Cruisers always talk about gorgeous sunsets in private anchorages, more fish than you can possibly eat yourselves, potlucks on the beach , snorkling in warm, turquoise waters, and wonderful, downwind sailing. Having spent the month of September, 1995 sailing from the San Francisco Bay Area to the Santa Barbara Channel Islands and back, I'm not so sure they're giving us the whole picture. So before my brain plays that nasty trick of fading out the more disagreeable memories in favor of only the good ones, let me relate a bit of the other side of cruising.
Cruising reminds me of car camping in many respects. You would think that cruising would be more luxurious because of the larger accomodations, but it isn't really, and I can't remember ever saying to my husband, "Honey, let's go camping for a whole month on our next vacation!" I know some people would think it's a great idea, but it would not place in my top ten list of things to do for an entire month. Roughing it in the outdoors sounds romantic, but primitive conditions, being subject to the elements, meeting new types of physical demands, and living in ever changing surroundings create a persistent hum of low level stress. We currently choose to keep things on our boat as simple as possible, so we do not have a watermaker. In more ways than one our vacation revolved around water. Nakia, our Hans Christian 33, carries 140 gallons of water. When John and I take long trips we like to pretend that we are in a long term cruising situation, and that we must conserve our water as if we may not reach a source of potable water for weeks. Towards this end we turn off the pressure water and use only the foot pump, which reduces the flow of water from the tap to a trickle. We wash dirty dishes by heating salt water in a kettle on the stove, and giving them a brief fresh water rinse before drying them. We bathe using a number of methods. Least desirable is the beach bath. This can be done while wearing a swim suit, if you are not among like-minded people, but better results are obtained if it's done in the buff. Take a wash cloth, towel, your favorite saltwater soap/shampoo and a jug of fresh water (preferably collected from a stream, and _not_ your drinking water) with you to the beach. Steel yourself for the plunge into 58-degree water, and dunk. (It's putting your head under the water that's the hardest part.) Soap up, scrub, and dunk again to rinse off the soap. Then wade ashore and rinse with the fresh water. This works best if your partner helps by pouring the water over you, though you will inevitably get water in your eyes and ears this way. A garden sprayer (intended for use with insecticide) is a more controlled and less wasteful way to rinse, but it's too slow and cumbersome if stream water is plentiful enough to waste. A variation of the beach bath is the fresh water stream bath. This is a notch above the beach bath since you are dealing with unlimited fresh water, but it still has the drawback of being freezing cold. Better still is to collect the stream water in a sun shower which you can store on deck. We actually used several collapsible jugs to collect fresh water. More often than not we had to hike in a distance to collect the water, and then carry it back to the dinghy. I gave John grief before the trip for buying two-and-a-half-gallon sized jugs, which were almost the same cost as the five gallon ones, but I got what I deserved when it came time for me to try lugging a five gallon container of water back over beach rock. Once you have the water stored up on deck, there is about a 50/50 chance that it will warm up to anything that could be called comfortable. We prefer to hang the shower from a halyard to bathe on deck in nice weather, but if there are people sitting in their cockpits with binoculars glued to their eyes, we opt for using the sun shower in the shower stall belowdecks. When water and air temperature are too cold, John prefers the more civilised method of heating stream water on the stove and mixing this with cold stream water in the sun shower, which is then hung in the shower stall in the head. We're keeping our fingers crossed that showering will be more appealing and a little less of a chore once we are cruising warmer waters. Because of our cold water cruising grounds swimming for pleasure was not on my agenda. John braved the cold in his full length, but light weight wetsuit (purchased for dinghy sailing, not SCUBA diving), but even he had to work up the nerve to slide into the water with his snorkle gear. My major snorkling responsibility was to keep an eye on his flourescent yellow snorkle and fins to make sure he was still bobbing on the surface. I even timed his free dives so that I would know if he ever stayed down longer than his average time! After searching valiantly for dinner with his spear gun, he would return to the boat and remove his fins, boots, mask and snorkle, gloves, wetsuit and swim trunks. Of course everything was covered in salt water, and had to be rinsed off with a few drops of the precious shower water before it could all be dried and stored below(including John). Unfortunately John's snorkling came to an end two weeks into our