Thus, as easy and wonderful as the making of friendships is with other cruisers, it’s a sad thing if it begins to edge out the inclination and opportunity to build friendships with local people.

Unfortunately, many cruisers do opt to hang back in the comfort zone of cruiser circles. They rationalize such self-limiting behavior as not wanting to be intrusive or as wariness about the security of their floating personal space. I know because I myself struggled with these feelings.

But when you see other cruisers invited on spearfishing trips with local fisherman, on long guided hikes to secret waterfalls, or included in unique family celebrations like Sunday dinner, holidays, festivals and weddings, you have to ask yourself, do these folks have some special knack for bridging those invisible boundaries between strangers, or do I need to change my thinking?

After surveying the Admirals – several of whom particularly seem fall into that special-knack category – what it really comes down to is a combination of opportunity, attitude, openness, and effort.

Cruisers successful at forging bonds with locals spend less time traveling in a pack and more time exploring out-of-the-way anchorages on their own.

Instead of a string of touch-and-go stops, they also invest more time in one place or make a point to return. This gives locals the chance to view cruisers less as tourists and more as real people.

These cruisers also seek out common ground, whether that’s a shared interest or a complementary one, where one party has the curiosity and the other party the information. For example, local foodstuffs and the recipes and cooking techniques for them make a simple common ground for conversation; likewise problems to be solved and broken equipment, whether it’s yours aboard the boat or their’s ashore.

Cruisers successful at forging bonds with locals give, rather than ask; listen rather than tell, respect rather than judge.

Yvonne of AUSTRALIA 31 watching dominoes on a street corner

Two of my Admirals stand out as such have-the-knack people: Judy of URSA MINOR, whom I’ve known for years, and Aussie Yvonne of AUSTRALIA 31, the avid birdwatcher, who was one of my original Admirals.

When Judy and I worked together in the Virgin Islands years ago, I thought her a model of international relations. Not only did she have exotic stories from her years doing legal aid in Micronesia or adventuring in the South Pacific as pickup crew on a tiny sailboat, but even in the Virgins, with its dual Anglo and West Indian cultures, Judy moved between cultures unselfconsciously. Her secret, as I determined it, was that she paid attention to what was going on, whether it was the news, local politics, or community dynamics, and plunged right in.

Recently, Judy and Bryan passed through a Fijian village in which she’d spent two weeks over 30 years ago. On that occasion she’d met, while scrubbing clothes in the river with the local women, a precocious 12-year-old named Esita who shared Judy’s passion for world news and politics. In the same stop, Judy befriended the chief’s teenage son who’d taken her hiking to a waterfall.

Both these individuals were still there, remembered her well, and were thrilled to reunite. “Had our time in that village been the usual 1-3 days cruisers typically devote to small places, I doubt either would’ve remembered me, but the combination of the time we spent and our eagerness to share life as they lived it, made us memorable among the yachts that have visited since.”

30 years later: Bryan with Esita and her family onboard. Judy with Tevita (David) the chief’s son.

Yvonne also has the knack. “What Yvonne does is very un-North American,” her husband Bernie relates.

“She invites locals aboard first thing – even the canoes that come alongside. If we cannot speak the language, she shows them photos instead, shares a few raisins or something sweet they have never seen, and ends up with mates for life. Her greatest invite was 35 pygmies from Guyana down below to watch a movie; then we spent a month with them!”

Yvonne and Bernie’s approach demonstrates that they consider themselves equals, are prepared to enjoy what the locals enjoy and “don’t pretend to be superior or on a boat locals shouldn’t see.”

Daria Blackwell, a new Admiral currently cruising Ireland aboard their Bowman 57 ALERIA, says in Ireland, “When you walk in the door of a pub, conversation stops while people size you up. But if you say hello, shake hands and look them in the eye, they’ll stare deep into your soul to quickly size you up, and, if they like what they see, they’ll take you in in a flash.”

Personally, I think Daria’s strategy is appropriate for any place you might stop. Key is the respect the steady look conveys and also the ability – no, the effort you have made – to say that hello in the local language. Sure, it’s easiest if English is a common language, as it was for Daria in Ireland or Bev of CLOVERLEAF in Israel. But even when it’s not, dust off that school French or Spanish (with a little help from Kathy Parsons’ “For Cruisers” language books!) or script out some greetings in the local vernacular extracted from your cruising or travel guides. Such small efforts translate to a giant step forward.

And speaking of planning ahead, when Marcie of NINE OF CUPS and her husband David prepared to head for such out of the way places as Tristan da Cunha and St. Helena in the South Atlantic, and Juan Fernandez, Easter Island and Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific, Marcie searched the internet in advance to find contacts in each of those places. “I simply asked if we could bring any supplies or needed items with us. Establishing an email relationship in advance ensured that someone knew we were coming and would perhaps be our hosts when we arrived. In every case, we had a welcoming committee waiting for us and experienced some memorable hospitality and generosity.”

