Epiphany

Life happens while you are busy living your dream as well as making other plans.
My Dad died tonight at 9:00pm. It was a day full of family gathering and togetherness in the nursing home where Al Goodrich, my dad, spent only about a week and a half at the very end of his 83 years. He lived through 12 years of Alzheimers which he and my mother navigated from their home, called 'Back Acres Ranch' on Goose Rocks Road in Kennebunkport, Maine.
Staying power is a profound thing--it can help you sustain through tough times, rough weather, rocky patches and blowouts. It's a decision, which my mom, Corinne, and my dad, Al, made at the beginning of their lives together in the military; and their staying power helped them to cope with the ups and downs of life, because they decided that they would. They lived in a generation that understood sacrifice and unselfishness.n
My parents did not just cope together, however, they flourished. Partly because they did not require much except their own elbow grease and a clear set of priorities based on right-minded living, and partly because my mother is a genius at making everything work and making it look easy.
Also, my Dad knew what he wanted and they made it work for them. They were full-fledged partners in their life. Last month, they celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary.
Dad was unhurried and painstaking about his talents and developed them into hobbies that inspired other people.
Although not an intellectual or philosopher, per se, he took a lively interest in the world and was a lifetime learner, acquiring many skills along the way that in a way that inspired his children and others to achieve to their best potential. He demonstrated the confidence that a person could do anything they chose to with their life.
He believed that a person's circumstances created opportunities to explore.
His love of flying led him into building model airplanes, which evolved into buying and flying and then building them himself, in his hangar, on their property, where they made a landing strip in the field and took off with children and grandchildren in tow.
His mechanical aptitude and deep curiosity led him to work on motors and build things that helped save time and trouble. He also built two homes and barns and workshops and a hangar and furniture. They were the penultimate do-it-yourselfers; they didn't preach their lifestyle, they simply lived it.
My Dad came from humble beginnings. "I was born on the banks of Tyler Brook, 77 years ago", my Dad would say, long after he turned 77. 
After beginning his education at one of Kennebunkport's two-room schoolhouses, Dad graduated from Kennebunk High School.
His father, George Goodrich, was a lobsterman in Cape Porpoise and his mother, Sadie ran the roadside clam hut called 'Sadie's Swimming Lobsters' on the Mills Road. Dad loved to recount the stories of his youth, including the time he helped beat the flames from the fire of '47 off the roof of his parents house at the age of 17.  He is in a famous early photo of the town, playing baseball in the road down in the center of Cape Porpoise to hold up tourist traffic, he said. He had a talent for adventure and a head for detail.
When he started forgetting, Dad accepted his situation with grace and patience. He had by this time built an 'ultralight' an experimental aircraft and was a member of that esteemed organization, the EAA, who have stayed friends with my parents, who are considered honorary lifetimes members.
Prior to this, my Dad decided early that lobstering was not for him, and left his Swampscot Dory behind to take up a twenty year career in the military. At that time, you could not become an officer without college background. However, my Dad was one of the last people eligible to join the Cadets, a pilot training program. He earned his B.A. in history while working his way up the ranks to becoming, eventually, a Major, Crew Commander and pilot of B-52's.; he flew over 100 missions in Vietnam.  He flew in many overseas engagements.
After his retirement, which came in his forties, Dad tried a variety of careers as teacher, supervisor, pilot for his own charter company, and finally moved the family to Kennebunkport where they built on their land and raised cows, grew a Victory Garden and practiced an early version of what would later be called 'sustainable living'. 
When the grandchildren came, they were treated to the classic country farm experience. He raised four daughters who raised 11 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Through this all, their home has welcomed friends and family.
Saying that my Dad will be sorely missed is an understatement. That's the way how it is, he would say to us.

Sailing Through This

1/5/15
I'm coming back home to Maine, on a flight that gets into Boston at 10:30pm, having just watched the movie 'Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day' on the plane. It was in Spanish but the message got through.
It is the classic children's story about how everything that can go wrong, does; yet, when the people, despite their circumstance, pull together for each other, even the worst situations work out. The movie showed how the people felt empowered when they decided to turn their situations around, and how making that choice allowed unexpected good results to occur.
That's the kind of can-do positive orientation that I was raised on. I could make excuses for myself and create a sorrowful outlook as I am going back, due to my Dad's being in his last days. I could settle into a melancholy or sentimental sadness or fall into existential drama or regretful thinking, or go into my usual pattern of trying to make sense of it all.
Instead, I intend to keep aware and stay centered and calm. I could reject this as being superficial thinking, but I know that it works.
As the movie built up in its drama the people in the airplane were also going through their own loud, complaining, negative mindsets. It's not bothering me, though, and, instead, I am just keeping steady.  Sometimes you can be in the vortex of howling ferocity and stay at the calm in the center of the storm. I seem to be there.
The weather has been extreme, with cold up north and heavy winds and rain in the islands; and with the full moon, it seems prime for what is going on in this airplane. People seem to be falling into fitfulness all around me.
Prior to boarding, everyone heard, on the airport TV, that a plane was held up for 28 hours on the tarmac, and an elderly person died on board as a result.
That undoubtedly has added to the anxiety in the air, and snappish high voltage behaviors. I don't have to react, it is just what it is right now. It feels as though I will be able to sail through this. If all it takes for me to do this is to make a simple decision to make the best of a 'bad' situation, I am ready. It may not be much, but it is the sanest way of thinking.

