Episode 3 and Four lessons in four months of Cruising

Episode 3 is finally uploaded! Hooray! Internet is hard to come by…

It has been roughly four months since we untied the dock lines in Jersey City and set out for adventures and parts unknown.

I will say, at the outset, that there have been no boring days. Each day has presented challenges and opportunities to learn; all lessons have been valuable and have contributed to our overall experience.

Here are the four big ones.

1. Sailing is awesome. This may not seem like an incredible epiphany, but, honestly, we didn’t know if we would like this life when we left. We had less than 100 hours of sailing time between us (and the majority of it under Peter’s belt) so there was uncertainty if this whole endeavor was going to work out for us. It has and we love it!
2. This life is good for our health. We have both lost weight and gained muscle. We sleep better at night. Peter’s eyes are bluer than I have ever seen them. My clothes don’t fit but it is not a bad problem to have. Minor health problems have cleared up and we are both happier than we ever have been before.
3. To thine own self be true. Before we left we read a lot of books, watched a lot of videos, and talked to a lot of people about cruising… We thought we had a pretty good idea of what we were in for. I bought powdered eggs and a hand-washing thingy for laundry. Peter stocked up on tools and engine parts. We talked about other peoples’ experiences and opinions as if they were our own. No problem, we said. If they can do it, we can do it. Or, more dangerously, we said we can live without this thing that other people say is a must-have. Well, there’s no teacher half as instructive as experience. Our over-confidence is wearing off. We have had our behinds kicked in more ways than we knew existed. We have dealt with emergencies, problems, ups, and downs. We have rationed water. We have rationed food. We have hiked 9 miles to buy cat litter. We know so much more about ourselves than we did when we left.
4. Money is more important than we gave it credit for. Here’s the straight dope. The refit of our rigging cost more than double what we had budgeted which was basically all the money we had. We figured that we could make it work and amazingly, for two months, we have. Now, however, the pennies are squealing from being so tightly pinched and our stores are dangerously low (of both people food and kitty food). We are tired of parsimony and extreme economy. We would like to be able to purchase a bottle of wine now and then and it’s exhausting to worry if we are going to be charged to fill our water tanks. Diesel has become precious. The things that have broken on this cruise have had to stay broken since we can’t afford to fix them. Yes, money is important. Our immediate plans are to stop cruising for a while and get some more. Then we will buy a pizza.