vacation. On our return northwards from Catalina Island (the southernmost point of our journey), we came into an anchorage one evening to find two boats which we'd been hoping to meet up with. We were all headed to the same anchorage the following morning and looked forward to getting to know each other over the next few days. John started dinner and set up his fishing pole to catch some bait fish. Reading at the dining table while waiting for dinner, I heard John's voice from the cockpit. The request was simple, but there was something odd in the tone. "Linda, I need you to come help me with something." Very clear, controlled and firm. "I have a fish hook stuck in my finger and I need you to get me pliers or something." I immediately thought of his Leatherman and brought that out to him. He did his best to push the hook out himself, but it dug in and then broke off inside the tip of his little finger (it was a very small bait hook). So, after cleaning it up as best he could, he called the other boats to tell them what had happened, and that we would be delayed in arriving at the next anchorage by a sidetrip to a Santa Barbara hospital emergency room. Departing at 6:30 the next morning, we motored the five hours to Santa Barbara, and spent the rest of the day getting glimpses of the city in between trying to get the hook removed. Three stitches later it was 6:45pm. It felt like a very long day, but I've read enough cruising stories during the four years we've lived aboard to know that we were fortunate our medical mishap was a minor one and that reliable services were nearby. We left the marina the next day at 10:00am after John had his prescriptions filled, and arrived at Cuyler Harbor, San Miguel Island at 5:00pm. The two other boats were there as planned and said they would come over and pick us up in their dinghy for abalone dinner. A couple of hours later, we got a call on the radio saying that dinner was still on, but that it was delayed a bit because Gail had sliced her finger quite badly while cutting abalone steaks. We finally did get to spend a few hours with the very nice folks from Sea Witch and Overheated for an all-you-can-eat abalone dinner, but they had to leave for Santa Barbara in the morning to have Gail's finger attended to. Naturally we were able to recommend a very good hand surgeonfor her to see! Two lonely days later we were joined by three other boats late in the afternoon, but the wind had come up worse than usual and we were leaving the next morning, so we weren't able to meet them. As the wind continued to howl, a swell started to roll into the anchorage, and after spending a "night from hell" trying to get some sleep, all four boats were raising anchor at daylight to depart for the safety of the Santa Barbara marina before the swells began breaking across the entire entrance to the anchorage. I don't think cruisers talk enough about being at anchor. For me, there is always a low level of stress associated with swinging on our own hook. There is the initial concern over entering a new anchorage and situating the boat in what the guide book and we determine to be the best spot. Then, no matter how well we think it's set, there is a constant awareness in the back of our minds to make sure that we don't drag. Obviously in mild conditions this is a small matter, but it is always there, and it intensifies with any change in the weather. It is still a relief to me to return from a long hike to find Nakia bobbing in the same spot in the anchorage. Swinging on your own hook for days or weeks at a time is definitely not the same as living aboard in a marina! Of course when you do finally decide it's time to make a pit stop in a marina,there's all the fun associated with piloting your way into a new harbor and finding your assigned berth through a maze of strangely configured piers and docks. Then you have to figure out how to work the gate card key, or determine which key is for the gate and which is for the shower (or they really try to confuse you by giving you a men's shower key and a women's shower key along with the gate key!). This is followed by the search for and hike to the nearest laundromat, after first sorting through the dirty clothes and selecting only those items which absolutely must be laundered, so that you don't end up with more than you can carry. After all of this you will most likely want to take a relaxing shower. Marina showers are always a new experience. In Catalina the showers were coin operated. For twenty-five cents you received "one and a half minutes" of water. It took me $1.50 to learn that I couldn't make my twenty-five cent water ration last longer by turning off the faucet in between soaping and rinsing, and that "water" didn't necessarily mean "hot water". After five days, I was proud to have cut mine down to a seventy-five cent shower, but John still had me beat with his fifty cent shower (I'm sure it's because I have more hair on my head to wash and rinse than he does!). Then there was the Monterey shower which had a push button on the wall to start the water running for thirty seconds at a time. There was no obvious method for controlling the water temperature, and it was set