by Dan | Jun 4, 2012 | Preparation Stage
We had a busy weekend… a trip to the ER, a visit with parents, the cat brought a rabbit downstairs, and we still found time to go sailing! Michele was having some bad symptoms from her recent concussion, but everything is on the mend.
Family sailing - Carter didn't enjoy it as much... he's tired.
Michele, Kyle, Carter, and I had a great sail yesterday. The wind was a little too light, but hey… we’re learning! We were able to get both sails up for the first time, what a difference. The boat is significantly more controllable with the jib, properly trimmed (how do we know it was properly trimmed? We took NauticEd’s free sail trim class!), assisting the main.
Thanks to our new friend the jib (more weathered sailors need to keep the laughs at a minimum… you’ll wake the baby) we were able to sail a respectable 3.6 miles. Beginning at our new home port Detweiller Marina we turned South West and had the wind perpendicular to our course. The new marina helped immensely by reducing the time we spent between the marina and the channel. Detweiller is around 200 feet from the channel… Spindler is over a quarter mile. We had a beautiful sail past the downtown skyline.
Let me make a quick digression… there is a no wake zone between the two large bridges flanking each side of downtown where cabin cruisers (and wannabe cabin cruisers) like to raft up. To each his own, but it seems like a gigantic waste to buy a beautiful, expensive boat and never actually go anywhere in it. If you can’t afford the gas in your boat get a different boat… preferably one with sails.
Our Course
Upon our final turn into the marina, we were greeted by a cluster of drunkards sitting smack dab in the middle of the marina. I am under trolling motor power at this point, not winning any races here. One group of drunken people saw us coming in and decided it would be a good idea to power over, cross our bow, and park immediately in our line of travel about 50 feet away. After (as nicely as I could given the situation) asking them to move their drunken selves out of the way of traffic we were able to tie off at the launch ramp. Truly a wonderful sail! Michele and I begin our official sailing lessons tonight… we are used to just winging things, but our first few adventures told us to seek professional help.
Follow your dreams. Follow the Horizon.
by Michele | May 30, 2012 | Preparation Stage
Six staples later and still smiling!
…so I volunteered. As you will note from our last post, we all were in Bull Shoals, Arkansas this last weekend for a fantastic scuba diving trip. It was super fun, and we’ll probably have a post on it very soon. This post, however, is about my first (and hopefully last) dive accident which happened Sunday night. The story goes something like this: Dan and Kyle couldn’t finish their rescue diver certifications without completing a real rescue… so they needed someone to sustain an injury in the water to be able to fix. So I volunteered, and Kyle hit me over the head with his scuba tank so we would get some nice blood and potential spinal cord injury to practice on. Okay, not really.
So this is what actually happened: Dan, Kyle, and I were completing our advanced scuba certifications through PADI this weekend on our trip. Sunday night was my last dive, which was going to be our night dive. You basically do some underwater navigation and swim around with a flashlight when it’s dark. It was around 9:00 when Dan and I got in the water with one of the instructors on the trip and he started explaining to us what we needed to cover. We started swimming on the surface and suddenly I was shoved under water and had an intense pain on the crown of my head. I knew almost instantly that someone had jumped in on top of me and hit me in the head with their tank. Note to audience: getting hit in the head with 250 lbs of weight is not pleasant, please do not try this at home. I learned later that it was Kyle who had jumped in on me. He *claims* he couldn’t see me as it was pitch dark outside, but my theory is he was trying to kill me. Totally just kidding. He would never, ever do something like that on purpose.
It was at this point where the fact that there were four newly certified rescue divers on our trip, including Dan and Kyle who were in the water with me, became a really great factor. I shot up out of the water- luckily I hadn’t lost consciousness and my BCD (scuba vest) was full of air- and started screaming bloody murder. Dan and Kyle were both extremely calm, but focused, and literally had my gear off and me out of the water in probably 10 seconds flat. Another of the newly trained rescue divers was there stabilizing my head and neck against further potential damage to my spinal cord. Someone had already called 911 as well as the boat dock to get a rescue boat out to me. It was truly well done and I am very grateful to everyone on the boat that helped me so professionally and quickly.
The rest of my evening was spent waiting on various medical professionals in the emergency room of Baxter Regional Medical Center. To their credit, they did get to me fairly fast to do a preliminary assessment of my spinal cord, etc. After the doctor determined that I just had a big cut in my head, however, I pretty much got reassigned to the bottom of the list. I really believe that it was a miracle that I didn’t sustain more damage after such a heavy impact. I could have had a serious spinal injury, cracked skull, concussion, etc. but I didn’t. I did need 6 staples in my head, but I didn’t even get a headache!
Truthfully, there’s nothing like a serious accident to remind you of your priorities. Things like this happen to people every day, and yet so many of us waste our dreams by telling ourselves we’ll get to them later. What if there isn’t a later? Don’t be complacent with your time. You don’t know how much you have to work with, so make the most of it while you can.
Follow your Dreams. Follow the Horizon.
by Michele | May 26, 2012 | Preparation Stage
We aren't quite at this level...
So, for those of you who are keeping count, Dan and I have been sailing this year a grand total of… three times. Well, actually he’s been three, and I’ve been sailing twice and trying frantically to find somewhere to land the boat once. Seeing as it is almost the end of May you might be wondering where all of our sailing stories are. There are a couple of reasons (see: excuses) why we haven’t seen as much wind this spring as we had originally anticipated, but hope to improve over the summer.
