifetime: 2005's Katrina and 1992's Andrew.
What's harder to come by is information about the impact of these events on the cruising community. Sure, I read the Katrina-related articles by cruisers in the sailing magazines. Years ago, I watched an intimate yacht club presentation by a cruiser who buckled down in Hawaii and survived Hurricane Iniki as it passed over. I read Toast's harrowing posts about weathering 2009's Hurricane Jimena in Santa Rosalia, Mexico. I've read the Pardey's account of December 1982's rare winter storm that put 29 cruising boats on the beach.
For all of that, I've never seen anything like the compelling video below. I've never seen anything that better describes the impact of a major hurricane on the cruising community. It is an hour-long collage of interviews of a small number of sailors who survived 1989's Hurricane Hugo in the Virgin Islands. The video was made shortly after the storm hit and it ain't the cleanest, but the grainy, unpolished quality--and the fact that the impressions were recorded so soon after the fact--brings the thing to life.
Winds of Hugo were recorded at 200 miles per hour; 190 boats were wrecked ashore.
I found the link to the video on Fatty Goodlander's site, and he and his family are featured prominently. Fatty tells of trees blowing into his rigging and of stanchions pushed down vertically, straight through his deck and into the cabin--all the while with his wife and child taking cover on the cabin sole.
More amazing than the superlatives used by everyone in this video to try and describe their experiences (with a goat aboard!?!), are the descriptions of camaraderie, of cruisers helping cruisers before, during, and after this astounding meteorological event. Camaraderie is an ironic attribute of a community comprised of determined individualists, a community to which we will soon return.
Tonight, I asked Windy to not renew our subscription to Latitude 38. It seemed to her a weird request.
Every month I look forward to the newest edition arriving in the mail. I've considered feigning sickness on those days, just so I could beg a bit of quiet time alone in bed, free of parenting and household responsibilities, to dive into the latest issue. (I subscribe because the magazine, while free and widely available on the West Coast, is no place to be found in D.C.).
I've been reading Latitude 38 since the early nineties. I recall quarter-mile walks from my boat to the marina village at Ventura Harbor to pick up a few copies of the latest issue for myself and my neighbors, spending the next few hours in the cockpit, making my way through it, reading nearly every word, tearing out snippets from other cruisers writing from the far away places I planned to visit. I remember when color first found its way into the newsprint rag, first on the cover, then on the insides. I remember as the world wide web dawned, the publisher, Richard Spindler, opining confidently that there really didn't seem to be a need for an online presense for the magazine, that things would remain as they were, analog.
I remember when Latitude 38 sponsored and launched the first Baja Ha-Ha in '94. In fact, I remember that when we untied the docklines and headed south in 1996, we didn't participate in the Ha-Ha only because the nominal (and reasonable) entry fee would have busted our cruising kitty. We were low-budget cruisers; the entry fee was something like $85 bucks. I remember while cruising Mexico, in Mazatlan, hearing on the morning VHF net that a fellow cruiser had returned from the States with a few copies of Latitude, hot off the press--and the scramble to get my dinghy launched in a bid to secure a copy.
So, tonight I asked Windy not to renew. Not to renew because--assuming we've sufficiently appeased the real estate gods and our house sells quickly after listing it--we will not be here for all of the next 12 months! It's hard to justify the $50 subscription when I can read it online. In addition to just plain cutting costs for the sake of this trip's kitty, we will be using a mail forwarding service and want to minimize the amount of stuff they have to ship to Mexico. Ending our Latitude 38 subcription is the first concrete step towards that effort and it really brings it all home. We...are...leaving. The chair I'm sitting in now as I type this, the living room around me, the sounds of the bedtime routine drifting down from upstairs: we are leaving it all. In months. Whoa.
Back in July, I wrote a post about dinghies: what they are and why they're so important to cruisers (read The Cruiser's Car). I ended the post by describing the fine dinghy that came with our boat, and our intention to get rid of it: "Once back in the States, we plan to purchase a new hard dinghy and new motor…a very specific hard dinghy and motor. More on our dinghy plans and rationale in a future post…"
So here we are.
We plan to get rid of the dinghy that came with our Fuji 40 because it will not meet our needs. Why won't it meet our needs? Because we need our dinghy to be more than a dinghy.
We made a very deliberate decision not to carry a life raft aboard Del Viento. This decision flies smack in the face of the prevailing cruiser mindset. No life raft? Insanity!