for scalding. I consulted with John, who had discovered that by turning the nozzle to the fine spray setting, he could tolerate a hot "mist" shower. On another trip, I had to chuckle when I walked into the community shower room to find each shower stall (four each on two sides of the room facing each other) curtained with _clear_ shower curtains. So much for privacy - I wondered why they had bothered with curtains at all! But one thing we didn't have to put up with in the marinas were flying insects. Out in the islands we were befriended by kelp flies, yellow jackets and hitch-hiking moths. The yellow jackets never got too bad on board, but in Catalina we were curious about all the plastic soda bottles hanging from trees, and from the sterns of one or two boats. They were about one third full of a red liquid, with a few small holes poked in the upper half of the container. The yellow jackets climbed in through the holes, couldn't make their way back out, and drowned in the sticky, sweet poison known as Hawaiian Punch! John developed his own method for killing the kelp flies which were really a nuisance in some places. They are too quick to smack if you go for them flat out. And if you try to blow them off of you, they just hunker down and won't budge (must be a result of living in windy anchorages!). So John figured out that if you blow on them and then immediately come in for the kill, the success rate is much better. This made for a surprisingly entertaining afternoon of reading in the cockpit for me. Unfortunately it didn't work as well on the moths which descended upon us as we were motoring between islands one day. They must have been migrating because they would fly out of nowhere to land on the boat -for a rest I thought, until I noticed they weren't taking off as regularly as they were landing. By this time I was a practiced killing machine, and flushing them out of sails and off the dodger helped to pass my watches that day. Watches were among the few times that John and I had any time "apart" from each other. I told a friend afterwards that it seemed as though we did everything on the trip together except sleep and shower. He pointed out that perhaps we had it backwards - that sleeping and showering were the times we should have spent together, and that all the rest of the time should have been spent apart! The in-your-face companionship wore thin after awhile, and it's obvious to me that we need to work on going our own ways ashore while cruising. I think we treated the trip more like a vacation in this regard, by wanting to share every experience together. It's also often more convenient to combine tasks in one trip together, but this convenience comes at the expense of dragging each other around and waiting while one partner does something of little or no interest to the other. The last week of our trip introduced us to the tedium of waiting for a weather window. Hurricanes in Mexico and storms in the north Pacific brought unusual swell activity and winds to our area. Santa Barbara is a lovely city, but we were really just killing time in between listening to the hourly updates of conditions at the major points we would have to pass, and discussing the possibilities of leaving "tomorrow," with tomorrow coming and going more often than we liked. When we finally did make our move, the prudent thing to do was to keep moving without stopping long in any one anchorage. But at Monterey I was sucked in by the comfort of a marina stay, ice cream and the aquarium, and we stayed a day too long. When we left Monterey at 4:30pm bound for San Francisco, we were smacked on the nose and quickly decided to put in at Santa Cruz until things calmed down a bit. A second attempt at 2:30am that night was successful, and we didn't slow down until we were safely home. It felt great to be back in our marina with the phone and shore power umbilicals reconnected, unlimited fresh tasting pressurized water, familiar surroundings and friendly faces all around us, and nothing to worry about except how to get all the saltwater residue out of, as well as off of, the boat. Nothing to worry about?! I discovered that the familiar stresses are _nothing_ when compared with the new and unfamiliar tasks one is confronted with every day while cruising. Cruising is not only more physically demanding than my "normal" life, but it is also more challenging for me emotionally. I found I have more to learn about embracing new experiences and letting go of the comforting safety net of a familiar routine. I can only hope that cruising will one day feel as "normal" to me as living aboard in a marina, and that all the wonderful experiences will eclipse the more tedious ones. Because, as my memories of this trip begin to fade, I know I will not be forgetting the stunning moonrise over Pelican Bay, the thrill of whales, dolphins, seals and sea lions taking peeks at us, warm, sunshine filled days, and most especially the generous comraderie of other sailors. These are the kinds of things that will keep me coming back for more, in spite of that "other" side of cruising. **************************************************************** Reprinted with permission from the author.