After leaving Indiana Dunes, we really started to make our way into the heartland.  I had an earworm of the U2 song by the same name as we drove through Iowa and Nebraska – and it was originally going to be the title of this post –  but then we saw a sign on the side of the the Lincoln Highway and I had my blog title!

We had gratefully accepted a generous offer from cruising friends to stay in their townhouse while we were in the Chicago area (they’re currently cruising), so our next stop after Indiana Dunes was in an actual dwelling vs. our tent. Our plan was to use it as a base to explore Chicago for a few days, but we were both a bit tired so we decided instead to relax and take advantage of a rare opportunity to watch the Buffalo Bills on an actual television.  Despite the fact that they lost, it was a great stop before hitting the road to Iowa.

When I drove across the U.S. 32 years ago, the stretch in Iowa and Nebraska was something that you just had to get through.  But now that I’m older and (arguably) wiser, and after spending almost three years going at the speed of five knots, slower is more to our liking.  So we decided to get off the freeway and take the Lincoln Highway instead, which parallels I-80.  It wasn’t really much slower, but it was SUBSTANTIALLY more scenic with a lot fewer tractor trailers.   In fact, Jeff and I feel that Iowa gets a bad reputation for being nothing but flat cornfields.  If you opt to leave the freeway, you find rolling hills.  Yes, there are cornfields, but it’s still a lot prettier than I-80.

Continue reading “No waterfowl shooting from highway.” →

A big goal that I set for myself this summer was to take Pegu Club out by myself.  For some time now I’ve been confident that I had the knowledge to single-hand, and after cruising I also feel comfortable that if I was out by myself and something went wrong, I’d have a good foundation to try and figure out how to fix it.

In the nine years we’ve been sailing, Jeff and I have always traded responsibilities, so we both know all aspects of the boat from steering to working the lines, anchoring and docking.  That’s always been important to both of us because we didn’t want to be in a position where if one person was in some way incapacitated (or one of us got annoyed and decided to toss the other one overboard – kidding, kidding!), the other person would be able to get the boat into port.  We’ve heard of situations where something happened to (usually) the husband, and the wife didn’t know anything about how to handle the boat, requiring a rescue of some sort.  That definitely won’t be us.

But feeling confident in theory and translating that confidence into action are two completely different things for me.  I was still pretty nervous about actually doing it for one reason: docking.  I’m at the helm 99% of the time when we bring her in and out of the dock (Jeff’s longer arms make it easier for him to quickly tie us off), so I wasn’t worried about that so much.  It was the part where I would have to leave the helm and attach the spring line.  Once she was attached, the rest of the lines could be done in a relatively leisurely fashion.  I just didn’t want to break the dock or the boat in those seconds between entering the slip and attaching the spring line!

As an interim step, my Shenny friend, Sandy, offered to come along for moral support.  She wouldn’t do anything unless I asked her – she’d just be there.  So that’s how I found myself one day with the engine running, nervously casting the docklines off and backing out of the slip. Continue reading “Mission accomplished!” →

 

I was going to do one more Cruising by the Numbers for the month of May, but we didn’t spend the whole month cruising.  As a result, the cruising vs. non-cruising expenses started getting muddled together, so I figured I’d just post some random facts and figures instead.  But first, here are May’s non-financial statistics from May 1 until May 21 when we pulled into our slip at Shenny:

Days under way: 12

Nautical miles covered: 644.07

Nights at anchor: 5

Nights on a mooring: 2

Nights in a slip:  12 (this included 4 nights at a free docks)

Nights underway: 1

Number of states: 5 (North Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut)

 

As for cruising overall, we cast off the dock lines on September 3, 2018 and tied them again on May 21, 2021, totaling 993 days.  Two things struck me as I went through the notes I’ve kept.  

First:  We were able to spend over nine months in the Bahamas.  Many people never get to go at all, or, if they do, they spend a few days or a week.  But getting to spend nine months there?  How cool is that??  And, it’s entirely possible we will go down again in a few years.  But if we don’t?  What an adventure we’ve had!

Second: We acquired so much experience over the past three years.  If you’re reading this and thinking, “I could never go cruising.  I don’t have nearly enough experience,” just know that even though we had been sailing for several years before cutting the dock lines, our farthest trip had been 40 nautical miles, we had anchored less than a dozen times, and we had never sailed at night.  Now?  Well, you can see for yourself below.  You can do it.  At its core, each day is just more sailing.  

Nautical miles traveled: 10,415

Days in the Bahamas: 288 (29% of the time)

Nights at anchor: 565 (57% of the time)

Nights on the hard: 45 (4% of the time).  Most of that was 30 days at Shenny during the summer of 2019 when we traveled via automobile and airplane to visit family.

Overnights: 11

Three longest non-stop trips: 299 nautical miles, 294 nautical miles, and 250 nautical miles

Number of trips over 100 nautical miles: 12

Non-Bahamian squalls while underway: 2 – one in the Gulf Stream in Florida, and one off the coast of Virginia.

Number of tows needed: 1 – when we picked up bad fuel in the Abacos our first year, sailed to the St. John’s inlet by Jacksonville, and had a tow from TowBoat U.S. to Beach Marine in Jacksonville Beach.

