Throwback Thursday - The Anatomy of a Cruising Budget

I wrote this in 2015, but it is still totally and completely accurate.

The Anatomy of a Cruising Budget

Posted by Deb

September 20, 2015

 

Bob over at Boat Bits is a critical thinker. He's not afraid to confront issues directly and dissect them until he understands them. He's also not afraid of ruffling anyone's feathers, nor is he afraid of discovering some tenet he held is, in fact, incorrect. Refreshing. His blog was one of the earliest in my blog reader, one where I knew I could find someone willing to call B.S. when it was needed, and it's needed quite a bit in the marine industry. He recently challenged me in an email exchange regarding the costs of cruising and, soon after, he did a post, A Small Thought About Budgets and Boats. Go ahead over and read it. I'll wait, as it's important to this discussion.

Bob's concern about reported cruising budgets is that they are horribly under reported because, well, no one wants to look like either the idiot who wasn't smart enough to figure the costs prior to starting, or the cruiser with an uncontrollable spending problem. In addition, you have the fact that income and spending are both highly personal issues and few are willing to divulge that information since our society has deeply instilled in us the false doctrine that you are what your net worth is. In mulling this all over the last few days I kept remembering a short Bible verse that kind of sums it up: "Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won't you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it?" (Luke 14:28)  

Well, maybe not.

Before you can understand the realities of the cruising budget, you first have to understand reasons why people want to go cruising in the first place. It's important enough that the whole first chapter of the book we wrote deals with it. After a few years of doing this, I've found that there are about three styles of cruiser budgets. You have the bare bones Lin and Larry Pardey budget with no fridge, little electrical, very few electronics, no eating out. Some of these folks are able to cruise for $500-800 in third world countries by eating a lot of beans and rice, doing very little boat maintenance, trading work for parts when boat maintenance is needed, and never ever spending time on a dock. Next up is the group of cruisers that is mostly comprised of retirees living on pensions, investments, and Social Security. They eat well, mostly on the boat, with some treat excursions out a couple times of month. They do most of their own boat maintenance, read more than going out for entertainment, and socializing is usually potluck dinners with other cruisers. They try to anchor or to use mooring balls for the most part but may end up on a dock at least several times a month, mostly to reprovision.  The last group is the varying degrees of independently wealthy who live mostly in marinas, eat out nearly every day, frequent concerts, movies, galleries, and shopping, and hire someone to do most, if not all, of the boat maintenance. Of course, there are the folks who don't fit these neat categories, like a few younger cruisers we know who were able to sell a successful business which they worked hard to create, or who telecommute successfully from the boat. We fall in the middle group, along with most of the other people that we know and have met along the way. There's no question that the vast majority of cruisers on the east coast fall into this group. It's also the majority of the links in our cost of cruising side bar.

A couple of points need to be made as background for the following discussion.

1. You will never have enough money set aside to go cruising.
2. The boat will never be ready to go cruising.
3. Money fills a void. You will spend pretty much everything you have to go cruising.
4. Cruisers fall victim to Cost Creep, that insidious parade of "small purchases" that increase ever so slowly...

Our departure date to go full-time cruising was pushed up early due to our job losses. We could have gotten new jobs and spent two more years working to fill the cruising kitty but, in the end, we would have spent half that money dealing with storing the boat somewhere and moving expenses, since there were no jobs in aviation in the town where we lived. No question that more money would have made the last two years much easier, but the sheer hassle factor of finding new jobs and moving made us decide to go then and figure the rest out along the way. We had a savings account which we hoped would span the gap from our departure to our eligibility to claim Social Security and, once eligible, we would have enough funds to cruise on that monthly income.

Flash forward two years, and we can now see that the savings account will not span the gap and that we'll have to work somewhere for probably most of a year come Spring. Things happen. Boats break. A lot. Family members need help requiring multiple flights at short notice. The housing market takes a tumble and yields much less profit than hoped. And, yes <gasp>, some of the long list of stuff that everyone said you had to have was in fact B.S. And here is where I think the posted cruiser budgets fall short, because most of those reported budgets are normal, daily expense reports that don't include the initial refit or a periodic refit 5-10 years of cruising later. So if we look at cruising budgets in two parts we have a better feel for the actual cost of cruising.

Initial Outlay / Refit

One of the biggest gripes we have with the marine industry as a whole, and the cruising portion of it specifically, is that it's full of predators. One of our blog readers recently made this comment:

"The trouble is, they are doing business on the back of people's dreams and  
those dreams usually blind the newbie or part-time boat owner to what is  
right in front of their eyes."

You peruse the boat porn on yachtworld.com and make a list of all of the boats that interest you. The ads are great, the equipment list long. Unfortunately, while most (but not all) of the claimed equipment will be on board, much of it will be non-functioning. In our case it was the autopilot, the sump pump system, most of the lights, the VHF, the illegal propane bottles, the badly expired life raft to the point of ridiculousness, the head, the missing V-berth mattress, the missing salon cushions, the V-drive, the transmission, the ammeter, the heat pump, and repairs to the actual hull and deck. When you're looking at those ads you can't bring yourself to look at them critically. You see what you want to see. You see what they want you to see.

Even if you manage to find the perfect boat, you will also spend money on things just because you want them for functionality, comfort, or safety.  In our case that included new faucets, a salon table conversion, a workshop conversion, the pilot berth conversion, the addition of a gas detector, smoke alarms, CO detector, AIS, several new storage cabinets, spice rack, and the endless list of things like shower curtain, new sheets and blankets, new pillows, some galley items like our Magic Bullet, and tools. Ah yes, tools.

Tools deserve their own whole paragraph because if you fit into that do-most-of-the-work-yourself group like we do, tools will become a major part of your expenditure. We brought nearly half of all of Tim's tools from his aircraft maintenance stash and have still had to buy more along the way. The biggest part of tool expenditures is replacing electric tools like sanders and drills because the marine environment is so harsh for them. Harbor Freight is your friend because whether you buy expensive tools or cheap ones, you will still replace them about the same frequency. Save your money for beer. Tools fall into the Cost Creep category. None of them are very expensive. Our drill was $27. Less than a cost of two burgers, fries, and beers. But one of a long, long list of small expenditures. Your list will be different. Every cruiser's list is different because each of us have different comfort levels and desires and tolerances. Only you can know what's on your list.

