Salvio Sails!

We just got to wherever we are right now. (Mom note: We are on a mooring at the Sunset Bay Marina in Stuart.) I am looking forward to going kayaking today (Mom note: We are not going kayaking today.)

I had Cheeze-Its, cottage cheese and cucumbers for lunch. It was delicious.

We just were motoring for four hours to get here. We saw a great blue heron, and it looked really cool when it flew, spreading its neck out and wings.

There are two seagulls off of the stern of the boat right now. I am going to name them. They are Mr. and Mrs. Mask, because they look like they have masks on their faces.

Okay, bye!

Love, Violet

We woke up onboard this morning (where thankfully we also fell asleep- otherwise someone would have had some ‘splainin’ to do) to the sound of what must have been an alligator thwacking near the hull, due to the noise level (and precise thwackage meter I am known to possess). A nice wake up call, really, and despite the 50 degree temps on the boat, it was lovely to wake up on the water.

It was delightfully possible to do so thanks to the super speedy completion of the checklist that we had yesterday. We ended up launching early, which in turn made all of our other stowing and organizing begin sooner, which of course ultimately made the end-of-day beer a)come sooner and b)taste better.

Cabins are prepped, galley and head are clean, the salon has a few empty horizontal spaces, and future projects are planned out. We upgraded a few things this year, including storage for the girls’ clothing. They previously had bins at the foot of their bunk, which the expiration date is quickly approaching on due to the length of Lily’s legs. In preparation for that, we hung shoe organizers on their door, thanks to Ruach’s idea, and voila! Easy access.

The kids made a house, and their first Family Game, out of a cardboard box. They’ve been dumpster diving for parts and bits and bobs to make it a home, and everyone at the marina seems to stop in for a picture. I’m not sure if they’re pleased to see kids not entertaining themselves with screens, or if they’re recording the scene for future DHS fodder, but either way, it’s kept them occupied for hours, so we’ll take our chances.

Today is provisioning day, and a day largely spent in Stuart, acquiring last minute list items before a hopeful shove-off tomorrow. We’ll spend a night in Stuart on our way out in order to have our rig tuned, and then we’ll be off and heading south via the intercoastal waterway. It’s a loose plan, of course, since we know better than to anticipate perfection in timing when it comes to cruising!

In true Allen style, we’ve acquired a catchphrase on this trip that weaves its way into multiple situations, almost none of them applicable to the phrase itself. When pulling out of my Dad’s driveway four days ago after our goodbyes, Andy stopped the car quickly with his window down. “Is that a knife in the driveway?” he asked my father. My Dad walked in front of the car, bent down and came up with a decent-sized serrated knife. “Why yes it is!” he casually replied. The fact that this surprised no one present, including the girls, is the best part. Who doesn’t have a knife on their driveway?! Anyway, it caught us all in the funny, and now every time someone thinks of Granddad, knives, driveways, or anything, really, one of us says it and the rest of us crack up. It really doesn’t take much with this crew.

On a boat note, we’ve made it to Indiantown, and our Chickadee! After a couple of hours of cleaning, unpacking and stowing, we saw that we’d not make enough progress before nightfall to have two cozy bunks, so we shifted course and went into Stuart to pick up our serviced dinghy engine, our new cockpit cushions and other supplies before finding a room to stay for the night.

We’re on the road back to Chickadee, and we launch this morning at 11. Pictures to follow!

Six hours to Chickadee, or so says our trusty GPS.

Yesterday’s Charleston finale included a relaxing morning, a catch-up brunch with the person who introduced us to Charleston in the first place (and hooray for that!), a stroll on Sullivan Island’s beach despite the chill, some shopping, and dinner with friends with Southwest Harbor ties. All in all, a delightful day, and we’re happy to have been able to sneak in a side trip on our southbound journey.

