Simply Sailing
Christine Kling is taking the day off today to welcome my friend and today's guest blogger, Connie McBride here to Write on the Water. I first met Connie at Cooley's Landing Marina in Fort Lauderdale last fall when Eurisko was docked a few slips away. We met and talked writing, sailing and simplicity.
Connie McBride
The sun was setting behind the island—no chance of a green flash, so I went below to wash the dinner dishes, leaving the boys on deck to play their sunset game. They start by watching the sunset from the cockpit, then standing on deck, then on the coaming, climbing into the rig until they're standing on their tippy-toes on the boom. In this way, like the Little Prince, sometimes they see 7 sunsets in one evening.
In the galley, with their squeals of excitement as background noise, my mind wandered. My hands were washing dishes but my eyes were seeing the shark our youngest son had befriended in our last anchorage. When the words started to come, I half-dried by hands, rushed for my writing folder and favorite pencil, and captured them before they could disappear.
Our oldest son joined me in the cabin, looked at the mess still in the sink and said, "I thought you were washing…oh, never mind. MOM'S WRITING!" He sent out the warning signal. Throughout their childhood the boys have known that these two words mean a number of things including, "Don't ask her a question, or if you do, don't expect her to hear you." At various times they can also be interpreted as "School's postponed," "The pancakes are going to burn," and "Turn the music down."
That I am a writer is something the boys accepted long before I would admit it. I used to say, "Oh no, I just write." I'm not sure what I thought the difference was. I wrote my first published piece (and the first I'd ever submitted) for a local sailing magazine "for fun." Those thousand words changed my life. I had never seen anything of mine in print before, and I was hooked. That was in 1999. I'm still writing for sailing magazines, though my focus has changed. Sailing with three small children created innumerable stories that were fun to write, fun to read, and fun to get paid for. But as the kids grew up and we sailed farther from our home waters, I realized that HOW we sail is so different from what the magazines promote that I needed a new outlet.
Eurisko in Providencia, Colombia
While many of my how-to pieces are published in national magazines, I reserved the most extreme simplification methods for my book: Simply Sailing: A Different Approach to a Life of Adventure. It's difficult to sell a piece about getting fed up with your marine head and throwing it overboard in order to simplify to a bucket. Magazines won't touch something like that, so to speak. Living without a fridge (or ice), novel storage ideas and major repairs (new non-skid for the decks) are OK, but try getting an editor excited about your kerosene lights or sculling oar. These are the kinds of tips I share on my website instead: www.simplysailingonline.com.
By sailing simply we were able to follow our dream at 31 instead of 65. We are not independently wealthy; we both work a few months a year at "real jobs" and I write year-round. (A "real job" is one that pays the bills and writing almost but not quite does.) But because we have no generator, refrigerator, pressure water, shower, marine head or outboard and few electronic gizmos, sailing simply is much cheaper, allowing us to go now! (Well…9 years ago.) This means our children also had the pleasure of experiencing the US East coast and the Bahamas several times, the Turks and Caicos, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, the US and BVI, Saba, Statia, Antigua, Guadeloupe, Martinique, the Saints, Bequia, Union and other Grenadines, Trinidad, Panama, Colombian islands, and Mexico. I'm glad we didn't deny them those experiences just so we could have a bigger boat with more gadgets later on. Our little 34' Creekmore Eurisko was all the five of us needed.
As life has gotten financially easier (The boat is paid off; the kids are grown; my book I is selling; magazine editors know me and publish almost everything I send them.) we have changed very few of our simple ways. Ironically, the biggest changes have occurred because of my writing. Though we have only a handheld GPS and hundreds of charts for navigation, I have a laptop, printer, digital camera and iTouch, all of which were indispensable for getting pieces to editors the year we were in Panama. Gone are the days of handwriting pieces (although I do occasionally still do it when the words won't come any other way), taking it to the library to type it and print it, put it and the pictures I had developed (once I finally used the rest of the roll of film) and a SASE in a manila envelope, hunting down a post office and wondering how long it takes to get mail to Boston from Trinidad. (The answer—Longer than you think.)
Eurisko enroute to Mexico
In order to combine our need for simplicity with my needs as a writer, we have had to be creative. Until a few months ago we were charging my laptop through an inverter. This means I got about 4 hours of computer time a day before our two 50-watt solar panels could no longer keep up, and the house bank voltage started to drop. We finally realized that it was the fault of the inverter, not my profession. We were changing the 12-volt DC power from the boat to AC for the 110 cord which changed it back to DC for the laptop. Weeks of research rewarded me with a solution: www.laptoppartsnow.com sells 12-volt plugs for laptops. Since we no longer waste the energy converting DC to AC back to DC, I can use my laptop for 10 to 12 hours a day and the batteries never notice it.
Though I encourage simplicity, I never feel like I'm missing anything. Our home is cozy and seaworthy and has taken us to places we never would have been otherwise. From her deck we have seen islands appear on the horizon, dolphins playing in the phosphorescence in our wake and pods of whale laying on the surface. These experiences have made me glad we sail simply so we could sail away sooner and hopefully longer. Besides, they give me something to write about.
Connie McBride, her husband Dave, and their three sons dropped their dock lines and sailed away from the Chesapeake Bay eight years ago. Since then, they have spent six years in the Caribbean, island-hopping up and down the island chain and recently spending a year in Panama. You can read about their adventures in Connie's new Kindle Book Simply Sailing and on her website www.simplysailingonline.com.
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