Not insane, practical...logical. Instead of going to sea with the de rigueur blow-up life raft, we plan to outfit our dinghy such that it may be used as our lifeboat. To get an idea of how radical and contrary this idea is among cruisers, read the admonition in the recent Toast Floats post Preparing for Disaster. I'm actually surprised more folks don't adopt this approach (of course, it doesn't work with an inflatable dinghy and inflatables make such outstanding dinghies, it would be difficult to sway inflatable lovers). But none other than Lin and Larry Pardey are proponents of the don't-carry-a-life-raft-aboard-instead-use-your-dinghy-as-a-lifeboat philosophy, and they are highly regarded in the cruising community (though, now that I think about it, their respected choices are rarely followed).
If we wanted our dinghy to serve only as our dinghy, it would be difficult to justify replacing what we have. As a dinghy, our Mercury inflatable is large and stable, hard to beat. Even more surprising: Our Fuji 40 comes with a life raft too, a four-person Plastimo with a certification that expired in 2009. We'll sell this in the States too.
Some definitions: A life raft is usually either packaged in a valise and stored in a locker, or packaged in a canister and stored on deck. If your boat is sinking, you toss one or the other into the water and (hopefully) watch your new plastic salvation inflate. A lifeboat is what larger vessels carry--I'm talking ships (remember the lifeboats on the Titanic?). They don't inflate, they just are.
Of course, the reason most cruising boats and other smaller vessels carry life rafts rather than lifeboats is size. Now our boat isn't any bigger than the average cruising boat (a bit smaller actually, at 39.1 feet LOA), and we certainly could not carry a dedicated life boat. But by dual-purposing our dinghy, we won't have to.
While adopting this approach puts us in the minority (way in the minority), we think it makes total sense. Following are the points I think are important when comparing the life raft to the dinghy-as-life-boat (DALB), as I see them:
A life raft, even recently serviced, may not inflate. This is not uncommon. [A dinghy-as-life-boat (DALB) is a sure thing, you use it daily and know it works.]
A life raft is passive, with no means of locomotion. [A DALB will have a sail kit stored aboard (sail, mast, rudder, lee boards). This may allow you to sail yourself ashore or into shipping lanes.]
A life raft is subject to puncture and chafe. [A DALB is hard, not subject to puncture or chafe, and is unsinkable.]
A life raft requires regular repacking at considerable expense. Though there are facilities worldwide, you will have to coordinate your travels carefully to be located near one when you need to have your raft serviced. [A DALB is maintained by you.]
A life raft with a hydrostatic release deploys automatically. If things go down hill quickly and you find yourself in the water, the raft will likely bob to the surface and inflate soon after. [A DALB will be secured on deck while underway and will have to be unsecured and deployed manually, perhaps in challenging conditions.]
While Lin and Larry built their own DALB, they are Lin and Larry and we are not. Fortunately for us, almost 10 years ago, David Hulbert, a retired engineer in Portland, Maine, designed and built a prototype DALB he calls the Portland Pudgy. His prototype was so effective he decided to make more and he built a company. They are not cheap, and many think they are not pretty, but they are awesomely practical. Mr. Hubert brought his Pudgy to the the 2007 Annapolis Sailboat Show. Windy and I talked to him at length and even sat in the thing, trying to determine if it would be big enough for our 2011 family. We decided at the time it was, but Portland Pudgys have not returned to the show, so we've not had a chance to confirm what we decided then.
Following is a video interview with David Hulbert demonstrating the boat for BoatingLocal.com (read their complete review):
Also, the Pudgy offers other benefits over an inflatable dingy: it's fun to sail (doubling as an instructional water toy for the girls), it tows well (litlle resistance), it features internal storage (all of the safety and sailing gear are stowed aboard always), and it rows easily.
A couple months ago, Peter Neilsen, SAIL magazine's editor-in-chief, reviewed the Pudgy and wrote of the size: "The Pudgy is USCG-rated to carry up to four people, but they’d better be slightly built and very good friends; there are limits to what you can expect of a 7ft 9in dinghy with the floor area of a four-person liferaft."
He ended the review with the following endorsement: "It’s tough, functional and practical, and if the choice came down to climbing into a traditional life raft or boarding the Pudgy, I know where I’d rather be. For a cruising couple or a family with small children, the Pudgy makes a lot of sense."
Now, more on our dinghy motor plans in a future post...
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Voyaging With Kids
“If you’re thinking of cruising—full time or part time—you’ve got to read this book. Even if you don’t have kids aboard!” Carolyn Shearlock, author of The Boat Galley Cookbook
In our twenties, we traded our boat for a house and our freedom for careers. In our thirties, we lived the American dream. In our forties, we woke and traded our house for a boat and our careers for freedom. And here we are.
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