Caulk the Wagon

437 miles. 2 months in, and we’ve moved a grand total of 437 miles in our new floating home Twig. For reference, in our land life we often traveled to my parent’s house in Grand Lake, CO on weekends. That was a 200 mile round trip, which took a total of 4 hours (2 each way) on a slow day.

We’re still a bit dodgy on our sailing skills, and the weather hasn’t been cooperating, so we’ve been motoring most of the time. A 47 foot catamaran will motor along at about 7 knots if the wind and waves are in our favor (that happens about 1/3 of the time). For those of you not familiar, a “knot” is a nautical mile per hour, and 7 nautical miles is about 8 land miles. That means, on a good/fast day, we travel less than half the speed that you slow down to when you go through a school zone.

Try it next time you’re in your car. Slow down to 8 miles per hour and see how it feels. My guess is that you’ll get itching to push the pedal after about 30 seconds. If you really want to get a feel for it, go 60 miles. It’ll take you most of the day. For a little extra spice, move onto the interstate with the big trucks breathing down your neck (this is as close to a cargo/cruise ship as I can imagine).

To go 60 miles, we usually wake up at 5 am so that we can be underway with the sunrise to arrive before sunset.

The long and short of it is that our travel pace now more closely resembles the settlers on the Oregon trail than it does the frenzied pace of our lives on land. There’s something really chill, and really maddening about that. We’re forced to slow down and take the world in as it gently rolls by…but sometimes we need it to go a bit quicker.

Like when we saw a waterspout (water tornado) on the way to the Bahamas from Key Biscayne (south Florida). That would have been a super neat time to be able to travel at highway speeds.

On that same trip to the Bahamas, I saw two large cargo ships ahead. “Ahead”. They were on the horizon. For about an hour we watched them. They started out near each other. Then, as we got closer, we could see they were apart, but traveling in weird directions. If we go left, we intercept one, if we go right, we intercept the other. What are we supposed to do? I don’t want to hit a cargo ship! My kids are on board!

Take it easy Greg. We’re traveling at 8 miles per hour, and they are 40 miles away. If we get too close, we just slow down and let them pass, and move on. Slow and easy.

The pace isn’t the only part that resembles the Oregon Trail. When I was a kid, we played a game called Oregon Trail on the computer. It was a really low tech game that took place along the trail to the west. It consisted of a series of decisions that a settler needed to make along that route to the promised land. You’re at a river, do you try to float it, or caulk your wagon and ford it? Each decision had consequences, usually resulting in the death of one of your party. Float it, and you’re likely to get swept down river. Ford it, and somebody falls in (nobody could swim).

When we first started on this journey, and things were not going well, I felt very keenly that we were the pawns in some cosmic game of Oregon Trail. Let’s call this new game “The Thorny Path” (which is the name of the route most cruisers take from the east coast through the Caribbean).

Let’s play a round.

Congrats, you’ve arrived! You’re at Fort Pierce, the next stop in your journey. Do you:

a. Anchor just outside the channel
b. find a marina to tie up for the night
c. Head inland to a more protected anchorage

As you know, we chose A. As a result, we had to make a distress call to the Coast Guard. If we had chosen B, we would have been eaten by mosquitos. C would have led to a dismasting on a short bridge (we have a 72 ft mast, and most stationary bridges are 65 at best).

That’s the game of “Thorny Path” if we mimic Oregon Trail perfectly. In OT, you were lucky if one person from your party survived to the end. If that were actually true, the west would never have settled. I guess all the surviving people could have met up at the Saloon and paired up to start fresh, but that doesn’t seem likely.

But this life doesn’t mimic the game. After weathering what seemed like an endless seem of trials, our journey has gotten pretty spectacular. Clear waters, new friends, bonfires, drinking coconuts we knocked from the tree. I’d like to think that this life mimics what the settlers might have actually seen. Yeah, there were a lot of disasters, but there was also a lot of brilliance. Oceans of grass. New sights (is that a Buffalo?). The quiet of the campfire.

So, since I’m inventing this new game, I’m going to change it up. It’s not just disasters. There will be sudden squals that ruin your day (and maybe break something on the boat) for sure, but there will also be fresh tuna and a stream of perfect sunsets. The kindness of strangers, and new kinds of a music. Kids will learn science from nature, not from a text book. (Did you know that the remora fish will swim up a whale shark’s butt when they poop? I didn’t.)

This game is pretty great. We’re currently spending a couple of months cruising the Bahamas before heading to the east coast of the USA for hurricane season (July-Nov). As I write this, we’re alone in an anchorage off of a sandy beach. The only sounds I hear are the lapping of the (very small) waves on the hull, and Hunter practicing his Rubics Cube. Yesterday, we went snorkeling with our new friends on Machete, and then celebrated Cinco de Mayo with margs on their boat. Life is good, and those beautiful moments are outweighing the tough spots (like the 50 no-see-um bites on my legs, and when we hit bottom in the dinghy yesterday).

Yeah, there are scary parts ahead. The words “Hurricane Season” send shivers down my spine. However, I believe that the good will outweigh the bad, and good decisions (and the support of the cruising community) will help us weather those storms and come out on the other side for a nice sunset swim (with bugs).