I’m on watch at 11:00 p.m. on our final night prior to Suwarrow arrival. I wrote a blog post 2 or 3 nights ago, but decided there was too much whining in it so deleted. I want to share what this whole sailing deal is like for me, but it’s difficult to accurately express. The trip/adventure/lifestyle (whatever this is) is challenging. There are many incredible aspects, a decent dose of overall pain in the assness, and a large sprinkling of difficulty. Kind of like normal life times 10. Minus a lot of inconvenient obligations, plus extreme isolation that is sometimes fabulous and sometimes awful.
The incredible aspects are probably the most obvious and at the moment seem almost too much to get into given my current lack of sleep. They include pre-cargo ship crash Easter Island, spending 3 months in French Polynesia (how many people get to do that?), meeting other cruisers and sharing our experiences, the stars, exploring areas that are only accessible by boat, having “time”, snorkeling, becoming more comfortable with the diving, reading (I will always love to go to exotic places and sit around and read – why is that so great?), having people visit, feeling Agility surf, and tons more stuff. Sometimes I am thrilled out of my mind.
Pain in the ass stuff I write about too much. At the moment I’m still traumatized by the bugs in the food and upset way out of proportion over our broken electric tea kettle. I cried about the tea kettle and carried on about how we probably won’t find a replacement for months and it felt very burdensome to be out here with no Amazon or McGuckins. It is inconvenient boiling water in a pot and then pouring it into the kettle, but I’ve only dumped scalding water down my legs once. So far. This passage the difficulty has been lack of sleep. I don’t know if it was the 6 weeks off for Tim and I or what, but we’ve struggled this short and relatively easy passage. I typically find the first 3 nights the toughest so was feeling optimistic Wednesday, but then we had a night of squalls. Tim dealt with it solo the first several hours, but none of us were really sleeping. I got up and Tim dozed on the settee while we worked on dodging the squalls. “Fall off 20 degrees” Tim would say. Ay Ay Captain. At 4:00 a.m. I told Tim I was about ready to croak so we took the sails in, turned on the engine and had Elizabeth and Alex take over. Phew. Alex suffers from sea sickness so had a rough couple of days, but perked up day 3. Yesterday we were all pretty worthless, but I did make a decent spaghetti dinner. That is amusing in it’s own way. Tim doesn’t eat many carbs so I made him zucchini noodles, Eddie (Elizabeth) can’t have gluten so she had gluten free noodles brought from the U.S., Alex and I had normal pasta, and I was careful not to cross contaminate. Nothing is simple, but it was worth having some real noodles.
I think this post is deteriorating. I’ve been deleting entire paragraphs of blabbing. Time for my Lawrence of Arabia book.