What I Learned from Cruising
I just posted this on my new sailing blog Red Sky at Night and thought it might also be of interest here. I am editing the vocabulary slightly for you landlubbers. Cruising refers to living and traveling on board a boat for extended periods of time.
On October 25, 1975, my wife Mary and I, aged 24 and 25, set off down the Chicago River in a 22-foot sailboat named Shadow. With a cruising kitty of $300, we set a goal of reaching Suriname in South America in six months.
In June, 1984, we returned to the United States on our 36-foot sailboat Volantis with $5,000 left in the kitty. What happened in the intervening nine years? Life. Where did we go? Not to Suriname.
What did we learn in nine years of sailing the Gulf Coast, the Bahamas, and the Caribbean? Plenty:
You can make enough money to survive anywhere there are people. Particularly outside the United States. Survival means you have enough to eat and can keep the boat afloat. It does not mean staying at expensive marinas or running up big bar bills.
Where there are no people (or while you are still in the US), you can still find enough to eat. We caught and ate conch, cormorant and clams. Lots of clams. And there were still fish in the sea back then. We also learned how to trade our labor on a shrimp boat for anything pulled up in the net – except shrimp. We also learned that when a scallop boat has a small catch, they would rather give it away than bother to take it to market.
Once you get to the tropics, the only things you wear on a boat are long sleeved pajamas and sun block. Both for the same reason. You don’t need the fancy deck shoes or much of anything else. You don’t need a water heater, it is already hot enough.
You do need anchors. As many as you can scrounge up. When the boat gets overloaded with anchors you can always find another cruiser who needs one. You may not be able to afford insurance, but you can always find another anchor.
When you live on a small (substandard) boat, you learn not to accumulate “stuffâ€. If you don’t know why you need it, it goes ashore. Even taking out the garbage become a celebratory event. Someone once gave us a tortilla press. It was made of zinc plated iron and made wonderful tortillas. We asked why he wanted to give it away. He said it weighed 4 pounds and his boat was getting too low in the water. Time to lighten ship. We kept and used it for several years then passed it on to someone else when we got too low in the water.
Most people never go cruising but many people would like to. They all have their reasons why they can’t. But when they meet someone actually doing it, they get a vicarious pleasure from helping out. Maybe you could use a lift to a grocery store. Maybe you could tell them sailing stories while they buy you dinner. You have a degree of celebrity status. Share it by letting people become just a little bit involved.
In the US we were boat bums. Outside the US we were adventurers. We had credibility. It was assumed that we could do anything we said we could do. After all, we came across the ocean in our own little boat. People offered us jobs. On a couple of occasions, someone offered to start a business if we would stay and work for them.
The most important thing we learned was from a single hander who told us: “On the water, you always have your hand out – either to offer help or to accept itâ€. I believe that is true off the water as well.