Get Comfy, this will be a long one.
Why Did We Stop Cruising
Several factors influenced our decision to stop cruising. Firstly, this was always my dream, and never our dream. I held out hope for the first couple of years that the rest of the crew would see the light, but it just never happened.
This is probably more than Grete would want me to share, but she really didn’t like cruising. She tolerated it, rather begrudgingly at times, but she never actually liked it. Sometimes, when we were around people that really clicked with us, she would do better, but it was always a distant second to her social circle and life ashore in Pensacola. Her mental and physical state of being had ups and downs but mostly downs. She regressed as a person in a lot of ways. She gave up on exercising and as a result didn’t feel as good. She hated the non-stop sweating that comes with simply trying to exist in the tropics, and Baja Mexico in the summer on an un-air-conditioned sailboat. She never learned to drive the dinghy and thus was always dependent on me to bring her to shore for any purpose. This meant that she pretty much never just had time to herself to walk and think.
No exercise and no time alone are generally not a good path to optimal life satisfaction.
I don’t mean to lay it all on her. When I asked Dublin a few months ago what his favorite places have been while cruising. His answer was Dominican Republic, Grenada, St. Martin, Panamá, and La Paz. What do those places have in common? Those are the places where Grete’s mom (MG) came to visit.
Before we left Pensacola, MG used to come stay with us for 1-3 months twice a year and has always been a very big part of Dublin’s life. The bond that Dublin has with her is a beautiful thing and since we started cruising, he spends far less time with her. Maybe if we had a large catamaran that didn’t roll as much and had a spare room, she could have stayed with us and it would have been fine, but our budget certainly didn’t have room for that, and I think that it wouldn’t have been comfortable enough for her anyway. As I write this now a couple of months after moving back to shore, MG has already spent the last 6 weeks with us, after the kids spent 2.5 weeks with her at her house in Texas. That is already more time than they saw her for the 3 years we were out.
And then there is Fira. She is our little social butterfly. Although she has loved time spent on our million little adventures, she is always happiest around other people. She prefers kids, but has also found some meaningful relationships with adults, such as Sabine on Selador. I love that aspect of things, that she doesn’t only talk to other fifth graders all the time like she would in a ‘normal’ life ashore. But it would be great if she had better access to some fifth graders. She wants friends. Not acquaintances, but true friends. She hates goodbyes, and those are always just around the corner when cruising. She has made several friends while cruising, but friends in the cruising life are always ephemeral. When we have been with another boat and things are going great, there is a daily dread knowing that all of us cruisers are out there in part because they are attracted to freedom and have things they want to see and do and no one matches 100%, thus the honeymoon always ends.
We had a few long relationships in cruising: Our first season with Catnip, Machete, and Magistra; our second season with Low Expectations and Mamita; and our final season was mostly alone until late in the year when we linked up with Selador. I’m not downplaying the other boats were cruised with, there are just too many to name. These “buddy boats” are just the ones that we cruised with for extended periods, going from stop to stop together over several months.
So all that to say, I think Fira would really like to have a friend for more than a few weeks. I think she really wants a BFF that she can grow with and share every part of her life with, and that was not going to happen as nomads.
And lastly, me. Well, I would still be out there. But once it became clear that Grete was becoming less happy and that the kids would prefer to be on shore, the decision was clear.
Why Did We Start Cruising
Which brings me to one thing I wrestled with the last couple of months we were out there. I knew that money would run out and that we agreed on a maximum five years cruising. But that timeline was always very arbitrary. So why did we want to be out there to begin with. We have met people who have very specific sailing goals. Many want to sail around the world, some have specific far-away destinations such as French Polynesia in mind, some want to round a specific cape or horn, etc. We didn’t have any sailing goals. If anything, I think we went farther and covered more area than we ever set out to do.
We wanted to spend time with our kids. We got that…boy howdy! There is a sweet spot somewhere between ‘normal’ life and cruising. I’m incredibly thankful to have been on the far side of that sweet spot for a few years. Spending “too much” time with my family is not something I will ever regret.