Although I personally believe that expecting the best from people will get you the best in return, obviously we cannot afford to be blithely naïve. “Places where there are lots of cruising boats and cruise ships are not the best places to expect a genuine relationship to come easily,” observes Kathleen of RENAISSANCE. There are exceptions, as Kathleen was quick to point out, like Trinidad, where cruisers clearly represent a revenue opportunity – indeed one deliberately cultivated by local businesses – yet where genuine warmth flourishes.

But unfortunately, in places where tourism has boomed in the face of local poverty, crime becomes more likely and the ground often too hard for the seeds of friendship . “We’ve shied away from locals in places where the people we came across were aggressive in attitude,” says Daria.

But all in all, friendships made with local people are as varied as those we make with other cruisers. Some may result in intense closeness and end when we move on, while others will stay alive indefinitely whether by mail, Christmas cards, or, in this new era, by email and Facebook!

“After 17 years, Yvonne collected 743 email addresses in her contact list,” says Bernie. “When word got around she was ill, 450 of these made contact, some after a nine year break.”

That tells us a lot about the power of such friendships, doesn’t it? …And of the people who master “the knack”!

Photos: Thanks to Bernie & Yvonne Katchnor, AUSTRALIA 31; Judy Knape, URSA MINOR; Daria Blackwell, ALERIA.

Contributing Admirals: Judy Knape, URSA MINOR; Kathy Parsons, HALE KAI; Bernie & Yvonne Katchnor, AUSTRALIA 31; Marcie Lynn, NINE OF CUPS; Kathleen Watt, RENAISSANCE; Daria Blackwell, ALERIA; Sylvie Branton, mv ALBATROS; Bev Feiges, mv CLOVERLEAF.

This article was published in the April 2011 issue of Latitudes and Attitudes.

Related articles on this website

• Cruising Friendships, Part One (Admiral’s Angle column #55): Cruising friendships grow quickly from the lifestyle’s many meeting opportunities.
• Cruising Friendships, Part Two – Keeping Track! (Admiral’s Angle column #56): Strategies and incentives for keeping connected with cruising friends when way diverge.
• Language for Cruisers (Admiral’s Angle column #36): Small efforts in language reap big rewards in experience and open all kinds of doors in the places we want to visit.
• Cruisers Give Back (Admiral’s Angle column #26): Cruisers find ways to give back to the people and places they visit
• Traveler vs. Tourist, by Brittany Stephen-Meyers

On the one hand there is the memory game of sorting out and remembering all the folks you just met at a potluck, while on the other is the challenge of staying connected to the ones you’ve become close to when ways part.

Gone are the usual criteria by which we customarily organize acquaintances: their address, phone number, workplace,… their LAST NAME!

Instead we must learn to think of them by first names, boat names, boat type, homeport, radio call signs and – the most amorphous of criteria – their planned itinerary. Itinerary matters, because we cruisers do factor into the investment of attention we’re willing to give a new friendship the likelihood of our seeing them again.

The most important tool you have for remembering the people you meet (and being remembered by them!) is the boat card, promptly exchanged. You can have some fun in designing these, however, you need to give careful consideration to the information you want to put on it, depending on what you want to put out there for the world to see.

Commonly you will see any or all of the following: Boat name, crew names, hailing port, call sign(s), radio email address, DSC number (for digital selection calling via the VHF), land email address, mailing address, and boating associations belonged to. If you have a captain’s license and hope to do deliveries, you might put that on. Likewise if you have skill as a mechanic, seamstress, sailmaker, rigger or any cruising-related profession you want to market to other cruisers (don’t forget computer sorter-outer), you might want to include that! Finally, a picture of the boat or you is really helpful for people like me. Yes, all that on a 2”x3.5” card!

Some cruisers are private or cautious (or both) about sharing personal data, while others are more forward. One thing you want to be careful about spreading around is your radio email address, which you want to guard against getting on bulk mailing or spam lists.

On the other hand your email address is the best way for you to keep connected. A solution may be to have two cards, one with more info and with less. Either way, consider that you probably don’t want to print off a thousand glossy cards when first starting out, because information you want to share may change. Onboard printers and standard-size Avery card stock is a good compromise.

Other strategies for learning new names in an anchorage are to keep a list by the companionway that you add to daily or to enter names or paste boat cards into your log (or guest) book with pertinent notes about how you met. Many cruisers snap digital photos to aid their memories. The logbook option works well for Lisa of LADY GALADRIEL, because, like many people, “Associating where and what was happening when I met someone really helps me remember them.”

No matter how strong the connection you’ve just made with someone, chances are you’ll go in opposite directions sooner or later. It’s important not to take this personally. Cruisers are an independent breed, and part of the joy of cruising is the ability to peel off on your own whenever you wish and rejoin the crowd somewhere else.

