43°12'N 5°37'E
La Ceyreste
Provence, France
September 3, 2009
IN MEMORIAM
Ashore, people ask us “What do you do?” Though they may not put it so directly, most cruisers want to know, “What are your dreams?” And, more importantly, “What are you doing to make your dreams come true?” A very few people we have met cruising answer that final question by living their dreams every single moment of their lives. Ken Murray was one of those.
We first met Ken and his then-wife Helen in April of 2002 in a remote anchorage called Anihue in the northern part of the Chilean channels. But Evans and I had been hearing about them ever since we arrived in the Beagle Channel four months earlier. A stock fiberglass powerboat cruising the most challenging coastline in the world would have been enough to make Pelagic stand out from among the dozen or so mostly custom and mostly metal cruising sailboats. But in addition, while most boats passed through the 1,000 nautical miles of coastline in one short summer season, Pelagic had been in Chile for more than two years, and Ken’s penchant for gunkholing in uncharted fjords meant that he had a wealth of valuable information which he shared freely on the high-frequency radio net. At age 73, Helen was by far the oldest person anyone had ever heard of living aboard a cruising boat in the channels and nearly 20 years older than Ken. The age disparity between Ken and Helen offered even more grist for the rumor mill, as did Pelagic’s name because it was the same as a steel charter sailboat used for Antarctic climbing expeditions owned by Skip Novak, a well-known sailboat racer, climber, writer and adventurer. During one of the first evenings we got together Ken told us with an impish smile, “Skip was incensed that a powerboat should have the same name as his boat and told me to change it when we arrived in Chile in 2000.”
Ken was thin and rangy, his face sun creased, his brown eyes always smiling, his sharp mind easily engaged. With his engineer’s logic and skilled mechanic’s hands, he could fix almost anything, and he had somehow held the aging Pelagic together on her 15,000-mile voyage. When telling us about his repairing something on board, Helen said, “Ken got it to work with his usual method – magic!” In their eight years aboard Pelagic, Ken had spent almost as much time off the boat as on it, using his mechanical skills to help others with their boats, traveling around South America on his lovingly restored 1952 Matchless motorcycle, working on a ship doing underwater salvage in the Rio de la Plata, and contributing to whatever shoreside community lay beyond Pelagic’s decks at any given time.
Fifteen years before, Ken and Helen had both been with other partners, and both had dreamed of sailing to distant shores. Both had fit out sailboats with their spouses and headed down the west coast only to discover that their partners suffered from debilitating seasickness. Both had been unwilling to give up their dreams; for that and a variety of other reasons both ended up divorced. Ken was cruising Baja alone aboard his 42-foot steel boat, La Cuna. Helen had done everything she could to hitch a ride on a cruising boat, but no one would take her once they discovered that she was almost sixty years old and had some health problems. Undaunted, she had purchased a Toyota Minivan, loaded it with camping supplies, and headed south for the Baja peninsula and the shores of the Sea of Cortez. When Ken rowed ashore from La Cuna and landed at Helen’s campsite on a sandy beach in Baja, he asked her what she was doing there. “I’m waiting for someone to take me sailing,” she replied.
There were a dozen reasons why Ken and Helen should not have been where they were doing what they were. By almost any standard, they had no money and an entirely unsuitable boat. Helen had a plethora of health problems, and they had no health insurance. But they weren’t interested in excuses. The life they lived was tough, demanding and, at times, scary. But it was everything they wanted.
We sailed in company with Ken and Helen for much of our southbound trip through the channels from September to December of 2002. When we left Chile bound for Australia in January of 2003, we sailed away believing we would see them both again on a return trip to Chile at some indeterminate time in the future. But that was not to be.
In May of 2005 Helen suffered a stroke. Rather than leaving her in a nursing home in Argentina after she was released from the hospital, Ken brought her home to Pelagic and cared for her himself for five months. At the end of October, a second stroke put her back in the hospital and eventually she lapsed into a coma. On November 4, 2005, she came out of the coma long enough to spend a last hour with Ken. She told him she loved him and “the times we spent together were the best years of my life.” She had lived her dreams beyond her wildest imaginings, she said, but now it was time for her to move on.
When we returned to Chile in October of 2007 Ken was still cruising the channels in Pelagic, but much had changed in his life. Ken had fallen in love with and married Eef Willems, a merchant marine captain and charter boat skipper. I have told the remarkable story of their relationship in an article in the August Cruising World. Suffice to say that they had found true love, and seeing them together the most jaded person would not be able to deny that such a thing does exist. But less than a year after Helen had died and just six months after he and Eef had found each other, Ken was diagnosed with prostate cancer that had already metastasized into his bones and his lymph system and given a 20% chance of surviving the next five years. The first thing he did was to ask Eef to marry him.
