GOODBYE, GIRL!

Annapolis, MD

Cara Mia peeking out from behind a little blue boat.

The winter sun cut across the water, casting our sweet girl, Cara Mia, in warm, gold light. She was looking spectacular.

We put the last of our belongings on a dock cart and took a moment to tell her goodbye. She will be left in the hands of our broker as we take a four-month driving tour of the U.S. Will she still be ours when we return? Nobody knows.

Just in case, we told her goodbye.

A bittersweet moment for us, leaving her behind as we plan for our next big adventure -- the one we haven't announced yet. In the meantime, we are setting off on a cruise across the U.S. by car, departure as soon as we have a weather window.

That yellow line is our path.

Seriously. Do you think Chris Parker does land routing?

So buckle up, folks, and get ready for plodding in land paradise. There are surprises ahead.

Goodbye, East Coast. Take care of our beautiful girl.

BETTER THAN HOPE

Hope Town, Abacos, Bahamas 26º32.228N | 76º57.53W

Palms in Hopetown.

Before selling the wine shop we spirited away a bottle of Salon Champagne and tucked it into Cara Mia's bilge, a gift to ourselves to be opened in a place we dared to hope.

Three years and five months ago, Chip and I flew to Hopetown to fan the dream of a cruising life. At the time we were still deeply entrenched in land life, neither the house nor the wine shop were even on the market yet, and cruising for us was still years away but hope was not.

Every morning like a couple of pretenders, we tuned the VHF in our cottage to channel 68 to listen to the Abacos cruisers' net. From dry land, we spent hours watching the boats bobbing in the protective embrace of lovely Hopetown Harbor, hoping for the day we would arrive on our own boat.

But those wistful hopes were just a quick pencil sketch on a cocktail napkin compared to the stunning 3D color we rode in on today.

The sunrise over Lynyard Cay was a fitting preamble to a perfect day.

We raced beautiful Jessie Marie toward Hopetown on a come-and-go breeze under brilliant Bahamian skies. A group of dolphins cavorted around our bow, the water so clear I could watch them roll on their backs and dive under our bow.

Jessie Marie, cover girl.

And then we turned toward the Hopetown lighthouse. The water leading into the harbor is painfully shallow, and I inched in with white knuckles but not without feeling the full weight of emotion as we rounded the last turn of the channel and into that mooring field I had so often dreamed of.

Entrance to Hopetown Harbor.

It was smooth sailing that brought us here this morning, but our long plod across years to get here was not. It was strewn with the painstaking work of building and selling a business, building and selling a house, dispensing with a lifetime of belongings, searching for our perfect cruising boat then fitting her out for a new life.

Today, we celebrate the well-tended hope that breathed life into our 10-year plan, the gravity-defying hope that kept us focused while slogging step by step toward a vision that few around us shared or understood.

Cheers and a few tears.

2011 + 51

Coconut Grove, Miami, FL 25º43.532N | 80º14.193W

Chip's Awesome Carrot Cake.

These days my first thought in the morning is, "wonder where I am?" Many times I have clicked on weather.com, put my cursor in the box for "city," and drawn an absolute blank.

Good lord, on this day before I turn 51, these memory lapses should cause alarm that my aging brain has lost its way, that dementia is surely setting in.

Au contraire. Temporarily losing my place on the planet is just a delicious consequence of my constantly changing new existence. I wake to find the same cozy v-berth but rarely remember where I have parked it. These are the kind of surprises caused by adventure, not dementia.

Special delivery.

This new life has come with its share of uncomfortable adjustments and a new list of chores that is exasperating, but the payoff? Well, for eight days now I have lived in the elite neighborhood of Coconut Grove in Miami for $20/day, enjoying the good life with good friends.

Next week, if all goes as planned, I will move my house to Bimini and dip my feet in shiny, turquoise waters, then set off into the Bahamas where I can anchor for free and ponder the five-legged life of a starfish for three days if I choose.

And who to go with me but the man who makes getting old(ish) fun. Tonight he took me for dinner in a tiny French restaurant where we lingered over duck, a rich Bordeaux and toasted the New Year with kisses and shouts of bonne année! He not only understood when I shed sad tears, but shed a few himself.

Looking 2011 in the teary eye.

Sweet, sweet happiness at turning 51.

Deep, deep sorrow that I enter an age and a year that my old friend Dale will never see.

How is it that extreme happiness and deep sadness can stand right up next to each other, neither diminishing the other? I am neither half sad nor half happy but fully both. Life's mysteries.

Happy New Year. I hope yours holds bright promise and sense of adventure. 2011, here we come!

Coconut Grove, Miami, FL 25º43.532N | 80º14.193W

THE MISSING LINK

Dale Clifton Thommarson

October 31, 1961 - December 23, 2010

This morning going about my boat business, I mused about how very happy I am, happier than I can ever remember. How this new cruising life suits me, how on this eve of Christmas I feel so joyful spending it in our new life on our new boat with our new friends.

And then my phone rang. My sister asked where I was and was Chip with me.

And then life put up this road block. A cement barrier that I ran up smack against. My forever friend Dale was gone.

Words have always been my life raft. If I throw them out in just the right combination, they become buoyant and deliver me safely to the other side. But all these thousands of words that have been my life and livelihood, I filter through them, string them together, restring them, trying to arrange them into something to carry me through grief. Instead my words sink to the bottom.