This is why, in the era of satellite phones, so many cruisers feel so strongly about the value of having an HF (SSB/Ham) radio on board. “A satellite phone can connect you to the outside world,” says Kathy of HALE KAI, “but an HF radio connects you to your community.” At $1 a minute, cruisers don’t sit around chatting with each other on their Iridium phones.

Given that, another good place to keep a list of names handy is with your radio log.

“The regional radio nets are a great way to stay connected to cruising friends,” adds Lisa, who has been an active net controller in several cruising grounds. “The morning check-in lets you track where people are and the contact section lets you arrange your next rendezvous. You even absorb information about people you haven’t yet met.”

The regional nets aren’t the only way to use radio. Often, especially on passages, friends wanting to keep in closer touch setup a regular radio schedule on an agreed upon frequency. As your friendship group expands, so does the mini-net.

When distances grow greater, email steps into the breach. When both boats have onboard email capability, this enables quick communication. If one boat or both rely on land internet, however, connecting by email contact becomes less spontaneous.

There comes a threshold of time and distance where even personal emails drop off, yet you still don’t want to lose touch. Newsletters, composed and sent to a list of friends (often at Christmas), are a common answer to this urge. Newsletters sum up the salient points of recent travels so that recipients can act on them if relevant to their own voyage. Websites and blogs really don’t do this as well between cruisers as they do between you and people back home for the simple reason that most cruisers don’t have enough Internet access to follow them.

Facebook, on the other hand, does it very well, and cruisers have quickly flocked to the social networking machine. Facebook’s brief posts and easy uploading for photographs work great at keeping the embers of friendship updated and glowing across gaps of time and distance, plus, of course, Facebook makes it easy to find lost friends wherever they may be in the world. “Through Facebook the last couple of years,” recounts Marcie of NINE OF CUPS, “I’ve reconnected with cruisers I met years ago that I’d lost contact with. It was such a gift to reconnect with those people that I share wonderful memories with.”

Likewise Skype was adopted by cruisers well before the mainstream, and it is the ultimate in keeping connected across great distances. Whether computer-to-computer (free) or computer-to-phone (a very small charge), Skype has returned the intimacy of a voice call (not to mention video face-to-face time) to cruisers’ lives. I am regularly in touch with friends in Bahamas, Mexico, Fiji and Australia.

Why go to all this trouble to sustain so seemingly intangible a network of connections? Lorraine of TWIST OF FATE spoke for all the Admirals when she said, “The thrill of running into cruising friends again, even years later, even ashore, is wonderful. We catch up and reestablish that same closeness again easily, as if no time at all has passed.”

And thank God for that! In the past year alone we have had no fewer than a dozen good cruising friends stop by here in Florida for a visit – from the Virgin Islands, New Zealand, Alabama, Washington State, Colombia, Fiji, and California, among others.

“I see my cruising connections as giving me a lifetime of places to visit and/or compatible people to travel with,” says Kathy of HALE KAI, who’s pretty much ready to travel anywhere, anytime, with or without the boat. “Even if I can’t always stay with friends, at least I always have people to meet up with and locals to advise me on the best things to do there. I don’t have to feel like a stranger in a strange land.”

I think, again, this is so, because cruising friends GET IT. They know and never forget all of those shared experiences – the shared destinations, activities, projects, weather and, of course, adversities so unique to cruising – as well as the urge for exploration that drove us to have those cruising experiences in the first place.

Photos: Thanks to Kathy Parsons, Hale Kai

Contributing Admirals: Lisa Schofield, LADY GALADRIEL; Mary Heckrotte, CAMRYKA; Marcie Lynn, NINE OF CUPS; Jane Kilburn, LIONHEART; Kathy Parsons, HALE KAI; Debbie Leisure, ILLUSIONS; Ellen Sanpere, CAYENNE III; Lorraine Bramble, TWIST OF FATE; Sylvie Branton, ALBATROS.

This article was published in the March 2011 issue of Latitudes and Attitudes.

Related articles on this website

• Cruising Friendships, Part One (Admiral’s Angle column #55): Cruising friendships grow quickly from the lifestyle’s many meeting opportunities.
• The Knack of Befriending Locals (Admiral’s Angle column #57): What’s behind the knack of forging successful bonds with local peoples in the places we visit.
• Logs and Blogs (Admiral’s Angle column #37):The tradition of recording voyage experiences doesn’t just preserve memories but encourages others to follow.
• Staying in Touch (Admiral’s Angle column #14): Out of sight of land no longer means out of touch: the ways and means cruisers stay in touch with each other and back home.

There’s a camp song that goes, “Make new friends, but keep the old, one is silver and the other gold.” If there’s treasure to be found in cruising, most would agree it’s the friendships we make.

To someone still dockside, about to desert land-based friendships built over many years, the finding, making, and maintaining of worthwhile friendships while wandering the world’s oceans must seem a bewildering prospect.