The conventional wisdom is that you will spend 30% of the purchase price of your boat to get it ready to go cruising. Our reality was much higher, nearing 100%. If you have any doubt, think a larger amount.

Daily Expenses

Normal daily expenses on the boat include:

Food
Eating out 
Alcohol 
Water
Ice 
Miscellaneous supplies (paper goods, cleaners, rags, towels, flashlights, batteries,water filters,etc) 
Pumpout
Propane 
Gasoline
Diesel
Laundry
Communication
Health care
Medical expenses  
Clothing and shoes
Tools and equipment 
Bottom cleaning or supplies to do it yourself (scrapers, etc)
Entertainment (books, Kindles, movies, computers, museum tickets, concert tickets)
Transportation (bus fares, cab fares, metrolinks)

Travel (airline tickets, rental cars, hotels)

Make yourself a spreadsheet and play with the numbers. You're going to find that while living on a boat is definitely cheaper than living on land, a lot of the numbers are the same. Food will likely be more expensive, you will likely drink more alcohol due to socializing, water is very expensive in the Bahamas. Gasoline for the dinghy and diesel for the boat are both going to be more expensive than on land. Marinas charge a premium because you can't just drive somewhere else to save a couple pennies. Depending on how much land travel you do, that category can have a huge impact on your budget. Remember that communication (phones, internet) is often one of the largest items on the list. Once you get some numbers you think you can live with, talk to some cruisers and show them your list and see what they think. Remember that everyone lives at different comfort levels, but their input can be invaluable in determining if you're dreaming a pipe dream.

If you're already cruising, how does your current budget compare to what you thought it would be?  We definitely spent substantially more than I had planned and hoped. One of Bob's critical thoughts was that few cruisers are willing to admit that they made mistakes on their spending. As I look back on the years since we bought our first boat in 2007, there aren't many of those "WTF was I thinking, I spent HOW MUCH for that, and Boy-Howdy-I'll-never-make-that-stupid-mistake-again" moments Bob refers to, except for the initial purchase of Kintala. We clearly spent way too much money for the boat initially. We clearly spent way too much money on the surveys and inspections we hired out that were jokes. And we clearly had to spend way too much money to replace equipment that was on the list in the ad that wasn't actually there or wasn't functioning. Stupid, yes. We were the dreamers, they were the predators, and we were blind to what was right in front of our eyes. 

Since leaving, though, our higher than expected expenses can be tied to two major issues:  too much time spent on a dock, and Cost Creep.

Every time you land on a dock you will spend at least $100 a day. Dock fees (average $2 per foot per night=$84 for us),electric fees if you don't have solar ($5-10 avg), and the fact that restaurants and bars and grocery stores are close, all add up to at least that $100 per day.

Cost Creep are those myriad of expenses that cause money to slip through your fingers. They are all the expenses you don't quantify when planning that add up incredibly fast. It was stuff we just didn't think about when we planned. Examples? 

• Water filters: we use two types and replace them every 6 months at $100 each time.
• Water purifier: we use the Camco brand in our water tanks every time we fill them $5 a bottle, 12 per year. It's stabilized and works better than bleach.
• Ice: averages $2.50-$3.50 per bag and when it's really hot we go through one every couple days. Could we do without it? Yes, but this is a comfort choice.
• Laundry: averages $1.75-$2.50 to wash and $1.50-$2.00 to dry. We wash by hand a lot, but when we're near a laundry we generally use it.
• Water: in the States it's usually free, but in the Bahamas it swings wildly from $.20-$1.00 per gallon.
• Batteries: we go through a lot of AA and AAA batteries. We use rechargable when we can, but due to electrical draw on the inverter we do use a lot of disposable ones. I lucked out recently and got a box of 72 of them for $14 on a Groupon special but we frequently pay that for a dozen of them.
• Internet access to Skype with grand kids: There is virtually no free internet in the Bahamas. You can get data cards for $30 for 2gb, or you can go to a restaurant and order a meal and get very slow internet, or you can go to a coffee shop and get a $5 coffee and use the internet, but open wifi is virtually nonexistent. Even the restaurants and coffee shops change the password every single day. Have grand kids? Figure minimum $10 to Skype with them.
• Oil: We change the oil every 100 hours. Not a huge expense, but just another one at average $20 per jug.
• Engine diapers: they're required in a lot of places and we change them frequently. $.85 each.
• A spare impeller kit for our water pump is $85.
• A new toilet brush $3.95. Toothbrushes - about the same. Boat cleaning brush? Set you back $50
• Some new towels to replace the ones with threadbare holes $8.25
• Boat cleaning stuff: Prism Polish (we use a lot of it for stainless and fiberglass and ports), Simple Green, bleach, rags, etc. Just the Prism is $29.95 per can.
• Oh and then there's ice cream...nuff said.

So regarding the WTF expenses. We did make a few errors in purchasing over the four years of owning this boat and all of them, yes every single one, was based on buying what everyone in the industry and fellow experienced cruisers said we had to have.

• Stereo system: Turns out we like our iPads better with a Bluetooth speaker. We were able to sell the stereo we bought and recoup all but $20
• Spinnaker: Not knowing the difference in spinnakers due to lack of experience, we bought a symmetrical spinnaker that we found used at a good price. Turns out it was a good price because no one uses them any more. Turns out we will never deploy a spinnaker with a short-handed crew. Yes, I realize that some people do. Just not us. $375 lost and the spinnaker gifted to a friend of ours to make bags with.
• SSB: We bought a used SSB for the boat and after carrying it around for a year, we sold it for what we paid forit. Turns out that installing it in Kintala would have been a nightmare of epic proportions and we were done with nightmares. We spent $99 and  bought a portable receiver instead.
• Cordless power tools: We already had cordless drills that we brought which died within a few short months. They require a lot of power to recharge, they're expensive to buy, and the replacement batteries cost more than the whole new set. $135 for a lower-end cordless, or $27 for our corded drill. No brainer there. We threw away the cordless ones when they died and bought a new extension cord that will reach all over the boat from the inverter.