Now we look ahead to the immediate future, which includes provision lists, as much computer work as possible while we have good wifi at the marina, and ‘get-the-boat-put-together’ lists that are so daunting each year. The transfer of materials out of the boat, into the boat, out of the car and into the car is a Tetris challenge that I love, though tricky at times. (We keep a lot of deck gear down below while the boat is in storage, so that has to come out to make room for the contents of the car, which need to be emptied in order to grocery shop and to be able to stow any boat-related gear that we opt not to take on our sail (extra sails, extra cushions, e.g.). It’s a two day game of ‘schlep this box/bin/bag’ in one direction or the other, and sometimes both, which is as satisfying as it is maddening.

The girls will spend their time reacquainting themselves with the yard and its cast of characters and activities. We are regularly informed about new boats coming in (more dependably so if they have pets of any kind), what Jessie and Alex are up to (the two yard crewman who operate the travel lift, which is in constant motion this time of year), and what treasures may be found on the ‘Free’ table in the lounge area. Joined together with the Ruach kids, they are like a band of low-rent Eloises, skibbling around and scoping the scenes.

Back to more planning and list-making on this car trip while I still have time on my duff!

After twenty three hours of travel from door to door, which included   18 hours of driving in the rain (no picnic there), and not the best of sleep for anyone trying (except for Violet, who got her forty winks), we realized our first trip goal and pulled into Charleston, South Carolina.

Andy and I lived here a lifetime ago, and hold it fondly in our hearts, so we were really excited to introduce the girls to the city. After a shower and a rest at our hotel, we toured the town, including a stroll on the docks at City Marina, our old home (on a boat we worked on). A visit to the market, food breaks and plenty of reminiscing went on.

We then met up with a dear friend and her kids for dinner (our kids had never met as non-babies!), and clicked instantly back into comfort, as you do with friends whose relationship distance is ever only geographical.

Lily’s dinner experience was much more ‘nap’ than ‘food’, but it gave V a chance to work on sketches. (This one is a picture showing Violet carrying Lily back to the car in her current snoozy state.)

Today we’ll visit more friends, tour the lowcountry a bit more, and continue resting up for tomorrow’s arrival at the boat. Stay tuned!

 

And so it begins again. Andy is just home from a Chickadee prep visit in Florida, and I have finally turned my attention to the matters of packing at hand. While he’s been chipping away at the boat work list (reassembling the rig after a mast paint job this summer, new wiring down below, a new stem fitting on the bow, and the dozens of other odds and ends that find their way to necessity), I have begun the less dramatic part of cruise planning. Kids are doctored, dentisted, pets have their winter homes secured, packing lists are beginning, school planning is… hmm. Not so much in the works, but that’s next.

The countdown to the trip (we head out mid-January) is certainly sped up by the onslaught of the holidays, which is good and bad. We are oh-so-anxious to get to the boat, but still far from prepared. I have school programs to plan, meds to gather, storage organization to organize! And yet there are presents to wrap. Dang.

 

 

 

 

Whelp, here we are. The northern home. Snow on the ground, temps painfully below freezing, kids scattered around the house on reunion play dates, full dockets to plan for our first Monday mornings back, and a completely different set of routines and guiding forces. I even just woke from a dream about painting our stovepipe, for Pete’s sake. ‘Real’ life sure did crash back pretty quickly.

Once more, the girls, who no doubt adore their Chickadee time, have mentally and satisfyingly assimilated seamlessly, with only thoughts of seeing friends, their favorite parts of school ahead and playing in the yard and in our incredible surrounding spaces here on MDI dictating their new time.

Andy and I… less so. It’s hard to let go of something so special, especially when that special is accompanied by truly pleasant forecasting not seemingly aimed at harming you (forget the hurricanes, people, I’m simply talking about 78 degrees and a level of humidity that doesn’t suck your airways to a crisp). Aside from the fact that we drove out of New England in January and traces of head colds were instantly forgotten only to rear their heads again upon crossing the state line again, it’s hard to give ourselves up to our world here, to leave our ‘Cocoon of Four’. I have always loathed when parents of older children use the phrase “just wait, you’ll see” when referring to an ‘age-tied’ experience that they’re having with their child (who in the heck says my experience will follow theirs?!), but man, one day, Lily and Violet will see. They’ll know what we mean, and why we’re a bit sulky for now. We are excited to see family and friends, and we love our jobs and our life here, so we know that this too shall pass. For now though, our thoughts are still with the boat, and how she’s doing without little toes dancing on the bow and one particular monkey swinging from her davits. She also has the ability to boast that we can put dishes away without moving our feet, a fact we were painfully reacquainted with when we got home and had to schlep those plates around. (Blessedly our house isn’t that much bigger than our boat, so the ‘schlep’ was hyperbolic, indeed.) That is to say that our sweet Chickadee provides benefits to our lives that only increase as time goes on; we’re ever so grateful.