Not only does it happen, but many of us might reverse the rhyme. In the cruising world, it’s the new friendships that have both the sparkle and durability of gold, while old ones risk tarnish.

But let’s be fair to old friends. Unless they’re sailors, or at least travelers, themselves, they won’t get it. Not right off. You’re putting on hold or giving up entirely the very stuff by which they define their lives, and that’s shocking to them.

Email updates and blog posts are ways to tune them in to your new lifestyle, and friends may even feel that they’re riding along! You can even look ahead to destinations and plan a rendezvous, perhaps based at a resort. Fun visits bring the experience alive so much better than pictures … though they’re likely to forever view cruising as extended vacation!

The thing about new cruising friends is that they do GET IT, and they GET IT instantly. Shared destinations, shared activities, shared projects, shared weather and, of course, shared adversity lay immediate foundations. You always have something to talk about, and you have it before you even exchange names or homeports!

“On land, you take time and warm up to relationships,” says Marcie of NINE OF CUPS. “When cruising we tend to evaluate people quickly. We either like them or we don’t after a first meeting. If you like them, you pursue the relationship, because you never know when one boat or the other will leave.”

Mary of CAMRYKA calls it “meeting mode.” “Cruising women in particular are eager to make new friends, so it’s easy to encounter a total stranger and within minutes bypass all the normal game-playing and zoom right in. We watch for that ‘click’ – that something – that lets us know we like this person or we don’t. If we don’t, nothing lost. If we do, everything gained.”

That said, not all encounters result in the same kind of friendships. Some are intense closeness for a single event and gone, seemingly with the wind, the next day when courses diverge. Oddly, others are like seeds that grow and bear fruit later.

“Some people we met cruising we didn’t really get to know too well at the time,” says Jane of LIONHEART. “Lots of reasons. Usually too many other people around. Now those people are visiting as they pass through our homeport (Mooloolaba, Australia), and we’re finding we have so much more in common and didn’t know it! Cruising friendships just keep giving.”

The meeting opportunities

I asked the Admirals to get specific about some of the “meeting opportunities” that have worked best for them. They flooded me with terrific stories of friendships made: the how, the where, and the why.

Sometimes it’s chance happenstance, an opportune encounter to explore the same place at the same time, like the car and hotel overnight in Fiji we shared with Kathy and Dave of SUNFLOWER, before they sailed on.

Traveling the same route – like the ICW – or buddy boating (traveling in tandem) almost always builds a strong connection, whether it lasts for one leg only or stretches into months. Other times it’s as simple as flying the same flag in a foreign land or celebrating abroad a holiday like Thanksgiving or Super Bowl Sunday.

Adversity is another catalyst. Be it a serious emergency or merely a mechanical puzzler, cruisers stand ready to help cruisers. “It doesn’t matter if they know you or not,” attests Debbie of ILLUSIONS, “if you have a need, cruisers are there to help. I’ve regularly seen cruisers work hours on others’ boats, provide parts and advice, boat sit, provide transportation, or deliver parts. I once had a guy take a sail down off his boat and loan it to me when I destroyed mine and had engine failure. I had total strangers provide medical assistance in an emergency. Those people all became friends.”

Everyone loves to share what they know, and everyone out there has something to learn, as when Dennis & Lisa of LADY GALADRIEL taught us about underwater hunting (and cribbage!) in the Sea of Cortez, or I coached Lynn of WIND PONY on her scuba diving, or Kathy Parsons set me on the path to learning Spanish.

There’s an equal inclination to combine resources toward a shared outcome: like filling tanks to enable a group dive, merging copious watermaker output and a washing machine for a joint laundry day, or ransacking lockers to flesh out a spontaneous dinner party.

And all that never-ending talk about pumps, filters, batteries and refrigeration by the men? It also brings their women together to talk about provisioning options, destination recommendations, radio nets, and fish recipes.

“Even weeks stuck in a marina or boat yard become special because of the social aspect,” points out Lorraine of TWIST OF FATE.

Opportunities abound, from as coincidental an encounter as being docked side-by-side and chatting over lifelines to sharing laundry rooms. (“I’ve encountered women in a marina laundry and before the spin cycle learned all about their hopes, fears and dreams and likes, skills and relationships,” says Mary of CAMRYKA.)

A shared excursion into town by bus, taxi or rental car can be very bonding whether for provisioning, hunting for parts, or sightseeing. And marinas, boatyards and those special cruiser nodes (like the Bahamas’ Georgetown, Trinidad or Fiji’s Musket Cove) create spaces for yachtie gatherings like cocktail parties, game nights, swap meets, and potlucks.

Still, it’s hard to beat friendships launched in a shared anchorage.