A Reversal

Last night, after mooring by Marina Cay, I called my Mom and discovered that she and my sister had tried to call to tell me to come home quickly, as my Dad is dying.
This news is not unexpected, but facing it is not something you can do unemotionally. Bob and I went early to sleep, as we hadn't had any the previous night, due to our collision with the car ferry. In the morning we set out quickly for St. Thomas, arriving at 2:30 with good wind.
We passed our friends Tom and Andy, on Captain Tom's charter boat, the H.B. Welch enroute to Cruz Bay, St. John. We shot moons at each other across the waves; this is the day of the full moon, and it rose beautifully over the harbor tonight. It's high up there now, keeping me up, but I am glad for the ability to do my own reflecting.
I am leaving to go to Maine tomorrow and won't be back at least until January 30, when the return is set. I will miss Bob, Calypso and the Virgin Isles and our new friends of course, but I am looking forward to seeing my family and pets again.
Mom is picking me up in Wells and it will be so good to be with her. Of course, she has her mind full of things going on there, as my Dad has not been given a prognosis for many more days. I have been through a similar loss; this is a time for family to come together. We need each other. It will be strange, though, to spend so many days back on land since we became live aboards on Oct. 21st. The sea legs thing is only part of it; you grow accustomed to your boat beneath you.
Since this is a blog about the sailing life, I'll mention that we watched the movie 'Virgin Islands' tonight, about the couple who came to live on the (formerly) deserted island, where we moored at Marina Cay, and made a stone house there and called it home for several years in the 30's.
We appreciated the distraction, as our trip back to St. Thomas today was consumed by trying to get through to AT&T and Jet Blue, which took a ridiculous amount of my and my sister Karen's time; she  helped on internet and phone to the airlines, while we were out of range.
It would be nice to be technology free as the islanders in the movie were, but that really is  'Fantasy Island'. Nowadays, I am just trying to deal with technology efficiently and not get too crazed.
Then, as now, there is the expression 'island time', which means that things happen in a more relaxed way down here. We waited for the launch to come to get us from Trellis Bay to go to Marina Cay, which was almost an hour late. It did come, eventually, with no word of explanation.
Weather sounds bad back home and there is a weather advisory for the flight.
I know I sound very matter of fact, but when I think about what I might write about my Dad, it gets hard to move through the emotions. I plan to speak at his service, that much I know. The rest is fog.
What is true about my Dad is that he tried, he really tried, for as long as he could, to deal with his illness and stay in loving connection with all of us, until he had no reserves left. He has operated on fumes for a long while now and my Mom and he learned to navigate by the winds of the moment.
Dad learned 'island time' right there in Maine-- on the porch in his chair,  taking time to eat, walking through the flea market, driving with Mom in the car to get coffee or watch the trains go over the road or driving by his old homes. He was an unhurried man. He showed me how that is done, too, with grace and usually some means of good humor.
People will talk about him as a lover of his family - his girls and our Mom, that much is indisputable.
What I hope to share is how influential he was in the lives of each of us; how, for me, he was, (despite our major differences), the guiding model for my sense of purpose and mission in life. It goes without saying that he and my Mom were of one accord in their raising us, at least in front of, if not behind, the scenes.
He was able to lead by example in the way he accepted his life's duties. He enabled me to have not just faith, but confidence in my own ability to lead my life. That is not something you teach, so much as observe and follow, especially if you are encouraged to believe you can do it, whatever it is. My Dad did that for me. He did actively support me, I always knew he cared about the person I grew up to be.
Sitting on the deck of Calypso as we set out down the Sir Francis Drake Channel, I had a sunny, breezy few minutes to think about how he influenced me to be able to take on the challenge of starting to sail this summer at the age of 58. He built and flew his own airplanes and that never was my thing,  just as boats were never his thing. My grandfathers, the two Georges, both were the boaters of the family, as was my late husband Michael.
I just never thought I could become a captain myself, but I will be. I am already knee deep into courses, and Bob is taking his captain's class in the two weeks I will be away. We are in our life, just as my Mother and Father were committed to their flying and farming. My Mom and Dad started raising cows and started a 40 acre 'freedom farm' in their mid-life. They grew into new ways of living their lives fully.
I don't expect to fish, but having done the farming and land design and activism and writing, I am ready to sail into uncharted waters. That, for sure, I got from my parents, and from my Dad, I got the courage to lead the way for my family, and others, to see that this can be done, at any age-- living your dream, I mean. Bob is with me, and my Mom was with my Dad. They had each other, all the way through their long goodbye. I remember the good things, because they are all good things--the things I learned I am able to take into myself, that's because I love him and know he loved me.
I am lucky to have his loving inspiration and guidance in my life and that will never, ever end.
My Dad used to say many things but the message behind the man was simple: he loved us. Very, very much.