See you next year, old girl.

There have been so many goodbyes for us this week, it’s hard to keep track of our various states of sadness, anxieties and on the flip side for a few things, excitement. In addition to saying goodbye to our dear Ruach compadres/winter family (for the short while until we make the large island-crossings on MDI this summer), we said goodbye to our Jensen Beach friends as well. We’ve also said goodbye to warmth on our skin, any semblance of decent TexMex for months to come, Indiantown Marina and our beloved Chickadee. We’re also also in the stages of saying goodbye to the sun as we’ve known it, our flip flops, and what’s becoming my favorite stretch of Florida driving-the back roads to Indiantown through cattle farms edged in palms and pines.

Saying goodbye to flip flops seems like a minor complaint to have, but the implications are terrifying to think of. In an effort to ‘be fancy’ at one point about a month ago, V wore socks one day, which necesitated wearing shoes. An hour later, a quarter-sized blister started a blood trail onboard that has only barely abated. Shoes all day without pain and suffering?! Re-entry conundrum.

On the plus side, we’re saying goodbye to our scattered methods of communication and work, and I am not alone in thoughts of how nice it’s going to be to have my desk to pull up to once again.

On the super plus side, I have all but said goodbye to my school marm title, and I get to watch that yellow miracle-mobile come pick the girls up on Monday morning and take them to infinitely more qualified teachers for whom I can only hope they offer more attention.

Our road to the current I-95 has been a busy one. We motored along the Okeechobee Waterway on Sunday and pulled into Indiantown Marina in time to start unloading and getting things ready for hauling the next morning.

All went well with the haul on Monday morning, and the crane came a couple of hours later and hauled the mast. Friends graciously took the girls to a science museum in West Palm for the day, so Andy and I had a very productive day of cleaning, stowing, organizing, laundry, and taking mast fittings off in preparation for its paint job to be done this fall.

Yesterday’s list was shorter for me, and we were able to escape to the beach for one last surf romp of the trip.

Today Andy did most of the final tuck-in and covering sans mast for support while I packed, unpacked and repacked the car for hours on end. (I was hoping, along the way, to find an extra 10-20 cubic feet for maximum stuffage, but alas, none presented itself.) We now drive along like a primed jack-in-the-box: open a door incorrectly and various combinations of gear might jump out at you. Here’s to hoping Jack stays in the box for the next 30 hours!

After a few beautiful days on the water, we’ve landed back on our home shores. The crossing itself was uneventful- a too-light wind was behind us, so we motored across, with only the main up for steadying purposes in the softly rolling cobalt swells. No fish caught our line, but there was plenty of rummy and Old Maid played, books read, a few movies watched by the girls, and tasty vittles consumed. Such is passage-making aboard Chickadee.

Our jump from Green Turtle to Powell Cay turned out to be a jump to Manjack Cay instead, which was a boon in that it didn’t put us on the still-roiling sea for longer than we needed, but also because the pregnant goat we had met on our previous trip to Manjack had had her babies, and it was then that we discovered that everything is better with a baby goat nearby.

The island denizens who offer their beach as a landing pad, their yard and spaces as quiet refuges (and their workshop for sailors who need one) invited us to walk to the western point of the island with the goats and their people for their afternoon stroll. Mom-goat, auntie-goat and the two kids walked with their human parents and the eight of us on a gnarled road/path through the woods to the bluffs, delighting in watching the little babies leap and twist with no apparent cause or reason, as if they had misfiring springs in their hooves. Once at the shore, the four goats ran and barreled down paths like their tails were on fire, and we sat on the deck and listened to them bleating back and forth; stranded babies calling for help, and elders wondering where in the heck those babies went off to.