“In an anchorage,” says Kathy of HALE KAI, “it’s perfectly appropriate to dinghy up to a boat to introduce yourself, ask questions about the area or offer info to new arrivals. Perhaps you have fish to share, books to swap, or hot news from the radio to impart. There’s no end to simple rationales for stopping by.”

When someone does dinghy by, “Invite them aboard for tea or coffee in the cockpit,” says Sylvie of ALBATROS, remembering how she and Kathy first met in Trinidad’s Scotland Bay. “It’s an easy, low-cost no-strings-attached way to give friendship a start.”

Sundowners, of course, are the most traditional of cruiser gatherings, usually between two or three boats. (In different areas you’ll find different protocols for whether the host provides the drinks and hors d’oeuvres or whether it’s BYO. Feel your way!) Be prepared to make an evening of it as intense connections can spontaneously combust!

For larger groups, dinghy raft-ups make great impromptu sundowner platforms. In the Caribbean, we used to host “noodle parties,” allowing us to invite everybody in an anchorage to BYOB and bob behind the boat on flotation aids of choice – a great way to cool down for the evening.

But it doesn’t take a crowd. For making lasting friendships, one-on-one is often best.

My favorite tale comes from Jane. “One lovely couple we met in the remote Lau Group had a brew kit on board but little water. With our watermaker we had tons to spare. So we had a brewing day! A team keg and a wonderful friendship flourished. We spent two weeks exploring together whilst our beer baby brewed. Frankly, the more crowded an anchorage was, the more we stayed to ourselves or hung out with people we already knew.”

Next month, we’ll examine how cruisers keep track of so many roving friends……

Photos: Thanks to Kathy Parsons, Hale Kai

Contributing Admirals:  Mary Heckrotte, Camryka; Marcie Lynn, Nine of Cups; Jane Kilburn, Lionheart; Kathy Parsons, Hale Kai; Debbie Leisure, Illusions; Ellen Sanpere, Cayenne III; Lorraine Bramble, Twist of Fate; Sylvie Branton, Albatros

This article was published in the February 2011 issue of Latitudes and Attitudes.

Related articles on this website

• Cruising Friendships, Part Two – Keeping Track! (Admiral’s Angle column #56): Strategies and incentives for keeping connected with cruising friends when way diverge.
• The Knack of Befriending Locals (Admiral’s Angle column #57):
  What’s behind the knack of forging successful bonds with local peoples in the places we visit.
• Guests Aboard (Admiral’s Angle column #40): Some counsel about managing visits and visitors to enhance their experience and maintain crew sanity.
• Staying in Touch (Admiral’s Angle column #14): Out of sight of land no longer means out of touch: the ways and means cruisers stay in touch with each other and back home.

I’d like to think that “Admiral Abuse” is an oxymoron. That is, I’d like to think that in reality most Admirals –by my definition women who are fully engaged in all parts of the cruising lifestyle – would not encounter it in more than minor ways. But the kind of abuse we’re talking about exists across a spectrum – from slight acts of disrespect to actual oppression. Furthermore, cruising women are not instantly seasoned Admirals. There is a learning curve, which may seem onerous for women for whom cruising was not their idea in the first place or for whom it may seem hard to broach issues. Good partners, however, want to know what women are thinking, feeling and worrying about, because good partners want the cruising life to be enjoyable for all aboard.

The most common form of Admiral abuse is yelling. We’ve all seen it: the couple steering into the dock, the wife leaping around the deck dropping one dock line to grab at another, the husband yelling at her from the wheel. Yelling is bad enough when it is merely meant to give direction, but it becomes destructive when laced with invective (the s-word, not to mention the b-word). Often as not this kind of yelling comes about because the ego behind the wheel does not want to look inadequate to an audience (and isn’t there always an audience on a dock?!) Ironically, the single thing such yelling achieves is to put a spotlight on the very inadequacies that ego is trying to hide.

The solution to this is three-fold: communication, education and practice. Crews must agree in advance on the procedure they will follow for each onboard maneuver, whether it is docking, anchoring, raising and lowering sails, reefing, tacking, jibing, or picking up moorings — in other words all the active and stressful moments of sailing. Both partners need to understand the dynamics of the maneuvers, the potential complications of current or wind, the ramifications of a misjudgment or mistake. But the time to discuss it is not in the middle of things. The time to discuss it is well beforehand.

Next, a system to communicate during the maneuver needs to be in place. For example, many crews use traditional hand signals to communicate from foredeck to helm when anchoring, raising sails, etc. Others prefer radio headsets which allow conveying more detailed feedback. Once a plan is decided upon, the teams should practice, changing roles to see who actually is best suited to be on the foredeck, behind the wheel or at the mast. You may find it helpful to have an unbiased instructor on board to keep ego in place when inevitable goofs are made during the learning process. Or, if there is a big difference in experience levels, the woman might benefit from starting with a separate course with women instructors to gain some independent confidence.

