“What did we sign up for?!” I thought after our first day at anchor in the Sea of Cortez. We had spent the prior night and wee morning hours fighting through a 30 knot coromuel to get to the anchorage. Both us and the boat were covered with salt.
Alone at anchor in Puerto Don Juan
We took a pitiful shower in the cockpit with the already partially broken Solar Shower but without a watermaker we didn’t have enough water to clean the boat. Instead we walked around the deck spraying the hardware with a water bottle in hopes of preventing corrosion.
We had barely slept the night before and were expecting another sleepless night due to a repeat performance of coromuel winds.
After dinner I leaned over the side of the boat to scoop salt water in to a 5 gallon bucket. The very bucket that I planned to use for the summer to wash the dishes in salt water before a fresh water rinse.
I don’t like doing dishes in the first place, and now I am doing dishes in a salty bucket? Looking out on the uninhabited island of Isla Espiritu Santo, my husband and I asked each other, is this seriously going to be our life for the whole summer? Is this really what we signed up for?! …Read more
The Women’s Sailing Conference, held each June in Marblehead, is great fun. I’ve been involved one way or another many times. It amazes me how many women come back year after year. It also astounds me how quickly and enthusiastically women learn from each other.
This year the conference is about women extending their range. That might mean different things to different participants:
First overnight cruise
Doing all the navigating for a short trip
Going to Maine for two weeks
Crossing the Gulf Stream
Moving aboard
The one-day conference – Saturday, June 1, 2013 – will be moderated by Beth Leonard, long-time and long-distance sailor and Technical Editor for BoatUS publications.
Capt. Nancy Erley of Seattle, founder of Tethys Offshore who has twice circumnavigated with all-women crews;
and me, Betsy Morris of Marblehead, a long-time cruiser.
There’s more information available at www.womensailing.org, including the registration form. There’s a nice discount for those registering before May 15th.
Returning to our starting point of Ensenada felt like the definition of failure.
At 16o 36.050 S and 97o 31.080 W we turned around. It was not equipment failure or dangerous weather; it was fatigue.
Heading south from the Galapagos.
Next stop Easter Island.
We were half way to Easter Island from the Galapagos and from there we were headed to the fjords of Chile.
But it was not to be. We knew we would only get more tired and the safety of our family in a vast empty sea would be at risk. I had resisted abandoning the plan. I wanted the children to see that dreams and plans can be fulfilled.
And suddenly, with a turn of the wheel, we had no plan.
The captain put me in charge of getting us from point A to point B. I was responsible for upping anchor, route planning, navigating and dropping the hook at our destination.
My cruising life started and nearly ended in 2007. It just wasn’t what I thought or hoped it would be.
It was clear: never darken the boarding ladder again, or find out for myself what I wanted from cruising. My own approach to living in this watery world for months at a time.
I wondered what other cruising women were thinking about and doing on their boats. So I started to ask them. One of the areas we talked about was educating ourselves.
Common amongst the women I spoke with was a learning style based on doing. …Read more
Under the guise of a routine checkup, I set up an appointment to see our doctor before we quit our jobs and lost our medical benefits.
I didn’t need the doctor to check me out; I wanted her to check out my list of First Aid supplies for our boat. Paul and I were going to sail around the world and I had no idea what medical emergencies we might face.
Dr. Smith smiled when I confessed the real reason for my visit. A sailor herself, she gamely reviewed my list, took some notes and then handed me a catalogue of first aid kits for Emergency Medical Technicians. She suggested that I order one of these First Aid kits as they were more complete than the average camping kit. She also asked me to return in a week, with my husband, two oranges and 2 pigs’ feet.
A week later, during her lunch hour, she taught Paul and I how to give the orange injections. Apparently injecting an orange, with its tough outer peel and soft interior, was similar to giving a person a shot. Then she made slits in the pigs’ feet and showed us how to sew basic sutures before passing the feet to us to stitch up. I was surprised at how rubbery and impenetrable the skin was, and each haphazard stitch I made marked my struggle. Paul’s stitches, on the other hand, were evenly spaced and neatly done. …Read more
Although it is a hefty paperback, The Boat Galley Cookbook by cruisers Carolyn Shearlock and Jan Irons is likely to help raise your waterline, because it consolidates in one volume many culinary resources cruising chefs have previously felt obliged to carry.
