The hardest part of cruising

By Mike Jastrzebski

For me the hardest thing about cruising is not the boat work or the weather or rough seas, it's saying goodbye. Mary and I have done this twice now, when we left Minnesota to take the boat south and when Katrina forced us out of Mobile. Neither time was easy.

Mary and I still still keep in touch with some of the friends we left behind, but contact is fleeting and more often than not it's a quick e-mail or a comment on someone's facebook wall. We never planned it that way, but jobs and life and new friends take up time. Now that we're getting ready to take off from Ft. Lauderdale we're starting the process all over again.

Many of my writer friends will be attending SleuthFest this coming weekend. We'll talk and laugh and drink, and then I'll say my goodbyes. Many of these friends already know about my plans and although I've known it was coming for some time now, it won't make things any easier. If our cruising goes as planned we're going to spend the next several years cruising the Caribbean and I won't be returning to SleuthFest. So we'll all promise to keep in touch and a few of us will and the others will lose touch with us.

I've already told the members of my writer's group that I won't be attending the group meeting anymore. I have too much work to do on the boat. Fortunately, I'll see them all at SleuthFest and one of the members, Miriam Auerbach, is planning a going away party for us. That's nice, but sad at the same time because I'll miss not only them, but their input on my books.

I've belonged to half-a-dozen different critique groups over the years and unfortunately I've lost contact with all those fellow writers who have helped me to improve my writing. I hope that won't be the case with this group, but I'm a realist. After all, friends come and friends go and if we're lucky we'll connect again sometime in the future.

So when we finally drop anchor after we leave Ft. Lauderdale the first thing Mary and I will do is pour a glass of wine, sit back in the cockpit, and toast to friends old and new.

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