Dawn Inspection

Bob and I spent the night sharing watch, with my staying up until five and his taking the morning watch. It's 7am and we are not quite so amazed to have sustained no damage. We did, in fact, get hit more seriously. It must have taken place during the day, while we we touring Virgin Gorda.
There is a crack along the wood where the toe rail meets in the back, which was an unlikely place of impact, since it is protected by all the stainless stanchions around the wind vane--they were not touched. It must have been from a protruding part of the car ramp which hit us after all.
I heard Bob swearing after a further inspection, which revealed more issues. 
On the Port side, the metal car rail for the port side swim ladder was scuffed up for a length a foot and the metal lifeline stanchion there was bent a little, enough to require fixing to avoid a leak.
We are no longer cherry. We are however, sadder but wiser. It could have been so much worse, it's hard to conceive.  We had spotted one mooring ball but had chosen not to pick it up in favor of an anchorage that left us with boat damage and loss of sleep.  
We will always, henceforth, use moorings when available. It was expensive here: The first hour was free and then $5. per hour afterwards. It is getting tougher out here for cruisers, with fewer moorings and shallower, too, as the marinas cater more and more to catamarans.
Also we will never come within a mile of any large vessel and as far as possible from other boats. This is also easier said than done...last night, for instance, we were between a rock and a hard place, because we had the ferry eating up all the available space in the mooring field to our port, and the channel entrance to starboard, which we had to keep clear of. Letting out more chain in an anchoring, than in a mooring, you have a much larger turning radius. 
So far, we have been able to keep our distance boat wise, in tricky anchorages. But accounting for anchor dragging, which amounted to 200 feet in all, we should be counting our blessings instead of our cost in boat repairs.
Strangely, we just now spotted another sailboat adrift in the harbor, passing perilously close to a newer car ferry. The ferrymen put out a dinghy while we watched with our binoculars, and someone finally came out on deck.
They appear to have gotten by without collision, and are out on deck now pulling up their anchor, which they also dragged last night. Winds were up to 29 knots at times, gusting.
It shouldn't make us feel better, seeing someone else's dragging at anchor, but while Bob is make sounds of dismay up top, I am still glad that Neptune's trident didn't stab us more severely. We are alive another day, and the sun just broke out!