On Wednesday we left Ruach at Manjack, and headed west to make our way to our ‘jumping off’ point. We have more of a time crunch than they do, since our haul schedule is set for Monday, and we were hoping to get to Stuart in time for the canvas people to get a template for our bimini supports on Friday. We had an incredible sail with 25 knots on our quarter, and apart from making miles and enjoying the day, it was wonderful not to hear the drone of the engine at all. Since we’d had little sleep for the past few nights listening to the wind howling through the hatches, we decided for a more comfortable anchorage at Great Sale Cay as opposed to the more exposed Mangrove- the winds were taking their time dying down. We learned en route that our canvas ‘meeting’ wasn’t happening, so our timeframe opened up enough to allow us to wait for a day for Ruach to catch up. Before meeting them at Mangrove, however, we decided to explore Great Sale Cay a bit, since we only had 20nm to sail.

Our Great Sale adventure began auspiciously enough, with us traipsing across the lava-like ancient coral beds looking for a path through the mangroves to what we saw on the chart was a beautiful beach on the opposite side. The casuarinas were in sight (always a good beach sign), whistling in the breeze, but the getting to them part was proving to be tricky. After a bit of bush-whacking, we came upon a road of yore, crumbling and grown in, but a road nonetheless. The island was used by NASA in the 60’s to track rockets, and sites of ruins on the beach were also mentioned on the charts. Following the road we came upon some scat, which we first thought disgustingly was human. More pieces, more investigation (mmm, up close!) told us that it ate some serious vegetation, and the images of wild boars chasing us down the beach commenced. Once we made it to the beach itself, the ruins were beside the point, because all I could focus on were the hoof prints and large tunnels and holes dug through the high tide rack. There were plenty of prints, and fresh as well (as a newly self-proclaimed animal tracker I simply noticed that the wakes of upturned sand weren’t yet dry from the heat of the day, which was drying our tracks with haste. Field note #3: they were LARGE, whatever they were.)

Fully endorphined now, picturing myself throwing each child up a casuarina to climb (easy low branches for them to start!) for their lives while I wrestled the beast to the ground (I’m not actually sure what Andy would have been doing in this image of mine), I was ready to turn around, but tried my best to play it cool for the sake of Lily, who was equally spooked. “Are wild boar aggressive?” she asked. “Ohhh, nooooo….” we said before catching each other’s eyes and picking up our speed. Violet, on the other hand, self-assured as always, was more upset about not getting the beach time to swim that we had suggested might be a possibility. She was lagging behind, enhancing my reel by the frame of a vicious animal leaping from the mangroves to snag the smallest prey first. Maaaaaybe it’s time for me to meet civilization again, lest my imagination knot my skull with crazywork.

We beat feet back to the dinghy, where we realized that we forgot to set the geocache we had brought, so we hauled anchor, motored around, dropped anchor again and sent Andy back to the beach on Boar/Beast Island to do so. He lived to tell the tale, amazingly enough, and some adventurous soul may find our cache and the treasure we left. (Or the boar will snarf it out and see how a friendship bracelet in the Bahamian flag colors tastes.)

Mangrove was a lazy sail away, and while we waited for Ruach to arrive, we dinghied around to explore what was shown to be a small plane wreck on the chart, but what we found to be was an island impenetrable due to mangroves, plenty of stingrays along the coast, and a blue hole that was both beautiful and eerie at the same time. (Later research showed that the plane is actually underwater, and requires a snorkeling expedition: next time.)

We pulled into Loggerhead Marina for a ‘swanky’ weekend of boat cleaning and decommissioning earlier this afternoon, and have already hit the pool (heated, freshwater) and have had a perfect reunion/catch up dinner with our friends next door in Jensen Beach, who were kind enough to put up with our car-less ways and drive us to and fro while also feeding us. (How do we land these amazing types of friends, anyway?!)