Ken and Eef made the decision that quality of life mattered far more than length of life; that whatever treatment Ken pursued, it had to allow them to live aboard their boat and be together in Patagonia. Ken’s doctors at the VA hospital worked hard to give Ken all the time they could while allowing him to spend periods of many months 7,000 miles away from the hospital and the treatment facilities. They took advantage of every minute. When we were with them in the Beagle Channel in March of 2008, Ken and Eef went off for a month’s cruise, hiking and kayaking miles into the large islands at the bottom of South America, charting anchorages that, as far as anyone knows, no one had ever visited. They cruised the way that most people dream of and few achieve, as at home camping on a mountain along the edge of a glacier or kayaking up a stream as enjoying their boat’s snug cabin in a 50-knot blow.
Last year at this time, they had the choice of sitting around in hospitals “waiting to die,” as Ken put it, or having one last grand adventure. No one who knew Ken and Eef would have been surprised at their decision. He and Eef set off on Eef’s steel boat, Tooluka, and sailed 12,000 nautical miles to Greenland. For all of Ken’s sea miles and experiences, he had never taken a sailboat across an ocean, and he had never visited Greenland, another remote area of icebergs and glaciers where whales dance in steely gray waters. Against all the odds, and thanks to Eef’s strength and abilities, Ken made it to Greenland and spent two months cruising there under the midnight sun. He passed away with Eef at his side at 23:50 in Aasiaat, Greenland on August 25th in the local hospital. Our friends Clive and Laila were with him and helped Eef in every way they could in the last days of Ken’s life. Laila told me that the Greenlanders have a tradition of an “outsinging” for the dying, singing a hymn about sailing new waters and hunting new fields to carry them over the threshold of death. Most of the hospital staff joined the family of the man in the bed next to Ken’s to sing Ken out of this life and into the next.
Ken seemed to dance and laugh his way through life no matter the heartaches he encountered. When you lose a person like that, you cannot mourn for him, because you just know that he is still dancing and laughing somewhere. Instead you mourn for yourself and others like you, left bereft on a cold and empty shore watching a sparkling bright light pass out of your life forever.
43°12'N 5°37'E
La Ceyreste
Provence, France
July 18, 2009
EUROPEAN LIVING
After a whirlwind visit to friends and
family in Syracuse, NY, Beth was joined Evans at the beginning of July
in our new home in Provence in the south of France about twenty minutes
east of Marseille. We are both struck by the differences between living
in the US and living in Europe, and we thought we’d share some of our
observations so that those who have not lived in Europe can understand
why we feel that living here offers us many of the advantages of living
on the boat without some of the disadvantages.
On the boat,
almost all of our drinking water came from the sky in the form of
rainwater that we trapped on the decks and used to fill our tanks. Most
of our electricity (but, alas, not all) came from pollution free solar
panels. When we had too little sun (as in Chile last Southern winter),
we generated electricity using a highly efficient gasoline generator. We
kept our electrical demand low and used less than a tenth of the
electricity we would have used ashore. Once the boat was built and we
were off sailing, we lived a very comfortable life while consuming a
tiny fraction of the resources we had when living ashore while building
Hawk. During that time, we were surprised at how little control we
really had over how much water, electricity and fuel we used every day.
But here in Europe, while we’re using more resources than on the
boat, we’re living much less resource-intensively than we have ever
managed to in the States. Our boat-sized apartment is tucked into the
thick-walled basement of an old stone and stucco building in a medieval
town called Ceyreste that perches on a hill above the Mediterranean
about twenty minutes east of Marseille. Though daytime temperatures
average in the mid-80s and we’ve had several days in the 90s, the
apartment remains very comfortable even without air conditioning. In the
morning, when the sun shines fully on the one outside wall of the
apartment, we close the French doors and lower a mechanical shutter. The
heavy walls of the building retain the cool of the night, and the
apartment remains up to 10 degrees cooler than the temperature outside
during the hottest part of the day. In the mid-afternoon, when the front
of the apartment is in the shade, we open the shutter and the French
doors and let the near-constant sea breeze blow into the apartment,
airing it out and further cooling it.
Evans bikes the 10
kilometers to and from the boatyard in La Ciotat. For much of the way,
there are bike lanes or wide shoulders. Where there are not, drivers are
patient and courteous, never in a hurry on the winding little streets
that make up the town center. When I want to have lunch with him or go
shopping at the “hypermarché,” the big supermarket in town, I can take
the clean, efficient, inexpensive bus that runs every twenty minutes
into town and back. There really is no need to own a car, though we do
have one as part of Evans’ job. It is a tiny little Renault Clio diesel
that is rated for 53.5 miles per gallon on the highway. We haven’t done
any highway driving, but it looks as if we’ve been getting more than 35
miles per gallon on our little jaunts to explore the countryside around
us.
With an average rainfall of just 24 inches per year
(compared to 41 inches of precipitation in Boston), water has always
been scarce in this region, and the Romans built many aqueducts,
catchments and cisterns during their 500-year occupation a couple
millennia ago. Many of those still function today, and they keep the
area supplied during the dry summer months, but there is no water to
waste. Like most European toilets, ours has a two-part button on the
top. Pushing half the button puts about half the volume through the
toilet as pushing the full button, and the water runs for as long as you
hold the button down.