That was pretty much it. It checked all the boxes for what we were really hoping for. We got the bonus of learning to be dependent on each other even when the shit was hitting the fan, and we had some truly great adventures together. We also made many great friends along the way, explored cultures and our own limits in ways we could not have anticipated before we left.
I’ll Miss It
Obviously, I will miss the complete freedom of sailing. We got to move around however we pleased and live in places for however long we wanted and generally do what we wanted. No pick-up line at school, no late nights at the office, nothing.
I’ll also miss the silly things, because I’m a silly guy. At some point early on, I started the ridiculous habit of shouting, “So long suckers!” whenever I drove away in the dinghy to go ashore alone. It made me laugh inside pretty much every time and I’m laughing a little outside as I write this.
I’ll miss saying “Sea Horse” when they ask for my name at a restaurant or wherever. In cruising places and circles, people are often referred to by their boat name. When we first got to Florida, we went out to eat they asked for a name and I said “Sea Horse”, I got a weird look. I guess I need to give that up and be “Steve” again.
The most obvious thing I’ll miss is the views. I spent the better part of every day in the cockpit of our boat enjoying the surroundings. Sometimes it was sea life, sometimes massive cliffs and mountains, sometimes birds, sometimes crazy fisherman, but always something. We had billionaire views at thousandaire prices for three glorious years.
By the Numbers
Over 10,000 miles sailed. 1,034 days from the day we moved onto the boat until the day we moved off. We stayed in marinas 9 times. We dropped the anchor at approximately 175 spots, staying at least one night at all but a few. It is hard to get a consistent list for the recognized countries in the world, but using one source, I get 17 countries: USA, Bahamas, Dominican Republic, Great Britain, Anguilla, France, The Netherlands, St Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada, Panamá, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Mexico.
Things That Blew My Mind
Bioluminescence.
I have seen it before. I recall a specific time in Hing Kong Harbor standing midwatch with an M-60 machine gun on top of the submarine and throwing orange peel into the water to set the organisms alight. But in cruising, it was right there, and it was so common. It is beautiful. On almost every overnight passage, I would spend hours watching the glowing trail we left behind as we sailing along. In port, if we were in the dinghy at night, the propeller wash would throw a massive glowing wake. We saw glowing streaks left behind by dolphins and fish, aqua-marine torpedoes streaking along next to our home.
Since the toilets on our boat flush using saltwater, flushing the toilet at night would often be a light show if you flushed with the lights off.
My favorite of all was swimming with a mask on at night. It’s scary because swimming in the dark increases the number of sharks and box jellyfish within 100 feet to somewhere around 300 million in my imagination, but the glowing is everywhere. Each swimming stroke activates thousands of tiny glowing specks and every movement is like zooming through the galaxy at warp speed in a Sci-Fi movie. If you haven’t experienced it, you should put it on your bucket list, very near the top.
The loony thing about cruising is that it wasn’t hard to do. I literally just had to put a mask on and step off my back porch into the magic.
Scary Stuff
I’ve had some scary moments in my life. I am fairly certain that the worst so far in my 47 years was our night passage across the Gulf of Tehuantepec. Wind and waves are scary on a sailboat at first, but they follow a rhythm and are mostly predictable and controllable. Lightning is not that way. It is freakishly random and comes from storms that are localized and move far faster than a cruising boat. So when there is lightning, you just kind of cross your fingers and hope for the best. Driving in the water as the tallest object (63 foot tall metal mast) around for over a hundred miles while lightning is striking nearby is freaky. If lightning does choose your boat as the best path, it can blow a large hole through it, sinking it within minutes, it can catch it on fire causing you to abandon ship, or if you are lucky, it will simply destroy thousands of dollars of equipment.
In Tehuantepec, we hit a storm that lasted over 7 hours and lightning was striking less than a mile away for most of that time. High-pitched sharp cracking and blinding flashes every 2-3 seconds in the cold, driving rain. I was scared shitless for seven hours with nothing but hope as a strategy. Thankfully, nothing happened to us (it’s a probability game that luckily is well in our favor), but in the moment it was not clear how it would go.