We made countless smaller purchases of materials to complete projects that ended up not fitting, or not being quite the right material, or not being quite what we thought we wanted. Took us two tries to find a nav seat we were happy with. Another example of this is some screws that we ordered to replace some missing ones in the bimini frame mounting jaws. Sailrite doesn't offer them as spares and told us we could "find them at any hardware store." Not so much. We ordered them twice from different manufacturers and still don't have the right size screw. We have those screws sitting in the spares bin and maybe they'll fit something somewhere down the road. Yet another example would be some cup holders that didn't fit in the teak rack I had hoped they would fit in. Yes, I measured the hole. Yes, the holder labels said they would fit. No, they didn't fit. No, they couldn't be returned. Only $7.95 each, but this is the type of thing that adds up. 

    

So my WTF??? moments in regards to expenses are, for the most part, not major ones. It's the list of $22 and $31 and $14.95 and $8.75 and $3.57 expenses that pop up on my credit card bill. Cost Creep. Figure out how to nip it in the bud and you'll get your cruising cost numbers down to something bordering wishful thinking. And, since I'm sure you're wondering, our wishful thinking goal for monthly cruising expenditures would be $1750. The reality is much worse. Since leaving to go full-time cruising, we have averaged $3544. It doesn't include the initial refit. It does include everything else: our summer refit, the money we spent helping the kids last summer and health insurance (which is not in our monthly cruising expense reports only due to the fact that it comes out of a different account and is hard to include in our reports). One of the things that pushed our numbers that high was an unexpected medical issue for me in December and January of the past year that cost us nearly $10,000. Things happen.

Our hope is that now that most major projects are done on Kintala, our expenses will go down. We also hope that, since we're more experienced, we will stay off docks more and utilize free anchorages. If our expenses don't go down? Then we'll be working a bit longer. It's a price we're willing to pay for having had the opportunity to leave early. I wouldn't trade the last two years of cruising for anything.

As you read through the data so graciously provided by other cruisers in our cost of cruising links, and as you scour the internet for some I missed, here's a few concise tips to keep in mind.

• Try to come up with a sustainable budget that matches your resources.
• Expect the unexpected and find workarounds.
• Develop your creativity. Some of the best budget savers are those that were created as a result of budgetary pressures.
• Be kind to yourself and to your significant other. If you make a mistake, even a whopper, dust yourself off and start over.

And finally, remember that what works for us or for other people may not work for you. Take your time to decide what you need and what your comfort levels are. Don't rush out and buy things on the advice of even seasoned cruisers. Listen, evaluate, do without, then see if you really need it. I promise you the marine goods hawkers will still be there to pluck your money from your wallet a few months from now. You might just find out you don't really need or want whatever it was in the first place and the money you save might just equal another Skype visit with your little ones. And at least for this cruiser, that's an non-negotiable cruising budget item.

Throwback Thursday - The Magic

This was originally published on October 7, 2011 when we were still working and Kintala was still on Lake Carlyle in Illinois.

The Magic

Posted by TJ

Magic is that thing that happens when something pretty amazing happens but no one is really sure why or how it happens. A collection of circumstances, none of them particularly spectacular alone, flow together with some inner state of mind and somehow, everything in the entire freaking universe fits together just like it should.

Magic.

Daughter-who-lives-with-us has a friend visiting from Cape Cod, yet every bed in our little house has some one's name on it. So Deb and I allowed as we would offer her our sleeping place and head to the lake a day early. (Pretty slick, yes?) Once at the lake we decided to cove out for the night, something we have not done near enough of this season. Leaving the pier it seemed like a good idea. A couple of hundred yards from the inlet, mmm...not so good. Hoards of corps bug enveloped Kintala and her crew like some sort of Biblical plague. The starboard side of the hull was literally coated from water line to toe rail. We were motor sailing behind the jib, which itself drew a liberal coating of these nasty little creatures. They squished under hand with every grab on anything, flew into our faces, got tangled in Deb's hair and my beard (the only hair I have) and made hideous splotches of goo everywhere they died. As soon as the anchor sank into the mud we abandoned topside, retreating in the face of overwhelming numbers to the screened-in protection of below. Pretty much the opposite of magic.

Fed, showered and snug in the V-berth, the corps bugs faded from memory, and the magic started to fill the boat. Though all of her hatches are missing and the holes filled with plywood, and though there was nary a hint of a breeze, somehow Kintala shed the warmth of the day like a white beach on a clear night. Temps in our berth were perfect for cozying up under the quilt. It was still and quiet and I slept like a dead man; the best night's sleep I have enjoyed for countless weeks.

If there was a more perfect place on this little planet than Coles creek come this morning, I can't imagine where it could be. Apparently there was more magic than could fit in the boat so it flowed out to fill the cove. Fish jumped, birds circled, and the wind started to build from the ESE; a perfect direction for sailing off the hook. So we did.

That same wind must have blown some unused magic out on the lake proper. Over the next 7 hours or so Kintala romped under perfect winds of 10 to 20 knots, yet the waves on the lake never built to anything more than cat's paws. Hard on the wind, beam reach, broad reach, run - from Coles Creek to the dam to Tradewinds, back to near the dam, back to the cove, to the inlet for our marina, then to and fro across the width of the lake one more time just for the shear joy of it all. Kintalacovered more than 30 miles today, every inch some of the best sailing we have ever known.

We are back on the pier now. Deb is working on a sail project for a friend, dinner is in the oven, I am fumbling around this keyboard; pretty much an average day when we are on Kintala. But the glow from the magic still fills the boat.

By tomorrow even the glow will fade, leaving only the memory of a perfect day. But that is the way of magic. It is a rare thing and no ones knows the recipe for making it. We all get a bit of it now and again, though sometimes I suspect it goes by unappreciated - a missed opportunity if you will. And it seems to me there is just enough of it going around to keep all of us from going stark raving mad. However it works, the touch of it swept over our little piece of the world today. Maybe it is headed your way tomorrow?

