In 2004, my
husband Bob (aka Rudy) and I were discussing our future-- what to do,
where to go. By future we meant the minute our son Kai left for college.
We had lived in Charlotte, North Carolina since he was five, but never
found Charlotte to be our kind of place. We have a friend, Dan, who is
TOO BUSY to read this blog, because he needs to figure out what is
happening in the cell walls of plants, I think. But back in 2004, he
was thinking of chucking it all and moving to Greece, where he claimed
there were homes to be had in lovely little villages perched on
mountainsides, with views of the sea. This sounded good to me. I love
olives. So I proposed this idea to Bob. Who said that he had always
thought it would be nice to live in Italy, and that there were probably
houses to be had there as well, that had views of the sea. AND, he said,
we could get a little sailboat and sail across the Mediterranean to
Greece, and visit Dan. "Great idea," I said. "Too bad we don't know how
to sail." And that was maybe the last really sensible thing that was
said between us.
So
we bought an old sailboat, a 23' O'Day, and Bob, Kai and I sailed it
around Lake Norman for a few months and none of us died, though I
surprised all three of us by crying when the boat heeled. I am, at this
point, pretty tired of trying to figure out the reason for this-- I'm
generally brave about events that other people might prefer to sit out,
and this business of me hunkering down on the floor of the boat weeping,
for no apparent reason, had us all mystified. So we went to Florida for
a week in the early spring of that year, in part thinking that some
official-type training for all three of us might make me less afraid.
Which it did not, mostly because our instructor opted to make the
prescribed journey not on the ocean, where it would have gotten rough
and I would have lived through it, but on the ICW, or intra-coastal
waterway, which is like a long, annoying river. No waves, no heeling
over.
So we
bought a bigger boat, in June 2005. (I know, I know. Why not just buy an
RV, like everyone else, right?) We didn't. So the boat is a
Kelly-Peterson 44, built in 1979. We paid a lot of money for what we
thought was going to be a very thorough survey (a pre-sale inspection
for boats), paying special attention (through a fancy infra-red
thermographic camera) to signs of water intrusion. We bought the boat
based on this survey, and have hundreds of times since that day wished
we had not. It was less than 6 months later that Kai happened to walk on
the deck near the navigation station, when Bob and I were below, at the
same spot. I'll never forget the sickening sight of the deck squishing
down under his weight.
Now
it's 2012. We've bought and sold a second boat, Kalliope, a 40'
Challenger, on which we sailed to Florida and enjoyed a peaceful
existence, and also lived on for a while in this boatyard while we
worked on Trio, tearing up all the decks, replacing all the rotted wood
with new balsa and epoxy, rebuilding bulkheads, storage areas, tearing
out old water tanks, refrigeration, portholes, hatches, just everything,
really. Trio is about 70% new boat. And we're about 7 years behind
schedule on our sailing plan. But no matter. We've persevered, the boat
is beautiful, she is back in the water, and we're out of the trailer
that we rented for almost three years, thinking we'd need it for about 6
months. Now we're picking up where we left off 7 years ago-- learning to sail, and trying to get me to stop crying when we do.
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