There is a lot on our list to do before we haul on Monday, and still more after that, since our crane is scheduled to pull our rig just two hours after we’re on the hard. Lines and sails to be rinsed and stowed, covers and blankets to be washed, a salty boat to be doused with fresh water, and derigging as best we can for now. Plus we’ll be planning for next year’s projects, ordering parts to replace those now broken, lost or dysfunctional, and the general packing and repacking of any sort of gear that all boat projects require. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that time at the marina pool for the girls is on the list as well, so it’s not all a slog now, is it?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Follow up ‘field note’: while our photos of the poo did indeed match with the wild boar scat that Google had to offer, I could not find any mention of boar sightings on Great Sale Cay, despite its many mentions in travel blogs, sailor’s journals, or the island’s listing (for $10 million it could be yours!), though that last bit doesn’t surprise me. I DID, however, find plenty of gnarly aggressive wild boar videos, opposing the one Bahamian (I think?) home video boar sighting, where the toothy boar basically flops in the surf on the beach next to the frat boy filming it, not caring a lick about anything (i.e. not attacking said frat boy). The Bahamas are becoming well known for their swimming pigs- are ‘tame’ boars the next step up in attractions? And is buying Great Sale Cay Step One in capturing this market?! Ten mil could tell, people, just ten mil.

Lots of activity, not much wifi. In the past handful of days we’ve been back to Hopetown for a fun day with Sam and Kayda and a visit to the Hopetown Inn & Marina (it’ll definitely be in our freshwater pool guide as a four star, with an added mention in our supplemental guide: dryers that actually dry, and showers that are too pricey to bother with).

We then made our final crossing back over the Whale, and we’ve been bedded down in Green Turtle since. A front is blowing through, and with our wing keel sailing us back and forth on the mooring for three days, we’re certainly feeling it. We’re in Black Sound now, and it’s been great to employ our newfound knowledge of the island and its public docks to best arrange provisioning jaunts, laundry runs, fuel and water fills and general island romping. We’ve spent time at the Leeward Yacht Club pool, had the kids run to and fro in New Plymouth on its waterfront playspace, lunched, ice creamed and played the bean bag toss game as often as possible (it seems to be everywhere here).

Yesterday Andy and I took the girls on a long Sunday morning walk, which turned into a great exploration and eventual swim on the windward beach with its massive surf. We poked our way back along the hot and dusty road happily looking for treasure on its shoulder, but apparently looked pathetic enough to have a local stop and offer us a ride back. (Turns out we were pathetic enough- we took him up on it.)

 

After joining with Ruach we went to a leeward beach and the kids played together while we lounged on a nearby dock. Martin arranged for an Olympic showcase for Maeve and Lily while Violet made a birthday sign for her friend, and then buried herself on the beach in the sadness of missing birthday time with her bestie in Maine. It was an adorable showcase of Hawaiian sea grape-rimmed sand self-burial, even if its impetus was a blue one.

 

Today we begin our westward march back to Indiantown, starting with a small hop after school to an island a bit up the chain called Powell Cay (okay, I lied, we go westward tomorrow- today is a northbound journey). Tomorrow we plan on an early start for a ~60nm day to get us to Mangrove Cay, where we’ll stay for a night before our next long day (~75nm) to West Palm. The weather and conditions in the Gulf Stream coming up make it a good run for a day trip, and Lily really wants to see the crossing instead of sleep through it this time. Strangely (but completely identifying with their mother), their favorite part of last year’s offshore day and night was the stretch of time that they couldn’t see any land, and they want another go. Also, it’d be nice to catch a fish or two.

Anyhoo, that puts us in West Palm on Wednesday late afternoon/early evening if all goes to plan, and from there we’ll quickly make our way to Indiantown (a night in Peck Lake, and a few nights in the Stuart area to de-rig and start our decommission, which we’ve found to be a nicer setting than the boatyard itself).

I’ll spare you the depressive thoughts about leaving Chickadee that ran so rampant last year toward the end; the sentiments onboard are quite the same, but it’s too much of a bummer to simmer on it. For now we’ll just keep playing Chutes and Ladders until our eyes bleed, sew and bracelet-make like it’s the family business, read and play together as much as possible, and try to stow these moments for later use and comfort in the chaos of another season on MDI.