The area has long been known for its
agriculture, and driving around we see vineyards, fruit trees and
vegetable gardens. But only drought-resistant crops are grown and there
is no artificial irrigation. Absolutely no water is devoted to lawns –
the area around many houses consists of yellowed grass and bare soil
with lots of flowering bushes and plants that thrive in bright sunshine,
low moisture environments. Pools are a rarity – people go to the beach
and swim in the Mediterranean. When I ride the bus back from town, the
seats are often filled with kids sticky with salt and sand carrying
buckets and trowels.
We have a washing machine in the kitchen
which uses no more water than a boat washing machine per load. There is
no dishwasher and no dryer. Everyone dries their clothes outdoors on
lines or plastic racks that are hung out open windows of the apartments
that line the narrow alleyways. The hot, dry weather and the constant
breeze dry even heavy towels fresh out of the washing machine in less
than an hour.
The little medieval village has dozens of small
winding alleyways, and a set of small shops that meet all our day-to-day
needs. La Poste handles mail and la tabac carries postcards and
stationary supplies. La pharmacie has most everything to be found in an
American drugstore. La boucherie has fresh meat; la boulangerie has
fresh bread and pastries. A fruit and vegetable store boasts local
produce all fresh every day. A small natural food store carries whole
grains, and a small grocery store has cereal, yogurt and other things.
The stores close from 12:30 until 4:00 each day, and around 4:00 I
finish up my writing, put a shopping bag over my arm, and do my shopping
for the day. Evans gets home shortly after that, and we usually eat a
simple dinner of salad or fruit with baguettes on the little table on
the stone patio in front of our front door while the long twilight
paints the buildings golden and lights the steeple of the 12th century
Catholic Church visible over the roofs of the buildings around our
courtyard.
The economic situation in Europe seems as bad as in
the States when we look at the economic indicators, but the only
evidence of it we have seen directly is that the boatyard where Evans is
working is all but empty. Every bit of the hardstand area, which is the
size of a couple of football fields, was covered with superyachts two
years ago. Now the only boat besides the one Evans is working on is a
120-foot powerboat that has been repossessed. Yet when we ask people
about the economy, they say that the average person hasn’t really felt
it because the safety nets in Europe have protected them from the
economic collapse. This is a real contrast to the short time we spent in
the States where it seemed as if just about everyone we know has been
directly impacted in some way.
Of course, there are downsides.
The boatyard, despite promising to work full out all summer, is down to
a 30-hour work week. When Evans contacts suppliers for technical
information available in a brochure (but not on their website), he gets
an out-of-office reply saying that someone will get back to him in
September. This is part and parcel of the European lifestyle, and not
unexpected after our experiences living in Europe before we left on our
first circumnavigation. It’s wonderful to get all of July or August off
and most of December, but it’s not so much fun if you’re trying to get
something done.
But when all is said and done, on a day-to-day
basis we are able to live in a way that we only wish we could in the
States. The suburban, car-centered existence we seem unable to avoid in
the places we have lived seems out of step with modern realities. When
we eventually return to the States, we’d really like to find a place
where we can live where we can commute by bike, shop on foot, have
access to nature and still earn a decent living. Of course, we can
always head back to sea!
43°13'N 5°37.6'E
Ceyreste, France
June 28, 2009
A Quick Update
Evans has settled into his project management job in the South of France. Our flat is in a lovely old small village called Ceyreste (43° 13' 0N, 5° 37' 60E), and he is biking to and from work every day (to the slightly bigger town of La Ciotat). We expect this job will run until about November 15th, and then he will likely come back to Annapolis and work on Hawk’s refitting.
Beth is joining Evans in Ceyreste in a week and will stay until mid-august, working on the new book she is writing.During the fall, she will be back in the US doing various slide shows and seminars.
Hawk is all hauled out and snug in the marina near Annapolis (Cypress Marine) where we originally built her interior. She is in surprisingly good shape. So, the yard has a short work list, mainly focused on renewing ancillary engine components (like the rubber mounts) and the sails are off being looked at with stitching being touched up and chafe patches being renewed.
39°04'N 76°13'W
Cypress Marine, Magothy River
Chesapeake Bay
June 4, 2009
END OF A VOYAGE
Hawk lays in her berth at Cypress Marine, a little boatyard on Cypress
Creek off the Magothy River just north of Annapolis. We arrived here two
days ago, after a nine-day passage from the Virgin Islands, motoring
through the narrow entrance channel into the nearly landlocked Y-shaped
cove surrounded by lovely houses fronted by wooden docks. We first
passed through that channel and tied Hawk up in this slip in April of
1998 after her maiden voyage from Florida, when she was little more than
a bare hull, and then we spent a bit over a year fitting the interior
and finishing the boat. Ten years ago today, Hawk sailed out the mouth
of the Chesapeake Bay, bound for Newfoundland. Entering the Magothy
River and then Cypress Creek two days ago, it felt as if we had stepped
back in time, as if we had never left, as if all the years and all the
miles had never happened.