Although not technically a “scary” thing, when I got an allen key stuck in our flywheel in Costa Rica, I felt a deep concern for whether we were going to be able to find a path forward. The hopelessness I felt in the moment and for close to a week afterward destroyed my sleep and mental well-being until I was able to get someone to help me resolve the issue. It was the most concerned I was in our entire trip for how exactly we would be able to continue.
Things Even I Was Tired Of
The daily worry about power and fresh water. We had to make our own freshwater, using electricity that we also needed for every other thing on the boat. Trying to balance all of that out with how much solar power we were getting, and how much fuel for the generator we had on hand, etc. was a constant low-grade stressor.
Cruising was riddled with constant low-grade stressors. If the wind was picking up, we needed to worry about how well we were anchored with regard to hazards, as well as how well everyone else was anchored. As we learned, others didn’t often anchor well. Concern for no-see-ums, mosquitoes, flies, and bees was something we had to contend with daily. We lived, essentially, outdoors. Although we did have screens for the hatches, they weren’t always 100% effective, and even when they were, we were sometimes limited in our activities. So every time we moved to a new spot, we had to wonder what flying pests might be waiting to ruin our stay.
Getting rid of trash was a problem in many locations we visited. Some places don’t seem to have a way to deal with trash, some places charge a lot (we saw up to $10 a bag) to get rid of trash, and sometimes the trash was not convenient (we once had to walk about 3 miles to get to the trash disposal area).
We were dirty. By cruising standards you could fabricate microchips on us, but by land standards, we were dirty. We all took freshwater showers daily, but with no AC, you spend all night and day sweating. Then, ashore there were often only dirt roads, if any, and if the place was windy, dirt or sand could blow all the way out to the boat along with soot, bird crap and other nastiness. I often spent time in the evening just rolling dirt out of my pores and was typically so thoroughly sweaty that it stopped feeling like wet sweat but actually just felt slimy. I didn’t like it - I’d make a terrible hippy.
I love dogs. We missed having a dog of our own (we have resolved that issue since moving back to land, with our sweet new addition, BP). But, I am not a big fan of off-leash dogs. All of the Latin-American places we visited had tons of off-leash dogs. Often they were just a nuisance, but sometimes they were a bit concerning and even a bit scary. I love that every walk or run back home does not carry a bunch of uncertainty about what pack of dogs I might run into.
The French. Enough said.
Plumbing issues. We had some leaks in our freshwater system that were wake-up calls to the idea that losing freshwater access can take a perfect day and make it virtually unlivable. Those were rare and not such an issue. Our toilet storage tanks were gravity drained. Gravity wasn’t always enough. I will never miss the fact that plunging the toilets on the boat involved my needing to be on the other side. I had to plunge the waste to me, not away. I had to be underwater, sometimes getting stung by jellyfish while hoping that I could get a huge cloud of human waste to burst forth at me. I had to do that more times than my optimistic memory will ever recall.
Things I Could Never Tire Of
Not working. Man oh man I will never understand the people who say, “I wouldn’t know what to do if I retired”.
The views and fresh air that were our daily life. I think about the beauty and clean living that I have always loved about going camping and that was our life every day for three years. We very rarely got sick, had great tans, and were really in touch with the weather and nature in general.
Although 24 hours a day with your entire family crammed in a hot, sometimes rolling, boat is a bit on the high side and made for additional tension, I never felt like less time together would be a good thing. Our kids are wonderful little innocent kids, not because we’ve sheltered them, but simply because we’ve been with them. They learned their bad words from us, not some kid on the bus. I like that.
Sea life is so abundant and amazing. Although we only saw a few whales in three years, we saw countless sea turtles and dolphins, millions of birds, fish, etc. We got to see sealions, coatis, sloths, monkeys, toucans, parrots, crocodiles, sharks, capybaras, manatees, poison dart frogs, agoutis, and on and on.
Favorites
People often ask us what our favorite XXX was. Here are some of my favorites.
Favorite beach: Playa Frontón, Dominican Republic. A close second is Red Frog/Wizard Beach in Bocas del Toro, Panamá.
Favorite city: Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. What an amazing place. We visited several times during our two separate trips to the island. Mazatlán is a pretty solid second. We loved the music and food, and the malecón was the best of any we visited.