Back in the Box

Done with the sim observation week, and it went a bit better than pretty well. I started this with a tendency to look at Sim instruction as just one of those things one had to put up with for the chance to get back into a classroom setting. All of the hours spent in the front seats of Sims over the years had dulled any enthusiasm for working in the box. These last few days have eased that feeling somewhat. The Sim is a unique training environment; a multi-million dollar, full-motion chalkboard used to study and master some pretty complex challenges. At the start of the week the crew I was with was tentatively poking at switches just to get the flight deck powered up and the engines running. Today nothing—not badly degraded flight controls, one engine gone, or 3 of their 4 instrument screens dead in the panel—kept them from flying near perfect night instrument approaches to absolute minimums, usually ending with a gentle touchdown and the airplane coming to a stop with the nose gear on the center line. This is training the way training ought to be, and is pretty close to as much fun as a person can have while, at the same time, just working for a living. (No, we didn’t do any single-engine dump truck jumping. It turns out I’m not the only one who thinks such things are a waste of training time.) Meeting with them after their successful check rides was cool, and they were even kind enough to say that what little input I offered over our week together in the sim was helpful.

Photo courtesy of aopa.com

My next task is to “teach” the Initial Pilot sim sessions to two Flight Safety Instructors pretending to be clients, while a third Instructor teaches me the simulator ropes. And that has led to one of the cooler things that has happened to me lately. (Though the idea of four Flight Instructors in the same Sim provokes images of four doctors in a Bonanza. Its an insider joke, don't worry if you don't get it.)

Years ago, I had a chance to teach a class on high altitude/turbine flight operations at St. Louis University, something that lasted nearly eight years. After that job faded away, there was some time spent as an Airline Captain. Fun job, but the pay was hard to live on. (Regional pilot pay back in those days was another inside joke.) I left that job to fly a corporate jet around the country for about a decade and, when the ax fell on that gig, Deb and I headed out on Kintala.

Now, something near 20 years later, one of the pilots I will be practicing on will be someone who sat in one of those classes at St. Louis University. He is a fully qualified Sim and ground school instructor for the Legacy, and it is likely he will have much of value to share about teaching others to fly this thing.

I have stumbled across several students from those SLU days: a young lady flying Apache Helicopters for the Army, several who are now wearing 4 stripes and flogging airlines around the world, one who flies B2 stealth bombers…I don’t claim to have had anything at all to do with their success, though it was kind of fun that such meetings always included smiles, laughter, and good stories. But to be working with one of them, having him show me the way around this high-tech wonder jet? That’s enough to make an old flight instructor feel pretty good about the paths life has taken; enough to have me truly looking forward to being “back in the box.”

Throwback Thursday - Navigating the Ups and Downs

Throwback Thursday - original post Monday, May 2, 2016

Navigating the Ups and Downs

Posted by Deb

I belong to a women's Facebook Group called Women Who Sail. It was started by Charlotte Kaufman of The Rebel Heart, and has grown to over 8,000 members. Even with all those members, the tenor has remained helpful, caring, and positive, a feat that not many online sailing or boating communities can claim. If you are a woman who sails, or motors, or dreams of either, it is a tremendous resource.

One of the common threads in the group posts is that of discouraged ladies seeking some support and encouragement. While only a fraction of the members are full time cruisers or dreamers of such, selling everything and moving onto a boat can be the most trying venture a person can attempt. Once cruising, the learning curve is steep; the unexpected can sometimes be overwhelming. Among long-term cruisers, it is a well-known fact and oft-sited meme, that of the highs being higher and the lows being lower than land life and each cruiser has to find their own way through. I was thinking particularly about this issue this morning because after checking a few things off my project list yesterday and feeling pretty good about it, this morning I made the mistake of asking Tim what was on his list. Wow.

So how do we navigate those ups and downs, highs and lows? Clearly, the highs are great. Those fantastic take-your-breath-away sunsets, the hour long parade of dolphins dancing in your wake, the sight of that rare Tropic Bird, the lightning on the horizon and, yes, finishing a water pump overhaul and installation. The lows? They come in all sorts.

Loneliness can sometimes be the hardest. The cruising community is in a constant state of flux depending on where you happen to be at the moment. Dinner Key Mooring Field? Tons of cruisers, lots of community and social functions. Hoffman Cay in the Berry Islands? Better like your shipmates because they're the only ones you're going to see. Then there's the ever-present missing of family members back on shore: aging parents and grandbabies that grow up entirely too fast.

The current state of boat maintenance is probably the other main cause of deep lows. You spend a lot of time maintaining the boat and yet it will knock the feet right out from under you every chance it gets. We have a good friend who finally got to leave the dock after a long summer refit, only to have it break down a few times on their way south. Again. And they're not isolated. Two other friends have been held hostage by the dock for over a month waiting on parts to fix major issues on the boat - transmissions and rudders.

I've had someone tell me it's all about your attitude. I admire people who can just buckle down and say, "OK this thing sucks but I'm going to just be happy anyway." If I had that sort of emotional discipline, I wouldn't be carrying around 20 extra pounds. I've also had land-bound friends wonder how you could possibly ever claim the right to be depressed when you're living the life in paradise. You know the answer to that one, the exceedingly well-used (or abused) phrase "Cruising is fixing your boat in exotic places" thing. Boat maintenance brings with it physical pain (at least for those of us who are aging boat owners), stress over money (unless you are independently wealthy), and endless frustration because you can't find things, parts are unavailable, you don't have the proper tools or expertise, or the weather is not cooperating.

Ah yes...weather. The master of highs and lows, if you'll pardon the pun. The weather rules the cruising life and, inevitably, the sun will be bright and too hot when you need to do stainless polishing, the wind and rain will be ice cold when you have to travel down the ICW, the storm will be the strongest when you have people anchored too close, and rain will pin you inside a very small space for days. But that pristine steel blue sky after a cold front? The salty, light breeze whispering through the palms on shore? The deep reds and golds of a sunset reflected in the clouds? We live in the weather and these stunning displays that so many land dwellers miss are the stuff of good cruising dreams.