Number of times the engine stopped unexpectedly: 4 – 2 times due to the above-referenced dirty fuel, 1 time from a dirty filter in the Exumas resulting in our anchoring under sail for the first time, and 1 time just outside the Ft. Pierce inlet when we were rolling around, lower on fuel than we realized, and the engine sucked in some air.  

Number of times we felt unsafe: 2 – both in anchorages in Florida due to the actions of occupants of derelict boats (Cocoa Beach and Daytona Beach)

Number of Coast Guard boardings for a safety check: 1

Number of REALLY bad weather decisions: 1 – going south down the Jersey Coast in October, 2018.

Number of underwater dike collisions: 1 – that damn Reedy Island Dike in the Delaware Bay

Number of times we’ve been within 1 mile of the Reedy Island Dike since the collision: 0.

 

We’ve arrived at our slip at Shenny and with that, our full-time cruising adventures have come to an end.

Wait – what? Yep. We’ve been doing this for a touch under three years – 33 months to be exact. During that time we’ve been away from the boat for under six weeks.  Cruising is great.  It’s also not-so-great at times.  We’ve learned a ton and seen some amazing places.  But we‘ve always said that we’ll keep cruising as long as it’s fun.  While it’s not un-fun (yes, I just made up that word), it’s time for a break.

What are we planning to do instead? We are going to spend this summer doing shorter trips, including a trip with Shenny friends to Martha’s Vineyard which will be a first for all of us. We’re really looking forward to it.

What about this winter? Several months ago we decided that instead of pointing Pegu Club’s bow south this winter, we’d put her on the hard at Shenny and be snowbirds on land instead of the water.  We didn’t want to spend the winter in Florida, or really anywhere on the East Coast, and this California girl has been feeling the pull to spend more time there for quite awhile.  So we’ve booked AirBnB’s in Palm Springs from November to mid-April.

We’ve bought a used car and we’re going to road trip across the USA (something I’ve done 3 times, but not since 1990), camping in National Parks along the way.  Neither one of us has seen the Grand Canyon, and I’ve wanted to return to Bryce Canyon in Utah ever since I first saw it in 1990.  Jeff will have his lifetime National Parks pass by the time we leave, and we are going to take full advantage of it.  We’re very much looking forward to spending six months going on day hikes, eating Mexican food, visiting family and friends, and living on land in a few places vs. moving every week or two.  

How about the Bahamas after spending a winter on land? That’s still to be determined. Maybe we’ll land travel out west again, or fly somewhere international. While I won’t say that we definitely won’t go to the Bahamas, it will likely be a few winters before we consider that option.

Is this just a prelude to selling the boat? Definitely not. We still really enjoy boating and we don’t want to stop.  Wherever we spend our winters, we intend to move back onto Pegu Club in early May and spend the spring/summer/early fall living on her and sailing. We still want to explore Maine and Nova Scotia, and we’ve never been farther north on the boat than Rhode Island so there is still a lifetime’s worth of places left for us to discover.

If we only had a few years left on this planet, would we want to spend them cruising south every winter?  Frankly, no.  There are still far too many places where we want to spend months at a time – and not by traveling there on a boat.  Traveling to the Bahamas on Pegu Club has been the adventure of a lifetime.  Jeff and I will be sitting in rocking chairs one day playing “Remember when?” and boring people with tales about cruising full-time on a 30 foot sailboat for three years.  

But cruising full-time is also undoubtedly difficult – more psychologically than physically.  We both want to open the door and go for a walk without climbing into a dinghy first.  Jeff wants to accumulate a few things and have somewhere to put them – even if it’s just in the trunk of our car.  I want to run into people that I know when I’m out and about.  We both want to look at the weather forecast solely to check if we need a jacket or an umbrella – not whether there is an upcoming system requiring us to raise the anchor and move somewhere else.

We want to keep sailing in New England, but living on the boat here during the winter is a non-starter, not to mention that I’m never again living year-round in a place with winter.  Twenty-nine years was more than enough for me.  So six months on Pegu Club (based in Shennecossett) and six months on land somewhere warmer than Connecticut sounds like the perfect balance right now.

Isn’t this summer still considered full-time cruising?  Not in our book. If there is one thing that we didn’t understand until we started cruising, it’s that there’s a big difference between boating and cruising. People who haven’t cruised will swear up and down that it’s the same, but it simply isn’t. As long as we have a designated slip or a mooring that we repeatedly return to throughout the summer, we don’t consider ourselves to be cruising – we’re boating. And that’s fine with us. If we decide to head south again some autumn in the future, then we’ll be cruising again – not boating.

And the blog?  I started this blog as a diary/scrapbook of sorts for Jeff and me to look at and reminisce on our adventures, and we both enjoy looking at old posts to see how far we’ve come.  So I’m going to keep posting, but only when there is something that – to me – is worth putting pen to paper, so to speak.  I imagine posts will be in spurts depending on whether we are out adventuring or just being couch potatoes.

So if you’re here for the sailing stories, check back periodically over the summer.  Once the cool wind starts to blow, we’ll be going west for awhile, and the land stories will begin.