- First, the weather has been crazy. All week it will be beautiful sailing weather, then its freezing and rainy all weekend.
- Also complicating our plans is that our boat is not currently in a slip. This might not sound like a big complication, but it takes significantly longer prep time to have to pick up the boat and step the mast before heading out on the water. It pretty much limits our sailing time to weekends except for in the middle of the summer when there is a lot more daylight time to work with.
- Finally, Dan’s brother Kyle has been working most weekends, and due to my status as resident weakling, we need help stepping the mast.
Now that I’ve got all of the logical reasons out of the way, here’s the embarrassing one: we’re a little afraid of another disaster. Our confidence has been somewhat injured by our failures so far. (Though one of our 3 days was actually perfect.) Kyle, Becca, Dan and I actually had the boat down at a marina on Sunday, but we chickened out after watching another boat glide peacefully out of the harbor, only to get practically laid down as soon as they hit the 20 mph winds on the river. We just aren’t ready for dealing with that yet.
No worries, though! We haven’t given up, we are just going to get a little confidence boost before doing anything else crazy. Dan and I are taking a sailing class starting in June that should get us right back to our good-old-selves. Nothing like a little hands-on where the most experienced sailor in the boat isn’t the one who took the free online class! In the meantime, we’re going on a sweet dive vacation to Bull Shoals, Arkansas…full details forthcoming.
by Dan | May 16, 2012 | Preparation Stage
It turns out Kyle is as crazy as we are.
I’ve talked about my brother Kyle previously when discussing various sailing adventures as well as my SCUBA progress… What I haven’t talked about are his and Becca’s (his wife) plans and dreams. I’m not going to try and articulate their dreams… no one could except them. Suffice it to say that they are planning on joining us in casting off and following our cruising dream. On their own boat, of course.
Kyle was the first person other than Michele that I discussed my crazy idea with. We were extremely excited about our newly hatched plans… almost giddy. Each time we researched cruising we became more convinced. We needed an outside opinion (We’ve since met with our friends Scott and Brittany from Windtraveler for one). Before approaching Kyle, I expected to meet resistance and a multitude of reasons why following my dream was impossible. Amazingly, I found nothing but support. Well… support and mutual interest. He began to express many of the same sentiments that Michele and I have about materialism, time freedom, and life in general.
I am not going to talk about the whys, the hows, whens, etc of Kyle and Becca’s plans… their story is their own. They have become part of Michele and I’s story in some ways, however. It is a huge comfort to know that we will be sailing with people we can implicitly, and without hesitation, trust. Not only will we have double the amount of spare parts, dinghies, tools, etc but we will have partners to experience the wonders of cruising with. I am sure there will be times when we wonder “What are we doing here?” Thankfully, we will have Kyle and Becca nearby for support. One of the things I am most looking forward to is meeting new people and new cruising buddies while we are on our adventures, but I am extremely lucky to have a brother that shares the passion and dream of cruising.
by Michele | May 8, 2012 | Preparation Stage
It has come to my attention that I am not the “typical” boat wife. Apparently, a significantly larger percentage of men in the boating world would like to go cruising than their long-suffering wives… patiently rolling their eyes as the husband goes on again about the freedom of the open sea and other such nonsense as she sees it. Therefore, I have decided to take up my little soapbox today in the name of the crazy wives who actually think that the cruising life sounds like the best idea our husbands have ever come up with.
Let me start by saying that when Dan first brought up the idea a few years ago I actually laughed in his face. This was the most ridiculous idea he had ever come up with. We didn’t sail, I’m somewhat afraid of water, and we don’t even eat fish! No thank you. Also, I was enjoying our life and looking forward to a little family and the white picket fence; June Cleaver was my subconscious hero. In short, I just wasn’t ready yet for such a drastic dream.
Then a year ago, Dan starting looking into cruising again, more seriously this time. He brought the idea to me somewhat more cautiously optimistic than the first time, backing himself up with some realistic expectations. His enthusiasm caught my attention more than anything else. He let me know that he really wanted to go cruising but he needed me to make my own decision about it; he couldn’t let himself get any deeper without becoming emotionally committed to the dream. So I decided to do my own research and that I would make a real decision after our cruise to the Southern Caribbean, where we would be spending some time on smaller boats that would give me at least some idea of what sailing was about.
The first conclusion I came to was that living on a boat was definitely possible for us. (I know that sounds a little obvious, but it was a pretty big leap for a girl who had never been on a sailboat before.) Now I needed to decide if this was really what I wanted for me. Not because I loved my husband and wanted to make him happy, not because it would be a nice experience for my son, but because this was my dream. As I read and listened, a yearning started to build in my heart that was becoming my own. Finally, near the end of our cruise, I was standing on the top deck of our ship looking out at the huge moon reflecting off of the ocean waves and I knew: my life will not be complete until I see this scene from my own deck.
I want to encourage the wives out there, take your husband seriously when he brings you a dream that is in his heart. I believe that we find the person who was designed to unlock our deepest desires and greatest potential, but we are also the person who could crush that potential much more easily. Do you want to be the wife standing in the wings with a leash, or do you want to be a partner in a fantastic adventure?
Follow your dreams. Follow the Horizon.
We are normal (well ok, not so normal) people that have a dream to see the world and live life as it was meant to be. We both have successful careers in the healthcare industry, even in this terrible economy. We want to break free of the current cycle of trading time for dollars and dollars for more and more things we don't need. So, we have decided to forego the fruits of our economic success and "retire" well before we are 30 and set out to see what is over the Horizon.