This is Clouds Form Over Land, weekly writing about life at sea and going ashore.
The most unexpected gift from sailing around North America has been becoming a writer.
I recovered my love for words while typing up our sailing journey on the Azimuth blog, sharing somewhat regular observations whenever I had digested a stretch of miles down the Pacific coastline or some other happening onboard. Folks told me to keep going and I hopped on Substack to create a space to keep writing after we land in Virginia.
Most ocean sailing is either a delivery or a cruise. A delivery goes from Point A to Point B, usually on a schedule or as quickly as the weather will allow. “Crusing” is the verb of choice for the more rambling, possibly indefinite voyage, often without a destination. Our route aimed to be the best of both worlds (which means that occasionally it was the worst of both too). We wanted to get to the other side and we wanted to have a walkabout of sorts on the way. Looking back, I think it would have been much harder to jump into all this if we hadn’t already set up the ladder to climb back out.
Lining up “where” with “when” on a sailing trip is tricky, especially coming from how little weather tends to interfere with our modern life. This simple puzzle will be the fodder for more writing to come.
By nature of our “quick” trip, we weren’t getting to know any particular environment or community until we slowed down in Panama, but we were getting to know the rhythms of moving a vessel from place to place in Central America. I was connecting dots on shared histories and ecologies, as well as how to maintain a floating, adventurous household in some of the harshest conditions on earth — the ocean on any given day. I had a hunch that the lessons I was learning could be relevant to those preparing for a thru-hike, dive trip, or other extreme sports like motherhood or having a hobby alongside other work.
I also wanted to write from the perspective of “me” rather than “we”. We share most of the same relentless everyday sensations because the maximum distance apart is 36’ feet (sights, sounds, smells, atmospheric pressure drops, temperature, waves, hunger, thirst, coffee, etc.) Our whole mission is to keep the boat afloat and moving forward with us onboard, ideally in a good mood. A crew of an ocean-going vessel experiences extreme circumstances frequently — wildlife sightings, brilliant stars, mechanical failures, weather oddities, and the many other miracles of living life afloat. We move at 5 miles per hour, see almost no one we know in person,
I took a look at all that, on the heels of two years of pandemic isolation, and thought…it’d be healthy and generative to have an outlet to share how all this is going.
So where is this going? To land!
I have a backlog of sea stories and how-tos and can-dos, a couple of book ideas, and a firm belief that the best is yet to come. Living in remote jungles and deserts on a wind and solar-powered vessel taught me a whole lot about resilience, imperfection, and my relationship to the earth. We have already seen countless weather events that are evidence of changed climates, as well as habitat destruction and air and water pollution that harms us humans. There is so much we can’t control and so much we can, and I suppose our task is to thread that needle.
By taking and completing this trip, I created a somewhat blank slate for what life looks like for the rest of this year and beyond. The puzzle pieces are beginning to emerge. Back on a jungle walk in Panama, Scott compared our life in the Bay Area to an tall, elaborate sand castle with turrets and sand dribbles and sea shells. He compared our life onboard to a sturdy yet simple, lower-to-the-ground version. We’ve been gifted a clarity of priorities: partnership, community, health, nature, and creativity. I’ve found daily rhythms that support these priorities and am looking forward to seeing how they shift as more structure comes into play.
After having lots of long thinks on night watch, I think I can be of most service and ease by continuing to drive (work) in my lane. I’m seeking full-time employment in project development and operations of community and commercial-scale renewable energy.
Getting involved locally was one big motivator for moving to a smaller city and I look forward to river cleanup days and other active volunteering opportunities. Moving off of the boat means having more space for a home office, sewing table, and delightful time savers like a dishwasher, microwave, and in-unit laundry. We plan on keeping our sailboat Azimuth for many years of exploring the Chesapeake and Eastern Seaboard on weekends and vacations. I’m dreaming about car camping, container gardens, library cards, bike rides, CSA boxes, the VMFA, water polo practice,
The newsletter will press on, usually on Thursday mornings, but sometimes not, as I prioritize co-captaining this boat northward. Each season will include how-tos, works in progress, sea stories, and efficiencies for keeping house while living life on land.
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Ship’s Log:
130 nautical miles from Charleston, SC to Southport, NC
May 29 - 30, 2023: our last stretch in the ocean after almost 9000 miles at sea. The remainder of our miles will be inland waterways, rivers, and bays.
Our usual practice is to alternate who’s on watch every four hours. On-watch is spent monitoring the course and traffic, making rout changes as needed, listening to the VHF radio, scanning radar and AIS, eating and drinking and preparing eats and drinks, and cleaning if the seas allow. Off-watch is spent sleeping or resting on the couch. When on or off, we listen to audiobooks and music. The interruption of the usual night and day schedule is tiresome, but often enjoyable when padded with twelve hours of potential snoozing.
For this estimated 30-hour trip, we threw the watch schedule out the window and spent most of the time in the cockpit together, alternating naps. The sea state was nearly flat, despite two weeks of heavy breeze spinning up big waves. Most of the time was spent sailing on a broad reach in 8 knots apparent wind. An hour or so after sunset, the wind petered out and we fired up the diesel engine.
We watched the 2013 version of The Long Ranger, had teatime, ate breakfast burritos, sipped hot coffee and cold brew, delighted in weather suitable for quilts and sweaters, snuggled the cat, and saw jellyfish and dolphins in the Cape Fear River.
My usual watches: 0300-0700, 1100-1500, and 1900-2300.
For this final sail of the journey, I was on watch for the hours surrounding midnight for the first time, aside from the few “all hands on deck” moments sprinkled throughout our trip. I watched over us from 0000-0500 with a revolving mug of hot tea, journal pages, and a snoozing Scott and Cypress beside me. Sitting in that particular dark of night, I realized how much of this trip we had faced alone, together. When on watch, we each protect the other person’s rest, handling as many situations solo as possible and avoiding risks because it’s better to go slow and sleep soundly. This means we are either holding a vigil outside in the fiberglass cockpit, moving constantly with the waves, following our number one rule (stay on the boat) or off watch with an eyemask on our heads, trying to catch some zzz’s while the boat rocks and creaks according to the weather. The hardest time is when we switch at 3 AM. Scott will inevitably be counting down the minutes, and it’s an awfully early wake-up call for me, even as an early birdie. We strive to be as sweet as possible while transmitting updates on vessel traffic, course adjustments, and any oddities.
On this last passage, I spent hours sitting on an elevated seat with my legs draped over Scott’s. We didn’t have to worry about each other because we were right there. We couldn’t have swung this arrangement on our 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or even 8-day passages in rougher seas. The off-watch person can’t be jostling around or getting that much sun exposure, but for this 30-hour trip in overcast skies and on flat seas, we could send ourselves off from the Atlantic properly before heading inland.
Can Do List:
Move your body for a mile or a while (thanks Kara and Katie!)
Go to the library (thanks Mom!)
Take a nap (thanks Shelby!)
Consider how it would feel to have the opposite of what you have (thanks Emma!)
Written in the spirit of not letting what we can’t do get in the way of what we can.
Have a can-do activity to share? Bring it on!