For me, navigating the highs and lows involves finding ways to maneuver things around me to a manageable flow. One of the ways I do this is through lists. I am a meticulous list keeper. I put everything on The List no matter how small, just so I can check it off. Checking something off makes me feel like I'm accomplishing something, like I'm making some progress. If I'm installing a new bilge pump then the list might get four entries: research type of pump to buy, buy pump, run wiring, install pump. I do this, because many projects take days and if I just put, "install new bilge pump", I might not get to check off anything for a week. I will end each day feeling like I haven't accomplished anything. If the lows are getting to me, I find something quick and easy to get off the list and I immediately feel better. This approach doesn't work for everyone. Tim absolutely hates lists. He feels like they sit there mocking him, a constant reminder of his inability to stay on top of things. Fortunately for us, the two of us are bummed by different things so we rarely are at the low together and can encourage each other. You have to decide what works for you and for your partner if you're in a relationship

Another way to maneuver things around me to make it better is by simply taking a break. Go for a walk. Watch a funny movie. Read a book. Play a game. Cook a new recipe. Call a friend. Announce a day off and go for a hike in the park or a bike ride. Blow the conch horn at sunset. Anything that will allow you to take a deep breath and renew your energy to tackle things again.

All of life is waves and cycles and seasons, something that you don't think of much when you're living on land, but something that is acutely accented when living on the water. I wouldn't trade the intensity of life here for anything. Sure, it comes with the cost of those deep lows, but that's a price I'm willing to pay. Any life richly lived comes with a cost. I'm learning to find ways to mitigate the depth of the lows and, in the process, I'm accumulating a wealth of memories, experiences, and stories for the grandkids. So if you're planning to cruise some day and you hear fearsome stories of weather and boat maintenance nightmares, don't let them scare you away.

It's a life well lived and worth every bit of effort.

Changing Landscapes

When we left in 2013 we were part of what my good friend Paul (of S/V Kelly Nicole) has taken to calling "The Class of 2013." There were a group of us taking off then from various places: Paul and Deb from New York, and Bruce and Tammy (of Dos Libras) from South Carolina, and us from Annapolis. We met and tag-teamed that first few months, but Paul and Deb and Bruce and Tammy opted to go on to places farther than we intended to go. We split up physically, but always kept in touch. We consider them to be some of our best friends. Two years later, overachievers Bonnie and Craig both known from our aviation years in our home port of St. Louis, MO, decided to skip a few grades and move into the Class of '13. They left from Annapolis as well and quickly hop-scotched past us to join Paul and Deb.

The years passed, the friendships grew stronger (thanks in large part to social media,) but Paul and Deb pushed on to Granada, Bruce and Tammy bounced around the Gulf, Bahamas and Caribbean, we did the north in the summer/south in the Bahamas thing and Bonnie and Craig settled in the area around Puerto Rico. A year in to their cruising, Bonnie and Craig bought an RV. They sailed the boat in the winter, and traveled in the RV in the summer while the boat was on the hard for hurricane season. Flash forward to today: they just listed the boat for sale.

You hear it all the time: the most difficult part of cruising is the goodbyes. You meet cruisers in anchorages, on docks, at the dinghy dock, in cruiser hangouts, or on the radio underway. You form these deeply connected friendships in an unbelievably short time. No need to find out what you have in common, because you're coming from basically the same experiences and share the values of the cruising life. You skip all the small-talk niceties, and delve right into the meat of the relationship. Then a few days later, you're all headed different directions and have to say goodbye.  You know you'll likely see them again, and when you do you'll pick up just where you left off, but the landscape changes.

For the Class of '13, the landscape has changed pretty significantly. Tammy and Bruce bought a condo in Puerto Rico and are transitioning from Dos Libras to land, we've had to return to land (albeit temporarily) to make more money, Bonnie and Craig are moving off the water to their next adventure, and we're all living vicariously through Paul and Deb as they travel the Caribbean. While I have a completely different view out my window than I did out Kintala's port in 2013, it's the change inside me that matters most. The richness that these folks have brought to our lives, the shared experiences, the shared commitment to a life well-lived, are all something that I will always carry with me. Nowhere else in my life have I developed friendships like the ones in the cruising community, not just those in the Class of '13, but entirely too many others to list in a blog post. So no matter how much the landscape might change, the foundation of this magical life with the sea remains.

So if you're looking to join the cruising landscape, I can tell you that this catamaran is a very well-maintained one worth your consideration. Bonnie and Craig, both coming out of the aviation community, are just as anal as we are about maintenance and care, and the PDQ 36 has long been recognized as one of the better sailing catamarans. And if catamarans aren't your thing, keep in mind that Kintala is still for sale, recently reduced in price to $74,900, so Class of 2019 step up to the plate!

S/V Odin PDQ 36 on Yachtworld

Throwback Thursday - Destinations

Since we're stuck on land for a while I thought I'd join the Throwback Thursday bandwagon and highlight some posts from our 11 years of blogging. Yes, 11 years. Seems impossible that much time has passed since we first started on this journey.

For the first one, I thought I'd highlight this post that Tim wrote when he was on land helping his sister to move his parents into a nursing home. While the reasons for land dwelling are much less stressful this time, I was surprised at how pertinent it still is. Enjoy!

DESTINATIONS

Friday, May 30, 2014
Posted by Tj

I am still not used to traffic. Every trip seems more like a ride through a shooting gallery. Vehicles of all shapes and sizes switching lanes, dodging in and out, pushing lights, and getting as close to other vehicles as possible. It is as if the drivers think filling up every available inch will somehow get them to their destination a fraction of a second sooner. "Trust me," I want to tell them, "it doesn't". Then I want to add, "And your destination isn't that important anyway."

This morning, waiting to turn left, the buzz of a sport bike pulled up and filled the spot just off my starboard side. It was a cute little baby Ninja (maybe the 250 R) piloted by an equally cute (from what I could see – she was wearing a helmet and full armored gear) young lady. A moment later and the picture in my mind shifted to that of Deb astride her fully grown Ninja 1400Z. Thousands upon thousands of miles passed under our wheels, with me usually off her port side and a bike length or so in trail. It is the part of my old life that I miss the most, though truth to tell our go-blinding-fast-and-scare-the-snot-out-of-the-cage-drivers days are fading ever further into the past.

Between us, we clocked maybe a half a million miles on two wheels; mountains, deserts, forests; rain, snow and heat. We wore out a list of bikes too long to remember. For all of those miles the destination wasn't that important. It was only an excuse to go. What mattered was that we were moving, seeing new things, having an adventure, doing something not everyone does in a way not everyone does it.