As we backed into the slip so full of memories, we couldn’t help but
recall our last moments here. Beth had just sold her car, the last
personal possession binding us to land, and as her car disappeared out
the driveway she stepped aboard Hawk. Evans had the engine running and
all but two docklines untied and coiled on the deck, removed from the
pilings for the first time since Hawk had arrived in that slip more than
a year before. Beth pulled in the last two lines, and we motored away
from the dock, away from one life and toward another.
We hoped we would cruise aboard this boat for ten years. We hoped we
would sail to Chile and spend at least a year in the archipelago on its
west coast. We hoped we actually liked sailing in cold weather. We hoped
we had the skills to keep ourselves and our boat safe. But we didn’t
know. We did know that we were once again giving up the security of a
paycheck, health insurance and retirement savings, but we didn’t know if
we had any hope of supporting ourselves by writing from the boat. We
knew we were leaving behind many conveniences including well-stocked
supermarkets, showers with limitless hot water, washing machines and
dishwashers, 24-hour shopping, the Internet, easy communication with
family, mechanics and sailmakers… We left wondering if we were doing the
right thing, walking away yet again from jobs and financial security,
setting off knowing nothing for sure except that we would face
uncertainty, risk and challenge.
Now we are decommissioning Hawk after a 75,000-nautical mile, ten-year
voyage that has taken us around the world, as far north as the Arctic
Circle and as far south as Cape Horn. We visited Chile twice and spent
more than two years exploring that vast archipelago stretching from Cape
Horn north for 1,000 miles. We’ve sailed some 15,000 nautical miles
through the Southern Ocean. Our writing paid for most of our living
expenses aboard, even if it didn’t stretch to cover the expenses of
maintaining the boat. Together we have faced down our fears,
strengthened and deepened the bond between us, taken care of ourselves
in the most remote corners of the globe, fixed problems we would have
thought insurmountable and uncovered reserves of strength and
determination we never suspected. We have also built friendships with
extraordinary people around the globe, danced with albatrosses and
whales on the open ocean and visited remote wilderness areas virtually
unchanged since the days of Cook and Darwin. The sea has tested us again
and again, humbled us often and punished us occasionally. But it has
also rewarded us with perfect sailing days under a wide spread of
canvas, with sunsets so beautiful they brought tears to our eyes, with
the magic mystery of the green flash, with the fearsome beauty of giant
waves breaking green in a storm.
We left this slip filled with doubts and fears. We return knowing we
have been blessed to have the opportunity to make this voyage.
Now we are decommissioning Hawk for what will likely be six months or a
year on the hard. Yesterday we took the mainsail and jib off, flaked
them, and stowed them in the sail locker. We removed all the halyards,
leaving messenger lines in their place. We took all the running rigging
and removable hardware off the decks. We started emptying lockers and
filling the trunk of the rental car. We have lived on this boat three
times longer than we have lived anywhere else since we met more than
twenty years ago. Beth has lived twice as long on this boat as she has
lived anywhere in her entire life. We leave with regret, but we leave
knowing that we will live aboard this boat again, that she is and
remains an integral part of our lives. In the meantime, Hawk can have a
well-deserved rest and some much needed TLC. If we cannot find “real”
jobs in the next year, we may well be back aboard and heading out the
Chesapeake again a year from now, bound for Greenland.
Don’t worry – we’re not signing off. We will continue to post to the
website on topics related to offshore sailing and to our transition back
ashore. When we finished our voyage aboard Silk we thought we were done
with sailing. It took us only a few months to decide we had to leave
again. We’ll see how long we make it this time around.
18°20'N 64°55'W
Charlotte Amalie
St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands
May 21, 2009
We are getting ready to head North. It would normally take us 10 days to
sail from St. Thomas to the Chesapeake Bay, but the weather pattern
right now is unsettled, with lows spinning off Florida right across our
path, so we will probably take it slower and more carefully than normal.
A CLOSE CALL – A CAUTIONARY TALE
In the past few weeks, we have had a very close call. Not, as you might
immediately assume, with the boat. This is Beth’s story, so she’s going
to tell it.
Three weeks ago, my sister, Leigh, and brother-in-law, Steve, joined us
for a week of cruising around the US Virgin Islands. Leigh and Steve are
sailors too, though they normally sail a somewhat smaller boat. In fact,
they are the 2008 national champions in the Inland 20 scow, a 20-foot,
keel-less, planing dinghy that they sail on the inland lakes of the
Midwest. We love having such accomplished sailors on the boat. Not only
do they get us out sailing, but they help us sail the boat better than
we normally would. And they do all the work! Our week included a movie
on the beach under the stars, an upwind sail in 30 knots of wind, hours
spent chatting and catching up, and, for Leigh and Steve, lots of
snorkeling and lots of relaxation.