Even with plenty of preparation, things will most likely not go perfectly from day one. Most Admirals say it takes about a year of cruising for couples to work out their onboard procedures between them. It’s a stressful time, during which you and your partner are cooped up with each other 24/7, probably for the first time in your lives. Other tensions may come to the surface: issues about budgets, who does what in the maintenance department, whether or not you need that new piece of equipment, how much time can you devote to the trip, and, of course, decisions about where to go and when.

Once again the stress usually comes from an imbalance in responsibility and knowledge. Yes, the captain should be the one to make ultimate decisions, but remember: being The Captain doesn’t come automatically with either a Y chromosome or a fancy hat. It comes with experience and knowledge and the earned respect of the crew. He or she should again be watchful that ego doesn’t come into the mix. “We’re going because I say so,”— the Captain Bligh syndrome.  Likewise he/she should guard against being benignly patronizing or doling out reassurances that diminish the worrier. For many women just having the chance to voice worries makes reality more manageable. In the partnership of two that most cruising couples are, things will work out much better if both partners are informed about the important issues, are attentive to each other’s anxieties and make decisions together.

Even among experienced and competent cruising couples, trouble can still arise, mostly the typical trials that stem from two people living so closely together.  Sometimes the very systems you’ve worked on over the years to make flow so seamlessly actually become too seamless.  You assume the other knows what you’re thinking, and you become miffed when they don’t; you expect your opinions to be the same, and become impatient when they aren’t.  You finish each other’s sentences, tell each other’s stories, and interrupt with abandon as if you are of one mind, but you don’t listen because you think you already know.  She anticipates praise for a job he takes for granted.  He forgets she’s five feet away when he looses a torrent of cussing against a recalcitrant repair job.  She feels put upon when nightly left to do the dishes while he lounges.  He blows up and feels better for having vented, unaware that she takes it to heart.

The antidote for these again is communication, mutually airing the issues like musty linen as opposed to letting them molder, and a bilateral commitment to working things out.  But it is also giving yourself some private time and space.  I don’t mean jumping overboard at the height of an argument.  (It makes a dramatic statement, I’ll grant you…but it’s not practical.)  I mean taking time to not be together 24/7.  Make a spot on the boat – on the foredeck, perhaps, or in the aft cabin – where you can define some personal space and meditate, read or write in a journal.  Take off for a long beach walk on your own, go kayaking or snorkeling, or better yet plan a girls’ lunch or a girls’ land tour, or even fly home for a visit.  Probably one of the hardest adjustments for cruising women is that they no longer have the support of close and long-term friends the way they did on land, and probably one of the chief blind spots of men is not realizing how important that is to women.  On the other hand, the friendships you make cruising will build over time and geography and may, in the end, be more dependable – and definitely more attuned to the issues of your new life – than the old ones.

It would be irresponsible of me to write a column with such a serious title without recognizing that there are, occasionally, some truly serious situations out there.  In general, it is unlikely that couples with problems in their relationship before they go cruising will find cruising to be a cure, even though they might think, “Things will be much better when we go cruising and we’re free of all this crap that has us down.”  Not infrequently, cruising just substitutes new pressures for old ones. We’ve all met individuals who seem completely different people when in charge of a boat, often angrier, than when we knew them ashore.  Others with psychological issues or depression can so easily retreat from interactions with others and let themselves drift far from sources of help  And people with drinking problems, freed up from driving cars and holding down jobs, can, in a milieu where partying is so cheap and easy, lose the constraints that were previously holding their drinking in check. The partner of a person with a drinking problem is unfairly burdened with worries, like worry about them falling overboard (and drowning) or falling out of the dinghy (and getting run over). At the simplest, they have no one to rely on when bad weather blows through in the middle of the night and an anchor drags.  Should issues get this serious for you on board, and you’ve tried, but can’t make them better, take your passport and get off.  It’s a huge step to shore when you’ve sunk your all into life on the boat, but a boat is a very small place for a bad relationship.  It may be you’ll have a better shot at fixing things with a little space and outside help.

Luckily, for most of us, our issues are much smaller and only seem magnified by the finiteness of our waterline.  Negotiating issues with each other and working hard to shoulder a fair share of the responsibility is a daily challenge and needs to be a two-way street, but the result is that long-term cruising couples usually build enviably close bonds.

This article was published in the July 2008 issue of Latitudes and Attitudes.

“While living ashore, working two jobs and dealing with children, family, etc, couples are pulled apart dealing with many issues,” writes Debbie Leisure of Illusions, “but while living aboard, they will find that there are few external problems drawing you apart. You are both now dealing with the same issues: boat repair, sailing, and weather, but also everyday needs like meals, shopping, laundry, communications, none of which are accomplished as mindlessly as they were ashore. Couples discover they are now working as a united front. It can be a very rewarding experience.”