Our new life on the boat is the very essence of moving with little care of the destination. Each place is temporary anyway. We will be there for a while. Then we will be off to someplace else.

I think things like that living, as I am, this in-between life. This destination is important, important enough to keep me in one place for weeks. This is a place I have to be, and having to be in a place changes the color of everything. In this place, first I do what I have to do, then I do what I should do, then I do what I can do.  There is never a time when I am doing what I want to do.

Living on the boat I might be cold, might be a hungry or seasick, might be hot and sticky. There are times when I wish we were at the destination, temporary as it might be. But on some level too deep to think about very often, I am almost always doing what I want to do.

And I wondered, sitting at that light, if a destination IS a destination because it is a place we have to go to do a thing we have to do.  Maybe that's why land dwellers have such a hard time. They are always at a destination doing what they have to do. Then they hurry to the next destination to do what they have to do again.  Maybe the mad rush is nothing more than a vain hope that the next destination will be different, a place where they can do what they want to do.

A place where they can live as they want to live.

The green turn arrow flashed while I gazed at the baby Ninja. The guy behind me hit the horn a microsecond later.

I am a visitor in his world now, an outsider who has forgotten the rules. It never even occurred to me to flash him the single digit of estimated IQ.  Even if it had I hope I wouldn't have. Guests should be polite. I moved along to this place I need to be. But soon I will leave destinations behind once again.

The way it is.

Slowly, and somewhat against my will, the integration back into the world of land dwellers continues. I am starting to drive a little faster. The highway part of the route to and from the shop works best when big parts of it get done in the left lane. Two of the off ramps used are left exits, with one of those dumping me off into the left lane of another highway. From there it is about 1/2 mile to get across four lanes of traffic to a right exit. When in the left lane, it seems best to try and keep up, but ten over is about as fast as I care to go. It’s usually enough, particularly when the schedule has me making the trip around rush hour. Non-rush hour traffic is light enough that leaving the lane switch to the last minute isn’t a problem. On those days,speeds in the fast lane run 20/25 over…and more. Best to leave that bit of concrete to those in a real hurry to get to their next accident.

The drive through town to the highway has its own displays of land dweller foolishness. I don’t understand those who just blow through red lights without even slowing, something witnessed on an average of once a day. I can’t get my head around the idea of someone thinking that they are so important that traffic laws simply don’t apply to them. I sometime wonder if they think the laws of reaction times, momentum, braking traction, and impact “g” forces, don’t apply to them either. Then again, thinking isn’t likely one of their strong suits. Such drivers are, admittedly, a minority. Maybe Darwin keeps them from multiplying too rapidly.

Unsurprisingly, the job is helping ease the transition. In the aviation world, the people not big on thinking don’t get very far or last very long. (Darwin rules again.) Being among the tribe of hard-core, professional aviators helps take some of the sting out of not being among the tribe of cruisers. The job, now, is to sit through the exact same class/cockpit trainer/sim sessions as completed barely a week ago. Observing is the task at hand, concentrating more on how the material is taught rather than what is being taught. There is still a lot of learning going on. Knowing enough to pass the check rides and exams is not near to knowing enough to teach.

Mike, the instructor this past week, is the fourth I have worked with since hiring on. The first three got me – six years away from a flight deck – past an FAA type ride in the Legacy fly-by-wire-gee-whiz wonder bird, in three weeks. A pretty good demonstration of just how good they are at what they do. Watching Mike, with an eye toward working the classroom gee-whiz wonders and watching how he interacts with the group did (as I fully expected) highlight just how challenging – and fun – this is going to be. And there are still two areas of instruction, the cockpit trainer and the actual simulator, to be mastered.

Another help in taking the sting away from being off the boat comes from spending time with the pilots being trained. The current class includes pilots from Mexico, France, Germany (who was born in Brazil), and the US. One of the American pilots was a contract guy who has flown pretty much everywhere there is to fly, including Russia and China. This group of seven pilots is, collectively, fluent in at least 6 languages. They are very much the kind of people we routinely met while traveling on Kintala: adventuresome, capable, friendly, smart, and at ease with other cultures and ideas. It is just flat-out fun to be around them, listen to their stories, and work with them as they get a handle on this new bird.

It all helps.

The crew of Blown’ In the Wind is spending a few days on the dock where Kintala is sitting with the broker. They say it is strange to see her there without Deb and I nearby. It is even stranger having them “out there” while heading off to work each day. I try not to think of it too often; the job, Daughters (Two), and the grandkid gang of 7 are all good reasons to have taken this path. But sometimes the nights pass slow, with the lights of the city and the noise of the adjoining apartments rubbing raw against the nights of silence and darkness riding to the anchor off some uninhabited cay. At other times a thought or memory will sneak up and freeze my world for just a moment, right in the middle of the day. Those usually pass quickly, though the ghost of a hurt may linger for a while. Some of the people I love, and a world I miss, are very far away. And that’s just the way it is going to be for a while.

Just another ride?

One thing that seemed a pretty sure bet when we left land and moved onto a boat, was that there would be no more check rides in the future, let alone two check rides in five days. It would have been a bad bet to take.

Photo courtesy of AOPA.com

The first was Monday’s “easy” ride, the one to check the box required by the European authorities. That one was done with my new friend from Germany and was actually two, two-hour rides. Michael took the left (Captain’s) seat for the first ride with me on the right. Then we switched for the second ride. Like most jets, and in spite of all the high tech gee-wizardry that is supposed to make this one “easy” to fly, it is a two pilot airplane. When things start to go wonky, with warning lights flashing and aural alerts filling the flight deck, they can be two very busy people, with each person’s hands being filled with different tasks. The nice thing about European (EASA) rides is that they are not “jeopardy” events. One can’t really fail the ride. If a maneuver isn’t performed up to standard the crew simply does it again, learns from whatever mistake it was that they made, and moves on. There is always the possibility that someone will come along who simply can’t figure out how to do it right, but that is a pretty rare event at this level of aviation. These are not teenaged kids working toward their first solo flight in a single engine piston banger.