While my sister was visiting, I asked her advice on something that had
been bothering me. When we reached St. Helena in December and
started wearing shorts for the first time in more than a year, a small
mole on the outside of my left calf started changing. The mole was about
half the diameter of a pencil eraser and the color of a dark tan with a
slight thickness and texture to it. I had first noticed it the year
before when cruising Mexico, Costa Rica and the Gambiers, and it looked
no different than a dozen other small, brown moles on different parts of
my body. While we were in St. Helena a small area of skin on one side of
the mole took on a strawberry color, as if the mole were leaking red.
The area was no more than a thin border along one edge of the mole and
the skin felt the same with no thickness or texture. It seemed benign,
but it bothered me. I didn’t like looking at it, didn’t like how the
color seemed to flare when I sat out in the sun. The mole gave me the
willies, which seemed downright silly.
Between St. Helena and Antigua, the colored area of skin advanced out
from one side of the mole until it was almost the same diameter as the
mole. When we got to Antigua, I looked up how to diagnose melanoma on
the Internet and discovered the ABCDE of melanoma identification.
Melanoma moles tend to be asymmetrical, with irregular borders (blurred
or scalloped). They are usually more than one color with a diameter
greater than a pencil eraser and evolve over time. For more details and
pictures of melanomas, go to
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/melanoma/DS00439/DSECTION=symptoms.
My mole was not asymmetrical, though by the time we reached Antigua it
was oval in shape instead of round as it had been the previous year. It
had a clear border between it and the surrounding skin. The only slight
scalloping in the border occurred where the brown mole joined the redder
lesion. It definitely did consist of two slightly different colors,
though once we got to Antigua and were not in the sun as much as we had
been on passage the strawberry-red color faded a bit to a reddish-brown
that more closely matched the old mole. The total diameter was still a
bit less than that of a pencil eraser. It had been evolving, though that
too seemed to have come to a halt when we got to Antigua. With only two
of the five indicators definitely positive, I concluded it was not a
melanoma and told myself to stop being a hypochondriac. But I continued
to find the mole distasteful and didn’t like to look at it.
Melanoma is one of the deadliest of all cancers. So long as the tumor is
removed before it has advanced beyond the surface layers of the skin
(generally, a mole thickness of 0.2mm or less), long-term survival rates
remain near normal. But once it has penetrated through all of the skin
layers, and especially if the surface of the lesion is ulcerated (has
broken through the top layer of the skin), 10-year survival rates drop
to less 60% or so (http://www.cancer.org/docroot/CRI/content/CRI_2_4_3X_How_is_melanoma_staged_50.asp).
If any of the cancerous cells have reached a lymph node at the time of
diagnosis, very few treatment options exist and five-year survival rates
drop to around 50%. What starts as an easily removed surface lesion can,
in a very short period of time, penetrate surrounding tissues and go on
to invade the lymph nodes – sometimes in a matter of months.
I showed the mole to my sister because I knew she wouldn’t laugh at me
but would give me her honest opinion. Not only did she not laugh, she
took my concern very seriously. She urged me to visit a dermatologist
right away and reminded me that we have a family history of melanoma,
which is one of the main risk factors. I contacted friends who live on
St. John and asked for the name of a good dermatologist. I had lots of
things going on, but I dutifully put seeing a dermatologist on my list.
The day Leigh and Steve left, I heard back from my friends who told me
that there was only one dermatologist on the island and that most people
went to Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, to a clinic that
specializes in skin diseases. When I got that news, I crossed seeing a
dermatologist off my list. It didn’t have most of the characteristics of
melanoma, so it seemed like it would make no difference to wait six
weeks or two months until we were back in the States.
My sister and I have written one another once a week for the past
fourteen years. In my sister’s weekly letter, which I received on the
Sunday after she and her husband flew home, she said, “Please don’t wait
to get that mole checked by a dermatologist… I know you already know
what a difference it makes to catch any possible melanoma at the very
early stages. Treatment gets so much more complicated and is less
effective once it gets into even one or two lymph nodes.” I groaned when
I read that, but I couldn’t ignore what she had said. I looked up the
phone number for the only dermatologist in Charlotte Amalie and put
calling him at the top of my list for the week.
Unlike in the US, there was no hassle about getting an appointment – I
didn’t need a reference from my regular doctor or insurance documents
and there was no six week wait. I went to see Dr. Robinson on Thursday.
He examined the mole and thought it was highly unlikely to be melanoma.
But when I explained my family history of melanoma, he decided to remove
it just to be sure. It took fifteen minutes and cost me $300, and when I
walked out of the doctor’s office, I felt like I was walking on air. I
hadn’t realized how much that little piece of skin had been worrying me
and weighing me down. I was so glad to have that darned thing of my leg,
I was practically dancing.
