School Day …

After getting up this morning I made sure my shirt was clean and there were no big stains on my pants. Coffee, breakfast, brush teeth, shave close, generally making myself as presentable as possible. Load up, dink into shore, head down the road. Destination? Fox Town Preparatory school. Once there Deb was introduced to the students in the First / Second grade classroom as an Author from America (which she is), and then she read the class “Mr. Sun and the Super Sleepy Sunday”. After the story she answered questions from the kids and then left a signed copy of the book for their library.

It was the coolest thing we have done since setting out. The children were as polite as could be and nearly as cute as my own grand kids. The Principal and Teachers were friendly, professional, and clearly dedicated to the little ones in their charge. It was a real honor to be a part of their lives for just a little while, and Fox Town is now on our “must visit” list whenever we come this way.


In addition to the school visit we found fruit, milk, and even ICE CREAM while shopping the three small stores in the town. Everyone greeted us with a smile and a wave. A 10 pound block of ice was ours for just $5. The only shortfall was water, 5 gallons cost $6.50 and you had to return the bottle. Since we have a few days left in our tanks we decided to pass on the water, though we are in full conservation mode until finding some place to fill the tanks. (Yes, a water maker would make life easier right now, but this is the first time in 18 months where water on board is a concern.)

Principal Curry with the teacher and assistant.

One more thing about Fox Town. The anchorage is one of the prettiest ones we have been in. It is surrounded by little islands of rock, reminding me of the northeast coast of the US. The water isn't that deep, it is a bit of a dink ride to the dock, and there is enough fetch to make the place a little bumpy when the winds clock up to 20+ out of the east. It is still better than Dinner Key for most wind directions, and Kintala had no problem finding a good place to sit for a few days.

Kintala in the background.

After our school visit there was still enough time in the day to get underway. The plan was to sail to Powell Cay today, roughly 20 NM. The forecast for the Abacos is in a bit of a rut, ENE winds 15 to 20 with seas of 3 to 5 feet. It has been that way for nearly two weeks, and is forecast for the same as far into the future as the forecast goes. So, if one wants to get anywhere, 20 knots and five foot seas is what one gets to go in. Of course, the course to Powell Cay put the wind and waves directly on the bow.

Kintala's crew has gotten used to 5 foot seas breaking over the bow. Kintala herself doesn't mind 5 foot waves breaking over the bow so long as she has enough push to shoulder them aside. Ah, but the WesterBeast... The Beast and I have come to an uneasy kind of truce. I check it every single day we are under way, keep the revs down, and basically treat it like some kind of temperamental VIP who demands all the green M&Ms be taken from the bowl and the bottled water be shipped directly from France. In return the Beast has rumbled along with no complaints. It isn't using any coolant, isn't using any oil, and runs at a constant 178°. (Amazing what a heat exchanger overhaul will do. But hp is not the Beast's forté. It will get us in and out of an anchorage and motor us along, so long as we don't task it with too many 5 foot hills to climb. Insist on that and boat speed will fall by a third in each 5 footer, bringing Kintala to a stop with the third hit in a row. A fourth will have her backing up, Beast or no Beast. Three, four, and even five consecutive hits greeted the bow once we turned on course. Twenty miles is a long, long way in those kinds of conditions.

The medical center in town. My granddaughters would love this!

So the decision was made to abort to Crab Cay instead. Roughly the same heading but half the distance away. An hour or so later it was still nearly half the distance away. The Beast was just no match for the waves, and there was no point of sail that would work to cover the distance, even with multiple tacks. Even it there were, time was running out of the day for making multiple tacks.

Off the wind lay Allan's Pensacola Cay, only four miles away and with an anchorage that would offer some protection for the night. Also a place we skipped last year and wanted to see, so changing destinations yet again was an easy call. Deb turned Kintala off the wind and I spun out the staysail. Where we had been struggling to keep the average speed above 2 knots, now we were making 5+. Definitely an easy call. An added bonus was that the waves were not quite as tight to the bow, though we were still running sluices of water down the toe rail to pour off the side decks. Within two hours the hook was down, the deck set up for the night, and I had a sandwich and cold Rum & Coke in hand – complete with ice.

The colors here are stunning. There is simply no way to capture them on film.

Tomorrow we will try and get a little further east by leaving in the morning before the winds start their daily ramp up. That is the plan anyway.

Kintala swinging in the light wind.

Kacey this one's for you. One of the local bars with the ever-present Kalik sign.