Another good thing about EASA rides is they focus on crew coordination and decision making, using the aircraft's capabilities to minimize risk. When things start to go wrong, the crew is expected to reduce the risks involved as much as possible. Checking destination weather, finding alternate airports, requesting priority handling to simplify the approach procedure as much as possible, are all expected to be part of the crew’s actions. Of course things still go wrong on an EASA check ride. Though there is a good chance that a pilot starting out today will never see a honest to goodness flashing red light in an actual cockpit, you have to practice something.

The second ride, the FAA sanctioned ride, was Friday. The FAA is the last aviation entity on the planet to still insist on “jeopardy” rides. Lose too much airspeed during one kind of maneuver, gain or lose too much altitude during another maneuver, and the examiner is required to terminate the ride, no second chances. The applicant is sent home with a “pink slip” and a notice goes in the federal records of a failed attempt to get a new rating. They can’t take away your birthday or anything, and a second ride can be scheduled after a certain amount of retraining is logged. The bitch with this approach is that anyone can have a bad day, and a ride can be “busted” even if the outcome of the flight was never in doubt. (You can read that as meaning it didn’t get near to crashing and no one was going to get hurt.)

During this check ride, one gets to demonstrate all kinds of skills that will never be called upon again. Steep turns in an airplane deliberately designed to correct any roll attitude greater than 33 degrees is one. The required 45 degree angle can be commanded, but one is literally fighting the airplane’s flight management system the entire time. Oh, and don’t gain or lose about a wing’s span worth of altitude while doing so, even if the ground is 10,000 feet away. Do so and the ride is a bust, come back another day to try again.

The same can be said for performing aerodynamic stalls, when the wing quits flying from too low an airspeed. Millions upon millions of dollars were spent when designing this aircraft to ensure that it could not be stalled. So, during an FAA check ride, some (not all) of the multiple layers of protection are switched off. Then the pilot can provoke a stall warning (not an actual stall) in order to demonstrate the “skill” of recovering from something that hasn’t actually happened yet. It is a bit like chopping off a foot to demonstrate the skill of hopping around on one leg.

After doing things in the airplane that the airplane was designed not to do, one gets to demonstrate the ability to handle multiple, cascading failures by making the poorest possible risk management decisions. No pilot I know would ever, with an engine shut down (OEI), press on to an airport where the weather was at minimums for making the approach. Nor would any airport I have ever flown to allow a piece of equipment to blunder onto a runway in front of an emergency aircraft, thus provoking a single engine low altitude (barely 50 feet in the air, less than the length of the aircraft) abort and missed approach. But an FAA check ride requires pretend stupid topped with a dash of silly. After the abort, the sky will miraculously clear and turn into day for the next landing, but the flaps will fail. A OEI / no flaps landing is like tip-toeing through a mine field. One faltering step will have the airplane careening through the grass on the side of the runway. (A sure way to bust any kind of check ride is to crash, even if it is a Sim.)

A saying that floats around the aviation world goes something like this, “It is best to exercise superior judgment and avoid demonstrating superior skills.” On the FAA ride we do just the opposite. The good news is that the Legacy 500 is such an overpowered little brute that it barely notices that an engine has packed it in for the day. So, what it taketh away in cooperating with steep turns, it giveth back when jumping over a wayward dump truck. The no flap, OEI landing? Just take it easy with the single thrust reverser, don’t pounce on the brakes with too much enthusiasm, and all should be well. (That is, by the way, just the highlights of the things that go wrong on this two hour check ride.)

For me the ride mostly demonstrated that it takes more than a few weeks to scrape off 6 years worth of salt water accumulated rust. Still, it went okay. The Check Airman was fair in his assessment of the things I could have done better and, to a large extent, all involved are well aware that check rides have little to do with actually using the airplane to move around the country day after day. I would have been quite comfortable to walk out of the sim, climb up into an actual Legacy, and head off somewhere; the Check Airman would have put his family on board behind me. When it comes right down to it, that is every Check Airman's actual pass/fail criteria. And it is the best one I can think of.

After the “official” ride was over, we had a good discussion of how I, as a flight instructor, can help him do his job as a Pilot Examiner. The people he checks will soon include people I have helped train. We are on the same side when it comes to getting them ready for both the check ride and the real world. Sometimes that is a delicate balancing act between two contradictory sets of standards.

With the rides over, and a new type rating in my pocket, the heat is off a bit. I am past the point where the job could still have gone very wrong, leaving us with few options for getting back to a boat someday. I have been “at the shop” pretty much every day since training started three weeks ago. When not working the GFS I was at home pouring over manuals, procedures, and test questions, often far into the night. Though not the FAA’s doing, to me this check ride carried more potential “jeopardy” than any other I have taken.

It will be good to get back to a more normal schedule. I am really looking forward to concentrating on getting to the front of a classroom, rather than to the front seat of the airplane. After all, they hired me to teach, not to fly. 

Hoops and boxes

Training goes on. Sometimes it is kind of fun. Sometimes it is enormously frustrating. Note to self, don’t take nearly six years off from doing something complex, then expect to go back to it without any kind of drama. The salt water rust on what were more than adequate aviation skills is embarrassing. The good news is that one need not be an expert pilot to teach other expert pilots how to make friends with a new piece of equipment. The regulations require that one carry a type rating to teach but the goal isn't to fly the thing out on the line, it is to help those who do to keep sharp.

It is a bit like being a riding coach for a MotoGP racer. All the coaches are ex-racers themselves, though not all of them are past champions. Past champions tend to have enough resources to do whatever they want after hanging up their leathers. Not many of them want to gypsy around the world, living in hotels, and spending work days at race tracks. But past champions or no, the coaches don’t race anymore. Yet they are an important part of the package that gets the racer to the top step of the podium.

There is no desire, on my part, to join the working pilots back out on the line. Hotel rooms and working days spent at airports stuffed full of human kind don’t hold much attraction. And, truth to tell, I don’t think getting a type rating in the airplane myself is all that important, though it is kind of fun to add another one to my license, just for boasting’s sake. In the aviation world type ratings are a bit like the gold star one got from a favorite teacher back in Kindergarten.