Favorite hike: Boiling Lake, Dominica. This hike had amazing views and other-worldly scenery. It was somewhat dangerous and absolutely grueling though. For another really neat hike that wasn’t grueling at all, the trail along the southern shore of Antigua was pretty special. The views of the water were great and it ended at an old UNESCO Heritage site for the old port that was neat to explore.
Favorite snorkeling: The pier in Fredericksted, St. Croix was the only place we snorkeled that I though was really great. We saw a few patches of neat stuff elsewhere, and novelty things like the bubbles at Champagne Reef in Dominica, but St. Croix was the best by a long shot.
Favorite restaurant: Miss Willy’s in Crooked Island, Bahamas. It’s strange that our favorite restaurant was in the Bahamas since it is the worst food locale as a whole, but Miss Willy works very hard and is an amazing cook. She accommodated our dietary limitations and we ate like royalty for our meals there.
Favorite place to run: The Malecón in Mazatlán. It was far longer than I would ever need, had no stray dogs, lots of pretty sculptures and cool views over cliffs and beaches. Mid day runs ensured that I had the place to myself since it is too hot for sane people.
Favorite museum: The slavery museum in Point-a-Pitre, Guadeloupe was absolutely world class. It evoked incredibly strong emotions, was educational, and unique in many ways, such as the shared experience timing of the flow through the museum.
Favorite anchorage: This one it too tough for me to pick one. Of the 175 or so places, only a few were not good. My top three, not necessarily in order are:
- Starfish Beach, Bocas del Toro, Panamá. Such a cool vibe on shore, with a beautiful walking trail, sloths, and palapas. At dusk and dawn the howler monkeys grunt away. The anchorage was dead calm and comfortable with clean water that we always wanted to swim in and never got stung in. We hung there with friends and alone and it was always great. Hundreds of starfish lined the beaches which were great to explore by SUP board in the calm water.
- Deshaies, Guadeloupe. There was a really cool hike right from the town, a unique botanical garden, and a french café and bakery right across from the dinghy dock.
- Isla Coronado, Loreto, Baja California Sur, Mexico. This place was close to town for provisioning, had beautiful turquoise water and white sand beaches all at the base of a massive volcano. The water and snorkeling were some of the most pristine places we had seen in a long time and we fell in love before we even dropped the anchor.
What Now?
First off, the tenants in our house are a military family that is stationed in Pensacola until summer 2027. Luckily we found a 3-bedroom apartment in the same neighborhood so we are staying there and allowing them to stay in our house until they transfer in 2027.
The kids have been doing very well boat-schooling. The plan is for them to both finish out the school year homeschooling with Grete. Dublin has been very clear that he plans to keep homeschooling for one more school year. Fira is a little bit scared, she is scared of everything, but I think she will overcome her fear because she really wants to hang out with friends and just generally enjoy the “fun” side of school.
Grete is falling right back in. Her friends in Pensacola remained in contact the entire time we were gone and we have already hung out several times with them all. She has started back up exercising and running and plans to start coaching 5k training again in late spring.
I didn’t want to stop cruising. I want to keep traveling and seeing new things and places. So, I am pursuing a career change to commercial aviation. I’m about 25-30 years late to the training pipeline, but I am medically qualified and we still have a little bit of savings at hand since we stopped early. The schooling is about 12-14 months long and then another two years or so building flight hours as (most likely) a flight instructor for the next folks behind me in the training pipeline. I started about 6-8 weeks ago. So far I’ve managed to get about 20 hours of flying time and have passed the first of many written exams.
Sea Horse is currently hauled out at Cabrales boatyard in Puerto Peñasco and is currently listed for sale. Hopefully the next family interested in our make/model can get her back out on the water in her natural environment cruising the seas.
And that is it. We are settling back in to our new normal, with about a million beautiful photos and memories of our time on the Hoss. We are still spending a lot of time together and will forever have this sabbatical as something to reflect on with fondness.
P.S. I tried to put together some photo highlights to put in this post but after much curating, I got it down to just over 400. So, I did a few more passes and got each year down to nine pictures (the max that Google allows in a collage). Here they are.