I thought that would be the end of it, but Dr. Robinson called me the
following Tuesday. “I’m really surprised to be calling you back,” he
said. “But it was melanoma.” I saw him again last Thursday, and he did a
wide excision around the original site of the mole, removing several
centimeters of skin and underlying tissue in each direction from the
mole to ensure that the cancer had not spread. Eight sutures and $500
later, I left his office for the second time, hoping that this biopsy
would be negative. Yesterday, Dr. Robinson called me back with good
news: no sign of melanoma in the second biopsy. If I had waited until I
got back to the States, it could easily have been several months before
I got situated, had an appointment with my regular doctor, got a
referral to a dermatologist and got an appointment. Those months would
have been critical and might well have been enough time for some
cancerous cells to make their way to my lymph nodes.
Living on a boat, Evans and I get far more sun than is good for us. Like
many cruisers, we never seek out the sun. We wear hats and sunscreen
most of the time, and stay below during the hottest/sunniest part of the
day. I hope that my experience will convince anyone reading this who has
been worried about a mole to act as soon as possible. Here’s what I’ve
learned:
Take extra care if you have a family history of melanoma. One of the
single biggest risk factors for melanoma is having a blood relative who
has already had the disease.
If I had not had a close relative with a melanoma, the doctor probably
would not have removed my mole. Now that many people over 50 or so are
getting small moles removed, most of which prove to be benign, it’s
important to check with near relatives to see if any of their lesions
were melanoma.
Trust your instincts. I knew something was wrong with that particular
mole, as have several other people we have met who have had moles
removed that proved to be melanoma. I will be far more decisive if I
have a similar feeling about another mole in the future.
Use sunscreen on your whole body. I always put sunscreen on my face,
even after I’ve tanned. I usually put it on my arms, though I get less
diligent as I get more tanned. I only put it on my legs at the very
beginning of the season. If most women are like me, it might explain why
the most common site for melanoma on women is the lower leg (http://www.med.umich.edu/1libr/wha/wha_melanoma_crs.htm).
The most common site for men is on their backs and torsos – so use that
sunscreen, guys, when you take off your shirt! Not only is it important
to put sunscreen on in the first place, but it is necessary to reapply
sunscreen every two hours that you remain in the sun.
For more information, check out the following sites:
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/melanoma/DS00439
http://www.cancer.org/docroot/CRI/CRI_2x.asp?sitearea=LRN&dt=39
http://cancer.about.com/od/melanoma/Melanoma.htm
18°18'N 64°57’W
Honeymoon Cove, Water Island
St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands
April 6, 2009
IF YOU REALLY HAVE TO WORK…
It used to be that people didn’t go cruising because they’d have to
learn celestial navigation and to sail without an engine. When we
started cruising in the early 1990s, engines had become reliable and GPS
has just become widely available. Then people didn’t go cruising because
they’d have to leave behind their comforts and conveniences:
refrigeration, fresh water, showers and washing machines. Now that many
boats have all of these and more, we think the next big barrier to going
cruising will be unplugging from the Internet. One of the boats in this
anchorage is named Offline… even though they probably aren’t.
Being connected is the main reason why we’re hanging out in the US
Virgins instead of our favorite anchorages in the British Virgin
Islands. After being relegated to the Internet’s back roads and country
lanes for the past two years, we both had a long list of critical
activities that could only be conducted over the information
superhighway: researching information for Beth’s new book, reorganizing
our battered investment portfolios and launching job hunts among other
things. We’ve already discovered that wi-fi, even paid wi-fi, is not
good enough when a hundred boats are all trying to download movies and
podcasts in the same anchorage. And trotting into the cybercafé with our
laptops gets expensive after the third $6 latte of the day. No, we
needed to mainline, and we wanted to be able to do it in a lovely
anchorage instead of the dirty, crowded harbor at Charlotte Amalie. So
we purchased an AT&T Aircard – a sort of data cell phone that plugs into
a USB port on our computer and dials us right into broadband internet if
we’re within AT&T’s 3G coverage area. That means the US Virgins, and,
more specifically, St. Thomas. This is the natural culmination of a
phenomenon we first saw in Mexico three years ago: picking cruising
locations by the availability of internet connections and selecting the
best anchoring spot in that anchorage based on signal strength.
We are now anchored in a delightful little cove just south of Charlotte
Amalie with beautiful water for swimming and a perfect white sand beach
ashore within dinghy distance of grocery stores, laundromats, ATMs and
garbage dumpsters. Here we have found a group of cruisers working just
as hard as we are. Many have had their cruising plans temporarily set
back by the downturn in the economy, and they are waiting tables,
bartending, doing boat deliveries, studying for their captain’s licenses
and finding a dozen other ways to earn money without returning ashore.
And, if you have to work for a living, things could be a lot worse.