Things that go BUMP in the night

We had a moonlight collision. With an old 100 foot steel car ferry called 'Idlewild'.  At Colison aka 'Collision' Point. Unbelievably, we sustained no damage to our boat. Do things like this really happen to other cruisers?
We are heading tomorrow to Monkeytown, on Guana Island, which is apt, because I felt like a monkey running around on deck just now, with nothing on; we were trying to push the ferry's stern off our front end, at 10 pm, with the nearly full moon over us and the wind blowing hard.
We needed to keep our wits; the wind kept shifting us around.  Fortunately we acted quickly and, I believe, saved our boat from sinking.
Bob says I am being overdramatic, but it isn't everyday you can say that you got crashed into by a tanker and survived.
We had just come back from dinner at Little Dix Bay Resort, the most beautiful place we have seen so far, and before that saw a gorgeous sunset nearly atop Gorda Peak, which had a view across the entire Sir Francis Drake Channel and Gorda Sound. 
Bob was almost asleep on the starboard settee, and I was reading in the v-berth, about the Resort's development by Rockefeller, when there was a double crashing sound right up hard against the front where I was, inside. It wasn't the usual tossing and anchor banging or dinghy crunching noises.  I thought someone had run into us. It was a freakout moment, the type where you know that what happens in the next few minutes will determine the level of crisis you will be dealing with.
I came on deck and Bob was already out there, trying to keep the  ferry off our bow with a fender. 'Idlewild' was moored further out than us, closer to Colison Point.  We saw it clearly, tonight, due to the bright moonlight. 
It was strange that we had any contact with it at all.  When we originally came into St. Thomas Bay, in Spanishtown, this afternoon, we gave ourselves extra rode on the anchor: at 35 feet depth, we put out 175 feet of chain. We were a long distance from the ferry, which was on a mooring.  It didn't look like they could swing around anywhere near us. Best to be safe, we reasoned.
We may have dragged anchor closer to them, and when they swung around, they hit us with their back end. They were resting on our anchor chain, so I ran to get the windlass control by the nav desk inside, and Bob's glasses. Then I took the fender from him as he ran back to the cockpit to put us into reverse. Before he did that I got the anchor snubber off the chain and once we were clear we brought up the anchor. 
We moved closer into the harbor area and re-anchored behind some catamarans and a monohull, but we are now wide awake and not at all clear that we aren't dragging. 
We inspected the starboard side and there is some blue paint on the toe rail, but there does not appear to be any damage to the wood. We were both drifting, not moving under power, so I guess that explains why we don't have a gash on the side of our boat.
Bob says he was afraid of the big car gate, sticking off the back of the ferry; he says that if we had caught the corner of that, it would definitely have caused some damage. Luckily we were hit by their port quarter and not the protruding ramp. 
It was a moment,  when I first came on deck and saw the dark shape looming in front of us. I had night vision difficulty, and I couldn't make out what the hulk was before the boat, but it looked like something sinking--that's how your imagination runs.  
Now we have moved to the new spot. We have tried to carefully gauge our distance to the boat in front of us, so we don't swing into it if the wind shifts around, which it is doing, but there is nothing for it but to stay awake and watch whether we are dragging or not. This place isn't called Pull and be Damn Point for nothing.  
The funny part of it is that we had told Rick Smith, captain of Cimarron, that we were going to play it safe and not try to enter the small bay in front of Little Dix Resort, because it appeared too shallow and too close to the reefs at the entrance. 
After successfully navigating around Anegada Island on New Year's Day (being chaperoned there by a large friendly dolphin) and its deadly reefs and 300 shipwrecks, we had some confidence in our anchoring in treacherous areas.
We are near the reefs fronting Spanishtown's bay, but the depths are all visible on our echo sounder's readings, although we are getting tired after a nice meal and a great sail from Anegada to here. The anchor appears to be holding.  Bob is asking me to check the radar screen down here at the nav desk as he makes a valiant effort not to appear worried.  I just read this to him and he said, of course, that he isn't really worried because he isn't sleeping and the boat is running so if something happens, he's (we're) ready. We probably won't rest much tonight after all the excitement. 
I am looking forward to being back on a mooring. This much adventure is a lot for just being two days into the new year!
Yes, I did look overhead to thank our lucky stars, which are brightly shining down on us.


--

Be Who You RRRRR

After Sailing all morning, we arrived at the entry into the bay which Saba Rock, Leverick Bay and the Bitter End Yacht Club share, at the Eastern End of Virgin Gorda, at the Eastern End of the British Virgin Islands. Although it would appear to be a distant outpost, we were joined by a huge number of boaters, including some ridiculous mega yachts, actually resembling small cruise ships, one with five huge masts which seemed completely and literally over the top.
At five we were at Saba Rock, which has an interesting past, and we watched the Tarpons get fed; although they have no teeth, they apparently don't bite but I wouldn't want to mess with one, they are up to 4 feet long. The entertainer was making jokes as he fed them, while surrounded by people on the dock and on dinghies, taking pictures with go pro cameras.
We left to catch the Pirate show given by Michaels 'Beans' Gardner. They had a contest for the longest blow on a conch and I won! a bottle of rum, for making it blow for 50 plus seconds, longer than the guy did it. Bob was quite pleased. I bought him a captain's cap and he looks quite commanding in it.
That's it from here; the only thing I would say is that Michael's Pirate Show, at the end, had a message for everyone to be who they RRRR.. Sounds like good advice. We hope to see some fireworks, which get sent off at Necker Island at midnight, if we make it; but for now, the best thing about today was having another day in paradise with Bob and the next best thing was talking to my Mom tonight, and being glad to have had such a good set of parents. It's a nice way to end a year. Best wishes, All of You!

Anegada De Vida

We are on Anegada Island, a flat coral rimmed outpost island, site of 300 shipwrecks. We sailed early from Ford's Sounds, more on that later, but this is a great place to sail to and connect with the deep blue sea. Here's wishing everyone a fresh new year!