Somewhere along the way someone coined the expression of “pink and blue jobs” to describe the division of responsibilities on a cruising boat. While this raises the feminist hackles of many of today’s cruising women, when jobs sort out on the basis of “ability and affinity,” as one Admiral put it, the end result seems to be some fairly traditional divisions of labor.

“We’re much more “pink and blue” on the boat than we ever were on land,” says Eileen Quinn of Little Giddings. “That bothered us at first, but we stopped fighting it for its own sake and just tried to identify what we each really wanted to do. We tend to divide up areas of responsibility on the boat so that we can each be ‘in charge’ of certain things and then we help each other. Women need to avoid being cast solely as the ‘helpmate’.”

If the bulk of your responsibilities seem rosy-hued, there are a number of nautical functions that women seem to have natural affinity for once they’ve had some exposure. For example, with a little initiative and some good courses under their belt, woman often become the primary navigators, radio operators, and weather analysts. And women who sew (I am sewing impaired) are invaluable with sail repairs and canvas work.

“There are always tasks leftover that no one likes,” adds Mary Verlaque of I Wanda, “and you just divide those up in ways that work. The successful sharing of responsibility and drudgery as well as the fun seems to be a key to long term happy cruising.

Ellen Sanpere of Cayenne III summed up her onboard responsibilities as, “Everything the skipper doesn’t have time to do, can’t do, hates to do, puts off too long or gets out of doing.” This brings to mind my years as a charter captain. Over the course of eight years I had five different crew – four guys and one woman. Every pairing was different, but every one was successful, and someone asked how I did it. I realized the answer was that I didn’t find crew to fit MY needs, I found good crew who did what they did well, and then I did what they didn’t. My first crew Glenn, was an experienced mechanic, so he took care of all things in the engine room, but when Judy was my mate, she was a better chef than I, so I took on all the blue jobs: engine maintenance, toilet maintenance, schlepping laundry and groceries, plus all the deck work, even barbecuing. I didn’t love getting my hands all greasy, but I was very proud of that adaptability, of the things that I could do.

Opportunities to earn respect and achieve self-respect have to be foremost in the mix for today’s women to be successfully recruited from the dock to the cruising life. “It is inconceivable that a woman at the pinnacle of success in her land life, where she has earned the respect of her peers, will want to embrace a life where her most important task is viewed as preparing hors d’oeuvres,” says Mary Verlaque of I Wanda.
It will take a joint effort by both partners to make that mix happen, a give and take, since your partner needs his self-respect, too. Most cruising women who are Admirals by my definition, are just those kinds of successful women and yet they are very happy with their lives aboard, more than content to have traded their careers for the self-defined lifestyle that cruising is. The men that must cling to the traditional image of absolute authority?… Well, they can just go cruising alone!

This article was published in the December 2006 issue of Latitudes and Attitudes.

For adventurous ladies with cast-iron stomachs and nerves of steel, this approach might work, but for reluctant crew, this is a helluva start. I once read an entertaining cruising autobiography called If the Shoe Fits: The Adventures of a Reluctant Boatfrau by Rae Ellen Lee. Actually, it was less a cruising autobiography than a “getting started” autobiography. Shoe was the boat her husband bought for them in Port Townsend after a nice vacation in the Virgin Islands. Coming from the mountains of Montana, they both had to learn how to sail and live aboard. For some reason they started in winter. Her husband Tom was the motivated learner, and as he taught himself, with more than a few of those white-knuckled moments, he dragged her along with him like a dinghy in a choppy sea.

There are easier ways. Mary and her husband Christian, for example, started sailing lessons together in their 30s. They started with the basics on small sailing dinghies, and gradually progressed to bigger and bigger boats. One of the neat things about sailing is the fundamental principles are the same whether you are in a dinghy or the 40’ Camper Nicholson the Verlaques now sail in the Med. It’s the forces that change, and, if you don’t plunge into the big forces right away, you have time to internalize those fundamentals.

Although Mary and Christian started learning to sail at the same time, the school’s policy separated couples. This allowed them to “make mistakes and ask what may have been dumb questions without involving each other as a couple.” Many women opt for women-only sailing programs as offered all around the country. Under the impression she was providing moral support for a friend, Mary went along on a one-week women-only course and realized, in the all-female milieu, how many onboard tasks she’d been avoiding: engine and battery checks, sail selection, navigation, anchoring and docking. “I came home enthusiastic about sailing and living aboard. I felt empowered by the revelation that I could handle all those necessary tasks. I kept telling Christian, ‘WE CAN DO THIS!’ ”

Of course, many cruisers were active sailors before they became cruisers. Ellen Sanpere of Cayenne III, says she has always sailed. “As an adolescent, I discovered I could go sailing if I hung around the yacht club and offered to crew for the racing boats,” (a strategy that would work for single gals of any age!) Ellen returned to racing after a job transfer took her to Annapolis. She met her husband Tony on the racing circuit there, and the pair seems to have stumbled into full-time cruising simply by chasing down far-flung races. Kathy Blanding and her husband Dave, currently prepping to sail westward from Fiji, also started as small-boat racers. “Thanks to the racing, I knew the names of the lines and the sails, how to tack and gybe, and how to read the sails and trim accordingly. All of that helped with my self-confidence when we moved up to our Norseman 440 Sunflower.”