It would be more useful to run though the various scenarios, V1cuts, engine fires, ect., over and over to get the procedures down pat, sniffing out the smallest details of how to get it perfect. Then we could pass that along to the crews, like a riding coach helping get that last 0.1 of a second out of a difficult corner on the race track. But endless hours spent grinding through simulated skies setting up instrument approaches, doing circles in holding patters, talking on the radio? These folks do that day after day, and have been doing so for years. When it comes to a new airplane a bunch of hours figuring out the particular switch work is what they need, and they don’t need a full motion sim for that. Sim time should be spent concentrating on those difficult corners. Spend an hour doing V1 cuts, one after the other, where it is less then five minutes work from engine failure to flying or dying. Do ten of them in a row and the muscle memory will be there when needed. The same goes for engines blowing up, flight control failures, and electrical emergencies. Once the correct actions are taken, most problems are just an annoyance until the wheels touch down again. Then it becomes the maintenance department’s headache.

Repeated runs of low visibility departures and landings, the airplane at max take-off or landing weight, with the cross wind at maximum and / or the runways covered with snow would be time well spent. More of those difficult corners that lie at each end of a long, boring straight. Each of those only lasts a few minutes as well. A couple of hours in the sim and the crew could hammer out more of those twitchy departures and landings than they are likely to see in a year out on the line.

Still, as in all things in this modern world, the proper hoops must be jumped through, the boxes on various forms must be checked, and some sort of official blessing must be bestowed by both government and corporate powers-that-be. Though the sailing world has its own hoops, boxes, and brushes with officialdom, one rarely has to deal with such when out on big water in a small boat. Out there might be the last bastion of being completely responsible for ones’ own choices, answering only to Sister Ocean, Father Sky, and Mother Earth. That is not the same for the modern pilot. Cockpit voice recorders, data boxes, recorded communications, and radar flight track data will all be waiting to judge every action the crew took, and every word they spoke, after things went wonky. Even if they get the plane safely back to Mother Earth without putting a scratch on a passenger or bystander, some Monday morning quarterback somewhere will find fault with what they did. Human nature I guess, another advantage to being out on big water. Not a lot of humans milling around out there, looking for something to sound off about even if they don't have the slightest clue as to what really happened. Or what it took to survive.

Fortunately for me, when it comes to the effort of knocking off the rust, my Sim partner is one of those past champions who likes hanging around a race track. He is a retired check airman / instructor on Airbus airliners, flying mostly in Europe. His knowledge of instrument procedures / approaches / holds / misses / FMS operations is nothing short of encyclopedic. He even stumps our Instructor once in a while. It will be a bit embarrassing if, at some point down the road, he comes back for recurrent training and I end up as his Instructor. Sometimes the hoops and boxes are just short of silly, but at least I’ll know how to start up the Sim so we can work on getting the last bit of performance out of those difficult corners.

So What's in Your Ditchbag?

We were two hours into a deep sleep when the fire alarm woke us. If you've never lived in an apartment before, there's simply no way to describe the brain-splitting volume of the alarms in the old St. Louis buildings. It took us a moment to even realize what it was since we were so dead to the world and, not seeing or smelling any smoke, we took the time to dress and put coats on. It's incredibly cold in St. Louis right now and standing on the street corner in my jammies just wasn't all that appealing.

Peering into the hallway, we still didn't see any smoke and only smelled the remnants of someones's cigar nearby. We made our way down the ten flights of stairs, only meeting one other family along the way. In the lobby there were maybe thirty or forty people milling about while the firemen checked the alarm panel. Within ten minutes we were given the all clear to return to our apartments.

The experience was weird for me after living on a boat for so long. On a boat, any alarm demands instant reaction, and any emergency is almost certainly life-threatening. Here, in a building with at least 150 apartments and probably 200-400 residents, only 30-40 people even paid any attention to the alarm. While we were waiting on the fire department to clear the building, I chatted with a couple of our neighbors. I was told that it happens on a fairly regular basis, the last one being six months ago which surely has resulted in alarm fatigue. My one neighbor told me that he always comes down now because the last one involved a fire in the dumpster that had traveled up the trash chute at the end of the building. He said it was a serious fire that could have become catastrophic quickly, so he now responds to every alarm.

After returning to our apartment, we talked a little about it all and I mused that maybe we needed an apartment ditch bag, one with our passports, jewelery, and space to throw our wallets, phones, iPads, Captain's licenses, and my treasured framed 4-leaf clover set that my daughter gave me. It's definitely easier to think about dealing with losing everything when you're parked on land and can walk to your daughter's house. Quite a bit different from having to jump into the water with what you have on to avoid a boat fire. Yet, even here, I can't pull myself away from the well established habits of the boat. Whether you live on a boat, or have returned to land, the mindfulness you learn while cruising is truly a great thing.

The photo above just a few hundred yards from our mooring at Dinner Key is the fire that caused me to put together our first ditch bag on Kintala, although it's developed over the years. My apartment ditch bag will be much smaller than the one we used on Kintala, just a small bag with a few things that are sentimentally irreplaceable to me. The ditch bag on Kintala was one of survival, and that for an unknown time span. Since I've been asked for the contents list before, I thought it would be an appropriate time to post it here. So what's in your ditch bag?

• First aid kit - ours is actually a separate whole duffle-sized bag that is bright orange. I spent a long time assembling a good-quality first aid kit with seasick meds, prescriptions including antibiotics, a blood pressure reader, surgical wound closures, etc.
• Portable VHF
• Portable receive only SSB and 2 extra sets of batteries
• Multiple space blankets
• MREs for a week for the two of us
• 8 quarts of water (yes, I know it's not enough but we wouldn't be able to lift the bag with adequate water. We would have to collect water with space blankets)
• Flares
• Distress flag
• Signal mirror
• 3 knives
• Multi-tool
• Small fishing kit
• 2 inflatable pillows
• Wind-up flashlight
• Wind-up AM/FM radio
• My prescription
• 2 books
• Pencils
• Waterproof paper
• Package of ginger candy
• Extra pair of glasses and sunglasses
• Sunscreen
• Patch kit
• Superglue
• Several pieces of rope
• Bailing Cup
• Passports
• Boat documentation and insurance paperwork
• Room to put our last minute items in: cell phones, our Delorme InReach satellite communicator and the EPIRB and, of course, my treasured four-leaf clovers.