Indeed, no cruising cookbook I have ever seen has so deliberately set out to be a comprehensive examination of how to meet the challenges of cooking afloat. “We each faced a huge learning curve when we first began cruising,” say the authors, “so, we’ve tried to pass on all the things we wish we’d known!”
During our stay in Tauranga, New Zealand, the kids from two boats (Namani and Alouette) really hit it off. One activity they particularly enjoyed was learning to program computer graphics using a program called KTurtle.
Seeing their enthusiasm for this, we parents agreed to assign the kids a group project as part of their home schooling: to create a video documentary about life on a sailboat. The idea was for our children to learn new computer skills while producing an informative and interesting video, not to mention having fun. …Read more
After finishing Wendy Hinman’s Tightwads on the Loose, I placed it on my bookshelf next to Jana Cawrse Esarey’s The Motion of the Ocean and Torre DeRoche’s Swept: Love with a Chance of Drowning, because, like those two books, Tightwads on the Loose is a brightly-written sailing memoir by a young female cruiser from America’s West Coast.
All three books speak for a younger generation who choose to reach for the adventure of crossing oceans and exploring new cultures sooner rather than later, who go despite tight budgets in small, uncomplicated boats without waiting for the comforts and wallets of middle age, and who, because they are women, don’t gloss over the challenging dynamics of relationships shared and tested in the intense intimacy of cruising 24/7 in the confines of a small vessel
There are several differences, however, between Tightwads on the Loose and the other two books. …Read more
I’d like to let you know about the Cruising Women program that Pam Wall, Beth Leonard and I will be giving at Cruisers University on April 25-26 in Annapolis, Maryland.
Last April, as Pam Wall and I finished our second year as faculty at Cruisers University, (a fun weekend in Annapolis of in-depth courses to prepare people for cruising), we were approached by Paul Jacobs, the director of Cruisers University and manager of the Annapolis Sailboat and Powerboat Shows:
“I would like you two to put together an in-depth two-day program on cruising, just for women.”
TWO DAYS! Imagine what we could do in two whole days –MUCH, MUCH more than is ever possible in a one hour Women and Cruising seminar! Of course we were excited! But….
“We want BOATS – we don’t want to do this all in a classroom – we want to take women aboard several boats, and spend time aboard learning about the equipment and routines aboard. To see it, touch it, use it…” …Read more
“The world was theirs” is Mattie McAlarney’s favorite headline written about her seven-and-a-half-year trip around the world with husband Henry. The couple wrapped up a 70-country cruise aboard their 39-foot Corbin Center Cockpit 2 Extreme in 2009. “I wanted to be home for my 70th birthday,” Mattie tells me as I admire the aft-cabin curtains sewn from hand-embroidered silk fabric bought in some exotic eastern market. “I made it back a year early.”
Since then 2 Extreme has been on the market. Media outlets ranging from Pacific-based sailing magazines to Pasco County Florida’s local newspaper has interviewed this fascinating couple with so many stories to tell. …Read more
It’s a shame that more girls aren’t trained as marine mechanics because, frankly, with the tiny spaces one has to maneuver in to work on a boat, most men, with their big, cumbersome frames, just aren’t built for it.
The job we tackled on Monday, after putting off boat work to celebrate my birthday all weekend, was to figure out why our fuel gauge wasn’t working.
I’d gotten on the Catalina 34 site and Cruiser’s Forum to ask how I could figure out whether the problem was with the fuel gauge on the instrument panel or the sender float in the fuel tank. I got a lot of advice on how to figure this out, along with the guess that we had a bad sender float, and if that was the case, it was more trouble than it was worth to replace it. …Read more
“You baked that? On your boat?? In a solar oven???”
Whenever I present a double-layer homemade carrot cake like this one I’m sure to be met with incredulous guests. Most cruisers do little baking anyway, so I had them on “from scratch”. Trusting their culinary fortunes to the sun is a real stretch – no way was this delectable dessert baked on the foredeck!
Truth is, the Sea Lady’s galley oven serves mostly as storage for pots & pans. Baking happens on deck, fueled by the toasty Caribbean sun. …Read more
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This year the conference is about women extending their range. That might mean different things to different participants:
Although it is a hefty paperback, 
After finishing Wendy Hinman’s Tightwads on the Loose, I placed it on my bookshelf next to Jana Cawrse Esarey’s The Motion of the Ocean and Torre DeRoche’s Swept: Love with a Chance of Drowning, because, like those two books, Tightwads on the Loose is a brightly-written sailing memoir by a young female cruiser from America’s West Coast.