More commonly, couples get started like Mary Heckrotte of Camryka. ”My first date with Carl when I was 33 was to go sailing on his 26’ Westerly, my first ever sail. After that we rattled around Pamlico Sound for years together on weekends and vacation days. Somewhere along the way we met real people who actually lived aboard and poked about the world. Such a wild idea!” Wild or not, the idea grew, Mary and Carl upgraded to a 36’ Westerly, and they have been sailing the Caribbean since 1992.

If you are starting from scratch with no history and no boat in the back yard, I can’t imagine a better way to discover cruising than to take a crewed charter. In the hands of professionals, novices can concentrate on the pleasures of cruising – those romantic sundowners — without being plunged headlong into the responsibilities of a bareboat. You can often pick your yacht by type, and many crews will teach you as much as you want to learn. If you’re lucky, you’ll come home itching to do it on your own!

This article was published in the October 2006 issue of Latitudes and Attitudes.

• Peace of Mind—Emergency Skills (Admiral’s Angle column #4 )
• How We Learn – Women tell us how they have learned the skills they need to sail and cruise (Women and Cruising blog)

“For me,” observes Kathy Parsons of Hale Kai, a Downeast 38 cutter, “IT is feeling that my boat is truly home and that my community is a fluid one that consists of all the people that cruising has allowed me to meet – both other cruisers and people I’ve met in the countries I’ve visited.” “Friendships — with folks who so often are kindred spirits — are made quickly and solidified by shared adversity and fun,” says Mary Verlaque of I Wanda. “Nobody asks what you did in your ‘other life’, and it is simply unimportant. You are accepted (usually) by your acts and your seamanship.” And when you part ways, Folksinger Eileen Quinn reminds, “You learn to trust that the winds will cause your paths to cross again.”

Making the boat you cruise on into YOUR home is a common observation. As Mary Heckrotte of Camryka, a Westerly 36, succinctly observes, IT is the comfort of “cooking in my same old pots, sleeping in my same old bed, then looking out my porthole to see a whole different country.” Boat as home may come most naturally when a couple buys a boat together, but “too often,” writes Debbie Leisure from her 29’ Island Packet Illusions, “women move on board a boat that is HIS boat. They have little say in anything except the galley. For a woman to make that boat her home, she must become emotionally attached to it, as she probably was to her home on land.” Lisa Schofield of Lady Galadriel, who has now traveled from San Francisco to the Chesapeake on what was originally her husband’s Crealock 37, seconds that. “In my observations of other cruisers, it’s been clear that those who don’t have IT aren’t happy aboard, and many times that has to do simply with not having brought along things that give them pleasure.”

Beyond building a physical connection to the boat, the Admirals say, getting into IT extends to being party to all the decision-making of the cruise. In a crew of two, especially when husband and wife, there is no place for Bligh-like tyranny by “The Captain”, but equally there is no room for a passive passenger. It is in the best interest of life aboard that each person develops expertise in particular areas, yet each should have a working understanding of the other’s, as well On Tackless II, we have “board meetings” – usually over morning coffee or after the lights are out on the dinner dishes – during which we each report on our own “departments”, and seek the other’s input. We always consider together any upcoming plans and projects, destinations, and weather forecasts until we come to a common decision. This way we share in the responsibility.

The object of all this is achieving a self-determined lifestyle. “In cruising,” says Kathy Parsons, “you move so far outside the box of expectations, that the weight of “shoulds” largely disappears and you live your life the way you want.

”From what my Admirals say, women seeking IT will do well to cultivate in themselves such personality traits as flexibility and adaptability, an independent nature, a satisfaction at living hand-in-hand with nature, a capacity to make do with somewhat less than most of what passes for necessary in our consumption-crazy world, and a willingness to step up to the unknown. My friend Kathy Blanding of Sunflower carries the following saying in her billfold. “Live in wonder; be willing not to know.” I don’t know where that comes from, but it seems fundamental to the life of travel that cruising is. “And if you don’t travel with the boat,” points out Eileen Quinn “then it’s just living aboard!” However, she wisely adds that IT doesn’t come all at once. “The first year or two, cruising is mostly about getting to know your boat, yourself and your partner underway. There’s little spare time; every experience is new and the learning curve is steep. I promised my husband that I wouldn’t pass judgment on the lifestyle until we’d been at it a good six months.” It must have worked. Eileen and her husband have been cruising together aboard Little Giddings, a Bayfield 36, for twelve years.

This article was published in the September 2006 issue of Latitudes and Attitudes.