How Did We Get Here?

Thanks, Loyal Followers, for your patience waiting for this post. I had hoped that you would read it on the "new, improved" Word Press windleblo.com, but, alas, it is not yet ready, so further delay in posting is unbearable. For now, this installment will have to suffice. I hope to pick up the pace of postings as we slow down to Med Time. Enjoy!

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As I write this, I am sitting at a café in Plaza de Mina listening to the Cadizians roar at every turn in an exciting Euro Cup 2012 football match between Spain and France. I ask myself, “How did I get here?”

The answer, of course, is, “By sea. You got here by sea.”

Not long ago, this would have seemed an absurd response. A few short years back, the notion of buying a 40-foot yacht in Sweden and sailing her around Europe was the furthest thing from our minds. Like many, we were so tightly ensconced in our busy-ness – keeping a job, raising kids, weekend warrioring – that the idea would be quickly dismissed as wild, hairball imaginings, something you talked about but never acted upon.

But now, arrival by sea has become our season by season reality, lived day by day and anchorage by anchorage as one season has turned into two, two to three, and now we find our fourth season as live-aboard “cruisers” firmly under way.

So how did we get here, really? We ordinary people without sea salt in our blood.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when the wild, hairball imagining turned into a hard, actionable reality. As with many turns of fate, it was more like a series of circumstances that led incrementally to a “no turning back now” decision point.

Perhaps it was the uncertainty looming ahead for a 50-something male whose career high points seemed to appear in the rear view mirror. Perhaps it was my parents’ slow decline and eventual death and the attendant toll on my psyche. Perhaps it was the kids coming of age and moving out of the house and the adjustment to our new, quieter life as “empty nesters.” Perhaps it was a yearning to keep enjoying wilderness (there’s nothing more wild than the open sea) without enduring longer and longer recoveries as my own aging body mended after mountain backpacking or river tripping excursions.

These influences and others accumulated into an indisputable sense of the inevitability of change and a realization that life goes on, one way or another. The question becomes, which way?  And will you take it any way it comes or make it come your way? As a New England WASP, I’ve always leaned toward taking matters into my own hands, so the passive route lacked appeal. But things bigger than me, like death and dying, humbled me into accepting that some things are out of my control and time was wasting.

So over the course of a few short years in the “mid-oughts” (what else do you call the years 2004 through 2008?), a latent urge to design the next phase of our lives emerged. What that next phase would look like or how we would go about making it happen, we hadn’t the foggiest.

That’s when we went on a bareboat charter in Washington State’s San Juan Islands.

Over the years, we had casually referred to the idea of a bareboat charter as a cool thing to do. We had always gravitated toward spending leisure time communing with nature at remote campsites. As a small child, my parents would pack my sister, brother, and me and all our gear into the family station wagon for the endless drive to a cove on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire to spend my dad’s precious two week vacation at a shoreside “camp.” More like a rustic cabin, this destination held great import as the family “happy place” where we could get away from it all.  When I close my eyes, I can still smell the piney forests that surround the place and feel the refreshing, silky smooth lake waters on my skin. That camp is on Windleblo Cove and the dirt road that led to it is Windleblo Road. Later, we traded two weeks at Windleblo Cove for full summers in Cohasset, Massachusetts, the “green town by the sea” where I spent my teen years and learned how to sail.

With Windleblo Cove as my grounding, all during college and then throughout my twenties I would escape the confines of the job and the city to enjoy mountain air or river silt. Each summer through the 1980’s, my college buddies and I would gather for week or two’s wilderness reunion, the destinations successively more ambitious as the year’s passed. Bagging 14ers in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, running Desolation Canyon on Utah’s Green River, assaulting Gannett Peak, the highest point in Wyoming’s Wind River Range, and descending the wild and scenic Buffalo River through Arkansas’ Ozark Mountains were among our adventures. With time, I followed in my father's footsteps by packing my own growing family up and trekking to Windleblo Cove for many iddylic summer holidays.

But never in all these years did we venture onto the ocean for our wilderness experience.  The idea had come up, but we never pursued it. That finally changed with the San Juan Island charter.

At this point, An explanation is overdue as to who the “we” is in the foregoing narrative, lest you think it is simply the “royal we.” I am referring, of course, to my wife and best friend, Jocelyn Hoopes. It was she who joined me as first mate on the San Juan charter, and it is she who has been my life partner and chief consultant ever since in all matters related to our new cruising lifestyle.

We arrived at Friday Harbor, San Juan Island, Washington, on a Saturday in early September, 2008, under cloudless skies, having taken the ferry from Anacortes on the mainland. We had reserved Trofast, a 34-foot Catalina sloop, from a San Juan charter company. After a brief check-out, which amounted to leaving the dock, steering the boat around Friday Harbor, and returning to the dock, we were under way.

With only a tattered chart and compass and no chartplotter, Trofast none-the-less seemed palatial to us. She was certainly the largest vessel we had ever sailed, our only prior experience boating together being limited to a Blue Hole OCA canoe and a Hobie Cat rental many years earlier. We proceeded to enjoy a week of blissful cruising, from Friday Harbor to Victoria, B.C., to Galiano Island, and back to Friday Harbor. It helped that the area offers ample visitor moorings and, despite the Northwest’s reputation for rainy weather, the cloudless skies continued throughout the week.

We returned to Colorado and our Applewood home all ga-ga about cruising. We raved to whoever would listen about how great a time we had had and how much fun cruising was. It seemed we had found a new calling.

NEXT: How we shifted from chartering to owning our own boat.