We get out of bed by 6 and go out on deck before getting to work to
admire the various shades of teal, green, blue and azure in the waters
around us and to check our anchor by looking at it lying on the bottom
in the perfectly clear water. We eat breakfast, stroll three feet to our
desks and arrive at work. We work in t-shirts and shorts with the
hatches open and a fresh breeze blowing in. We eat granola and yogurt
for breakfast, work until noon, and break for a salad. Then we go back
to work until 2 or 3 in the afternoon before shutting down for an
hour-long swim in the beautiful tropical water. Back aboard, we turn on
our Sirius radio and listen to NPR and BBC while we do a few boat
chores. We prepare dinner and eat out in the cockpit watching for the
green flash as the sun slips beneath the horizon. After cleaning up the
galley, we both do one more mainline injection of Internet and then
relax with a book before falling asleep with a light sheet over us and
cool, fresh air coming in through the open hatch. And tonight we’re
going ashore to eat hot dogs and popcorn and watch Slum Dog Millionaire
on a screen stretched between two palm trees on the beach under the
stars.
No commute, no pollution, no cubicle, no suit, no boss, no cranky office
mates, no set schedule. No car payment, no mortgage, no monthly
bills… but also no health insurance, no retirement plan, no vacation
days. Well, you can’t have everything.
18°20'N 64°55’W
Charlotte Amalie
St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands
March 21, 2009
BACK IN THE US OF A… SORT OF!
We wrenched ourselves away from Antigua on Wednesday morning bound for St. Barths, but we quickly decided to change course and make for the US Virgin Islands directly. That decision was based largely on the need to buy Evans a new computer – his has been in its death throes for the past two months. Since we needed to go shopping, it only made sense to head for the closest bit of America. As any cruiser will tell you, America is shopping paradise, and many of our foreign friends take quite convoluted routes when flying from the boat to their home countries to spend a few days in some American city hitting the malls and shopping on the Internet. “All you need is a credit card and a US address,” they say. And it’s true!
Our change of course made for a very pleasant overnight passage with 15-18 knots of wind shifting between the beam and the stern quarter every couple of hours, almost no swell and not a single squall. Before the moon rose, the stars stood looked like layer upon layer of sparkling gems scattered across the sky. The phosphorescence was as gentle as the night, winking fireflies playing on the dark water on the leeward side of the boat. We saw a procession of cruise ships making their way from the Virgins to St. Martin like jets lined up on a flight path, but we were far enough south that they remained surreal glowing castles streaming across the northern horizon. It was a perfect night sail, one that made us think of how few overnights we have left before returning to the Chesapeake and some time ashore.
And once in the good old US of A… we shopped. Office Max and Radio Shack served up a computer and a phone with all the trimmings. All we needed to do was flash our plastic. Then we retreated to the boat before our plastic jumped out of our wallet and flashed itself! We spent this morning at the local cybercafé, Badass Coffee, on the fastest Internet connection we’ve seen in more than three years. No sitting and waiting for two minutes while the website loads, and streaming video actually streams instead of stuttering to a halt every ten seconds. But we’ve also been shocked by the traffic, and it feels as if even here, in the Caribbean US, everyone is hyped on caffeine and just a bit touchy. We’re a long way from being acclimated, even though we know that the Virgins are moving at walking pace compared to what we’ll find when we get back to the States.
We’ve rarely felt culture shock when making landfall at an exotic destination. After all, we expect that most things will be different, and we’re always surprised at how much is the same. The basics don’t change that much – in the places we have visited most people live in houses with four walls and a roof, most get water through a tap and most have indoor plumbing. Food gets bought in a supermarket, mail gets sent from a post office, people drive cars, people without cars take buses and international travelers come through airports.
But whenever we have returned to our own country, the culture shock has been all but overwhelming. We expect things will not have changed in our absence, but they have and at lightning speed. And we have been changed by our experiences, so that we don’t quite fit anymore, a square peg trying to slide smoothly back into a round hole. Yet we also have the luxury of being observers of our own culture, of seeing things we would never have noticed before and won’t notice again in another few months. For the moment, American energy and can-do enthusiasm seems a bit overwhelming. But we’re really enjoying American convenience, the “have it your way” attitude combined with “of course it’s in stock!” No other country in the world does that better.
17°02'N 61°46’W
English Harbour
Antigua, Leeward Islands
March 16, 2009
We have not yet managed to pull free of the Antigua vortex. We
have been here since we arrived from St. Helena in the South Atlantic in
mid-January. We had intended to cruise down island for several
weeks, but unrest in Gaudeloupe and Martinique put us off. Even if
the islands had been peaceful, though, we probably wouldn’t have gotten
away. Our friends, Clive and Laila, whose 72-foot yacht, Billy Budd, we
took care of while we were in the Beagle Channel during the (southern
hemisphere) winter, arrived here a bit over a week ago. Clive and Laila
came from two different directions. Clive came by plane from Spain
after surveying a 112-foot yacht for the owner of Billy Budd, having
flown there from the Falklands after their trip to South Georgia.
