My coworkers at Compaq Computer Corporation told me that 8 years ago I had told them that I would someday quit and go cruising. As the years went by and my salary grew, they decided that I had given up that foolish idea. When I began to collect boxes from the copy room, held a monster garage sale, and asked my boss how much notice he wanted, they still didn't believe it. I gave him 100 days' verbal notice, but it wasn't until I turned in my official 2 weeks' notice to the company that anyone believed me. They ignored the cruising guides that I poured over during lunch at my desk, the charts and maps I had pinned all over the walls of my office.

I would regale them with our planned itinerary for the next 3 years-Galveston to Key West to Boot Key to Gun Cay, Bahamas. From there, we would be more flexible as cruisers should be-Exumas, maybe Abacos, Turks and Caicos, maybe Dominican Republic or maybe the Virgin Islands. Then as time, currents, weather and hurricane season dictated (aided by time and lat/long restrictions of the insurance company), we would head on down to the Windward Islands, Trinidad, Tobago, and Venezuela. We would spend the 1997 hurricane season "down there" somewhere. Then possibly back up the islands to "do" the ones we missed and back to Trinidad or Curacao for the next season. OR maybe we would head on up the coast of Central America and spend the next hurricane season in Rio Dulce, Guatemala.

We bought the CAP'N electronic navigation program and the CDs and tapes for all the islands in the Eastern Caribbean and some for the Northwest Caribbean for next year. We had all the cruising guides although we argued about whether to take them now or get them out of storage later, when we neared those destinations. We had some ICW cruising guides from a trip to Florida 2 years ago and we had bought the latest Waterway Guide, Southern Edition, when we thought we would be leaving in February or March, planning to get to the Keys via the GIWW.

But it was the first week of April before we got everything stored, renters settled into our house, the cars sold/given away, and the boat loaded. And I mean loaded. Of course my husband Mike kept harping about my packing the whole 4-bedroom house into our double-ender 31-ft boat. I wasn't TRYING to put all that on-just my favorite books, the CDs, videos, books on tape (great for night watches), and the hundreds of articles we had clipped from 15 years' worth of sailing and travel magazines that we had planned to put in notebooks but didn't before leaving. And the ham radio stuff for updating my license. Not to mention the 4 boxes and bags filled with medical emergency supplies, blow-up splints, cervical collars, and hot and cold compresses. Or the life raft, nesting dinghy, inflatable dinghy, ditch kit, 40 rolls of toilet paper, 40 rolls of paper towels, and the one hundred or so cans of corn, green beans, mushroom soup, and tuna-those items which are hard-to-find or very expensive in the islands.

Our major concern now was time. Yes, I had "retired", but Mike was going to attempt to continue working. He is presently a mate on a seismic research ship ( "looking" for oil and gas under the ocean floor using soundwaves). His work schedule is supposed to be 6 weeks on, 6 weeks off. We knew we would be out of e-mail and phone range much of the time, but hoped that we could still manage to get him to the ship and back on time. The night before we left, we looked at the charts, looked at the calendar, looked at the articles on how expensive the Bahamas were, looked at the calendar again. Mike had to be back to Houston on April 20 and this was April 5. So we decided to start being flexible like "real" cruisers were supposed to be, and decided to head for Isla Mujeres, off the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. I speak Spanish fairly fluently, one of the marinas was reported to be reasonably priced, and there was easy access to the airport in Cancun, with numerous flights to Houston daily. So forget the Bahamas for now--the new plan was Mexico, Belize, and then the Rio Dulce, Gautemala, for hurricane season. We hurriedly dug out the charts and articles about those areas and drove 50 miles in a rented car to our storage unit to retrieve our cruising guides for that area.

At long last, with the bootstripe inches below the water, we motored away from our dock in Kemah and headed down the Houston Ship Channel. For once, the wind was NOT right "on the nose" but it was light, so we were able to motorsail toward Galveston, reaching Bolivar Roads in 4 hours. The winds were expected to increase later in the afternoon and switch to the NW, perfect for our start. (You just can't head straight south to Mexico because of a strange "loop current" in the Gulf of Mexico that either pushes you towards Veracruz or towards Cuba. You have to head east and then southeast and then somewhere south of Louisiana or Mississippi, you turn south.)

We cleared the Galveston jetties at about 5 p.m. Now the wind was on the nose but very light, so we rolled up the jib and continued to motor. Finally, around 7 p.pm, those NW winds actually materialized. We smiled at each other, hauled up the main, unrolled the jib, and I shut off the motor. The sun was going down and all was right with the world. I headed down into the salon to put these observations in the log.

As I was writing, I heard the sound of water swishing past the hull. It sounded wonderful. As I kept writing, however, I realized that the sound seemed to be coming from the engine room, not the hull just outside. I opened the engine compartment and heard wht then sounded like a major waterfall. "MIIIIKE! I think you need to come down here for a minute." Because the engine was still hot, we couldn't lean over it for a good view, but we had heard this sound before and figured out immediately what was wrong. The packing around the shaft seal was leaking--gushing actually. At this point I was prepared to pump and bail the week or so it would take us to get to Mexico, but Mike was less than thrilled about that idea. So we turned around, nose into the wind, and fought our way back to Galveston.

This detour was NOT a part of my new flexible plan and the gods determined to make it as miserable as possible. The winds had picked up and there was no moon that night--a tricky time to be heading into the Galveston jetties, even if you knew the way. Mike had down it in his ship, but I had managed to never be out there after dark. There is no light at the end of the jetty but there are all kinds of other lights to distract and interfere with night vision. It took us almost 5 hours and a wonderful portable spotlight to backtrack to the Galveston Yacht Basin. We arrived right at midnight at the fuel dock. We tried to raise the night guard on the dock telephone and radio, but after about 15 minutes, gave up and went below and crashed.

The one-hour repair to the stuffing box cost us a full day as we had to motor all the way around the island to a repair shop on the other side. It would have only taken an extra hour if the bridge in between had not been damaged by a barge and left unrepaired. By the time we made it back to the GYB, it was late afternoon, of a beautiful, clear sailing day. But that all changed the next morning and we ended up "waiting for weather" as sailors say, for the next four days. Friday, the day we planned to leave, began at about 5 a.m. with a wild and wooly thunderstorm, but it had blown over and left behind great sailiing conditions, so we left, once again, on our great adventure.

(Continued in "All My Charts Say Bahamas So How Did I End Up in Biloxi?")