43°12'N 5°37'E
Ceyreste, Provence, France
January 1, 2010
Joyeaux Noël et Bonne année !
We are late in getting our Christmas greetings out because we’ve been
having a very eventful holiday season after a year full of changes and
new directions. Now we stand on the threshold of a new year and can
hardly begin to guess what it will bring.
A year ago, Hawk and her crew had just crossed the equator enroute
from St. Helena Island in the South Atlantic to the Caribbean on the
second to last passage of her ten-year circumnavigation. We completed
our voyage on June 2nd when we tied up at Cypress Marine in the Magothy
River just north of Annapolis in the same slip we left ten years and
75,000nm earlier. By then our lives had already moved on to the next
chapter, as Evans had gotten a job (yes, that terrible three-letter
word!) managing the refit of a 112-foot superyacht. He flew out to
France ten days later, while Beth moved most of our worldly belongings
from Hawk to a storage shed in Syracuse, NY near her parents’ house.
Beth joined Evans in La Ciotat, about 20 minutes east of Marseille, in early July, and we had a wonderful summer in Provence, biking, eating the delicious Provençal food, and being productive each in our own way. Evans went to work every day at the boatyard managing the refit while Beth went to work every day at her computer writing a new book. The boatyard, pictured below, was a whole new experience for us, where 90 to 100-foot boats, like the one in the water to the right are considered “little” and the 220-foot long gray trawler on the hard behind it is merely a “tender” – in this case to Arab Sheik’s 350-plus-foot power boat. Evans has had to learn a whole new set of technical skills, skills we hope never to need on our own boat with our “kiss” sailing philosophy.
When Beth left in mid-September to return to the States for a
series of speaking engagements, neither the book nor the boat were
complete. Evans stayed on in France while Beth toured around the east
coast, speaking at the Annapolis boat show, the Seven Seas Cruising
Association gams in the Chesapeake and Florida, Mystic Seaport and a
variety of other venues. For the first time she began speaking at
schools, sharing Hawk’s voyages and wildlife experiences with
pre-schoolers through teenagers. Over the course of three months, more
than 2,500 people learned something of Hawk’s adventures through her
talks. In Melbourne, on Beth’s birthday, she was honored to accept the
Seven Seas Award on behalf of both of us.
In early December, Beth returned to France. We had been apart for nearly three months, our longest separation since we left on our first circumnavigation aboard Silk in the spring of 1992. Beth’s parents, Joyce and Harsey, arrived a week after she did, and the four of us have had a wonderful time enjoying Christmas in France. We had six days in Paris before flying back to Marseille and celebrating Christmas in the little village of Ceyreste just north of La Ciotat where Evans and Beth have their apartment. A few holiday images give some idea of the wonderful time we’ve had together:
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While we were playing in France, Hawk got buried under 22 inches
of snow in the Chesapeake, as shown in a photo forwarded to us by Allen
Flinchum at Cypress Marine.
As for 2010? We have no idea where we might be a year from now. Evans
continues to work on the refit, and Beth is very much looking forward to
finishing the book she is working on and seeing if it can find an
audience in the big, wide world. We believe we have one more long voyage
in us, but we can’t say whether that will begin in a year or in ten.
This will be a year of transitions for us, and while it is somewhat
scary to have so little idea of what might be next, we’ve both learned
to accept that this kind of uncertainty comes with the voyaging life.
Whatever happens, we will face it together, and we can be sure it will
be exciting and challenging.
Wishing you a wonderful holiday season and a happy and healthy 2010,
Beth and Evans