Laila brought Billy Budd north with a crew of three, so we had to be
here when Laila arrived after a month and 5,800 miles on her first
offshore passage as skipper. After Laila berthed Billy Budd
stern-to in Nelson’s Dockyard at 3:00 in the morning, we sat on deck and
drank champagne on a dead calm night under thousands of stars. We
had not expected this reunion. When Laila started out on her
passage, she was heading for the British Virgin Islands.
Our sailing lives have been full of transitions, of sometimes painful
partings and unexpected reunions, like the one we enjoyed a little over
a week ago with Laila. Sometimes the hardest thing about this life
is the uncertainty when we finish one leg of a voyage and try to decide
what’s next. Even more difficult is the transition back to shore,
as we discovered when we sold Silk in 1995 after our three-year
circumnavigation. In less than four months, we had both concluded
that land life no longer suited, and we began the process of building
Hawk so we could go to sea again. This time, we’ve lived aboard
our boat for more than a decade, longer than either of us has lived
anywhere since before graduating from high school. As we’ve been
getting closer and closer to the United States, the questions have
loomed larger and larger: Where will we live? Can we keep the
boat? Where will we keep her? What do we want to do?
Will we be able to find jobs we really want to do in the current
economic climate?
It’s not that we’re worried about finding a way to earn a living, it’s
that at the transition point from sea to shore everything changes – from
what we do day-to-day to where we live and who we interact with.
That’s a bit overwhelming and somewhat intimidating. As adults,
most people take pretty much for granted that they’ll be doing next year
what they’re doing now. But every few years, we are forced to
examine what we’re doing and to make wholesale decisions about our lives
that often take us in a completely different direction.
Last time, we returned ashore and Evans spent six months looking for a
job. This time, the job came looking for him. He was in
Spain with our friend, Clive, surveying the 112-foot Royal Huiseman
yacht, and he has been asked to be involved in the refit of the boat.
Laila changed her Caribbean landfall to Antigua so Billy Budd, the
Oyster 72, will be here for the Oyster regatta, when they hope to find a
buyer for the boat. Evans will be working pretty much full time on
this project for anywhere from four months to a year. And we’ll be
working with Clive and Laila instead of saying goodbye again for an
unknown period of time.
So our plans have become just a bit clearer – more like tomato soup than
mud. We had planned to clear out of Antigua last Thursday when our
visas and cruising permit expired, but we got permission to stay a few
more days, in part because of the local election on Thursday and the
national holiday the day after. That turned out to be a very good
thing, as it gave us more time to coordinate with Clive and Laila over
the refit. We will be leaving tomorrow for the Virgins, where we
will cruise for six weeks. My sister and brother-in-law will join
us there at the end of April, and then we’ll be heading north for the
Chesapeake in early May, returning to the boatyard on Magothy Creek just
north of Annapolis where we fit Hawk out and from where we left ten
years ago.
January 8, 2009
12°42.0'S 49°7.0'W
On Passage, North Atlantic Ocean part ii
We now have 775 miles left to Antigua and have made good 1150 miles in 6 days. That's just shy of the mythical 200 mile/day average and we could have easily added 50 miles here and there, but as usual we fine it more comfortable and relaxing to back off just a little.
The weather has been sort of strange. We have definitely had strong NE trade winds but not the cumulus clouds we usually associate with the trades. Instead we have had a pretty constant stormy looking cloud cover. I am not sure what is causing that. As usual the gribs have not been very accurate within 15 degrees of the equator. The model primarily uses pressure gradients and wave heights to calculate winds and within 15 degrees of the equator there are only very small pressure gradients here and the wave heights are as good an indicator of wind strengths as elsewhere. Fortunately the weather is not that complex, at least out of hurricane season.
January 3, 2009
4°22.0'S 32°12.0'W
On Passage, North Atlantic Ocean
Happy New Year!
We made our 6th crossing of the equator yesterday at 29 21W and entered
the doldrums at 2 20N 30 23 W. This was a bit further east than we
had originally planned, but as we were approaching I saw that in this
area the weather forecast (Grib rain layer) had the doldrums pulling
north as we approached and then moving back south, so that we would have
a to deal with them for only a very short time. That seemed to
work out as we exited the doldrums and picked up the start of the NE
trade winds after only 34.3 miles. We now have about 2000 miles to go to
Antigua and should have pretty fast sailing but it may be a little rough
if the ‘Christmas winds’ (winter reinforced trade winds) pick up.
Each of our 6 doldrums crossings has been different. Sometimes they have
been quite wide and sometime narrow, sometimes they have been clearly
defined (as this time with solid walls of rain on entering and exiting)
and sometimes with no clear edges, sometimes there has been a lot of
rain and lightening inside the doldrums and other times there has been
clear sunny sky’s (Pretty much the case this time – most of the rain and
no lightening was at the edges).