The anchorage at Allen's Pensacola

Funding your cruising

One of the most common questions we get from people is how they can fund their cruising. Since a vast majority of cruisers are of retirement age they are depending on fixed income, usually investments they made while they were gainfully employed. Those who are young have usually worked for some time and set aside enough funds to cruise for a specified time, maybe a year or two, before they settle down to raise a family, with plans to cruise once again whenever the kids are on their own. A good many cruisers across the age spectrum are working part-time jobs, taking mostly seasonal retail positions in whatever port they happen to land for awhile, making enough money in four months' work to fund the other eight months. A small minority of cruisers is working full-time from their boat. Most of these are in an IT capacity like a friend of ours who is a software developer, but some are start-up businesses that sell anything from canvas work to home-crafted jewelery. An even smaller minority is depending on contract writing jobs, writing for sailing and cruising magazines and blogs.

We've had many of our blog readers tell us that they enjoy our writing and that we should write a book. We do both enjoy writing and are fairly good at it, thanks in part to being avid and voracious readers and thanks in part to genetics, but with all the distractions of the first year of cruising and the debacle that was The Bear, we haven't had much time to do anything other than concentrating on blog posts.

Writing is hard. Ask anyone who has published and they'll sigh deeply and tell you that the agony of producing a written work is always more difficult than the compensation received for it. I can echo this without any doubt. The first thing I published was a short article for Cruising World in the 35th anniversary edition October 2009. It was part of a special tribute section to Murray Davis, the founder of Cruising World Magazine who had recently died. For my troubles I received a Cruising World hat and duffle bag. I still have the hat, but the duffle only lasted about as long as the magazine issue. It was still slightly more profitable than my next article, an article for the May 2012 issue of Latitudes & Attitudes which was supposed to yield a whopping $75 of which I was entirely and unceremoniously stiffed due to the immediate demise of the publication shortly after my issue was printed. So far Tim holds the dollar value winner in the form of an article he wrote for Flying magazine which brought a mind-boggling $100. So I'm sure you can understand our hesitance in pursuing a writing career to support Kintala.

That being said...a few years ago while working my last aviation marketing job I became quite proficient in an open source graphics design program called Gimp. After being unceremoniously dumped from the job and being short on funds, I began to fiddle with the beginnings of a children's book that I hoped to print out for my grandchildren for an inexpensive Christmas present. The story evolved, I got better at the illustration and design, and before long the idea that it might be publishable began to enter my mind. The story had lain dormant for some time during our frantic, last- minute cruising preparations but after the financial drain of the three months on the dock I found some motivation to pick it back up. I finished the book while we were anchored here in Middle River and began the final editing and formatting process by showing it to Tim for the first time. He was impressed, and it's pretty hard to impress him with a children's book. My art critic and editor son-in-law was next with positive feedback.  I was buoyed, and submitted it to createspace.com, Amazon's self-publishing company, for approval. After 3 weeks and as many revisions, the book has been published and is ready for your perusal. If you have any children on your holiday gift list in the toddler to third grade range,  this book makes a great holiday gift. You can either get it on amazon.com or on createspace.com. I get more profit from the latter, but if you're shopping on the former and just want to add it to your cart, go for it.

A little background on the story and the main character is in order I think. The book is the first in a series of books with the main character, Maryssa Mayberry, who is a young sailor who feels very passionately about the ocean and is sailing around the world to educate kids about the problems with the oceans and how they can help. This first book introduces her and is a fun story about working together to accomplish things. The next book will begin to deal with the pollution of the ocean with trash.  There is also a companion blog for the character, 

www.maryssamayberry.blogspot.com

which has more in-depth information on the issues and resources for both kids and parents on how to get involved in helping. There are also some coloring pages, puzzles and games there to entertain the kids. If you happen to notice the author name and wonder about it, it's DeMa, the nickname my grandchildren fondly call me.

I can assure you that you won't be disappointed with the quality of the book. I have one in my hands right now and I have to tell you that I've been extremely impressed with the quality of printing done through Create Space. It's a print-on-demand service which I was leery about at first, but the book I ordered was printed the same day and I had it a few days later. It was a user-friendly interface and I look forward to working again with them in the near future with the second book. By the way...rumor has it that there will be a co-authored book for our adult blog readers coming up in the near future as well so stay tuned.

I'd love to have your feedback on this book, so please feel free to leave comments. Please try to be kind and constructive in your criticisms if you can. One of the other things that makes writing for pay so difficult is that you lay yourself bare out there. You tend to get attached to your characters since you spend so much time with them, and publishing a book leaves you feeling very vulnerable. But then, like cruising, any venture without risk is a venture without reward.

I hope you enjoy.