Those who regularly read my blog know that I rarely write in real time but after the fact, although usually only a few days later. Now, almost a month later, I put words together but dread the moment I hit "publish" because that becomes the final word.

And that happiness? It is still there. I know that Dale would not approve of sadness, in fact, would be angry at my tears.

Now, happiness and sadness coexist, side by side. Like a child walking along a curb, one step up on the curb and the next step down on the street, here I am, one moment ecstatically happy, the next weeping. Happy and sad, so close together, sometimes confusingly intertwined.

The day that photo was taken earlier this year, we were headed to Billy Ray's for karaoke night. How I wish that I had asked him that night to please live forever, because that's what I really wanted.

Instead, like we are so want to do, I asked for what was immediate and simple, a tiny, lame request. 

Sing Love Me Tender. 

And he did. 

There at Billy Ray's in the pitiful, tired light, his beautiful baritone voice rang strong as he slipped away.

"Love me tender. Love me true. All my dreams fulfilled. For my darlin' I love you. And I always will."

And I always will.

PEOPLE ON THE EDGE

Oriental, NC  35°0248N | 76°6948W

Today we opted for a layover day, a short respite after an arduous 7-day frenzy of leave-taking preparation and two long days of slogging down the Pamlico.

My goals for the day:

1. Sleep late
2. Don't cry 

It's a good thing this blog starts with the successful accomplishment of a 10-year goal lest I look like a pitiful failure.

Despite my best intentions, my eyes popped wide open at 5:45, not just a fleeting blink of consciousness but full on, uncharacteristic wakefulness.

We had hoped to take a day of rest but realized our chore list was rather long, starting with a good scrub down for Cara Mia.

Then, with a squall on our heels,

photo by Chip

we set out to meet the people of Oriental. That squall soon overtook us, and we had a 30-minute walk in an utter deluge, which makes me wonder why only children and crazy people go out in the rain. The rest of us could learn a little something from them about spontaneity and childlike joy.

Our mission was to stock up on spare parts for the engine at one of the few Yanmar parts outlets along the coast. We spent well over an hour with Lucille at Deaton Yachts identifying which tiny engine parts were the right ones. She patiently tracked down every part we needed, including one that is being shipped on ahead -- and, just when she thought we were done, we remembered that 5/16" line we need for our topping lift. All during the tedious process, Bill was waiting behind us. Despite several offers, he declined to play through. Instead it was apparent he was vicariously coming along on our $600 spending spree and, for that little while, hitching his wagon to our dream. 

Bill kindly drove us back to the boat, waited while we scrounged around gathering our used equipment -- and then drove us, still dripping, to the consignment shop. That's where Cindy took over. She registered our radar dome, portable autohelm, boom break and a box of hinges to be sold on consignment. We told her we would walk back to the boat to retrieve a small Fortress anchor to sell as well, but Cindy would have none of that. 

"Tonight is sushi night at M&Ms, so just bring the anchor to me there," she said. "M&Ms is a lot closer to the harbor!"

Okay, this is a town with great folks, but no tears yet, right?

Well, back there right after I woke up too early, we walked across the street to Oriental's notorious gathering spot, The Bean, where the posted speed limit is 15 but seems slower.

The barista, June, told us that sometimes she gets carried away looking out at the view of the harbor and burns the coffee.

"I spent too much of my life not getting carried away," she said.

For 28 years, June worked, not as a barista, but in the IT field, until one day, eight years ago, she realized she wasn't having fun any more.

"That's when I started over. I moved to Oriental, and this is the only job I've ever had where I look forward to going to work on Monday mornings."

We told her about our similar life reboot.

"Oh," she said, "You are going to love your new adventure. Some of the best people on earth are water people, I see it every day."

I think June is probably right. I would only add that the people on the edge of the land are pretty awesome as well.

It's June's fault I teared up before 8 a.m.

Today: 0 for 2

Oriental, NC  35°0248N | 76°6948W

MOMENTUM

Engelhard, NC  35°509N | 75°989W

Sailing into the sunrise out of Engelhard, NC.

The happy flow of our lives is so corny that I feel compelled to leave out a lot of the sappy details. For instance, yesterday I was embarrassed to include the part about the rising sun striking the water, scattering a million sparkling Tinkerbells in our wake. And later?  Dolphins kept popping up around us, sometimes one, sometimes two, shoulder to shoulder.

I'm pleased to report there have been no rainbows -- yet.

Schmaltziness aside, I set two goals for myself today:

1. Make the 54 mile passage to Oriental, NC
2. Don't cry

Is 50% an 'F'?

Our day started with the most gorgeous, surreal sunrise that packed enough power to provoke tears, but I prevailed. I was going to Oriental, and I wasn't going to cry. 

We turned south for a 9-hour trip through the notoriously sketchy Pamlico Sound:

The Pamlico: What nasty water?

All morning Cara Mia's good-old Yanmar plugged along through dead calm. Chip and I traded one-hour shifts at the helm so we could alternately do chores and learn how to use the radar (a damned fine invention).

Chip thawed bread for lunch using our new "microwave," formerly the floor of the old life raft:

The breakdown came soon thereafter. No, not the engine, not the boat, not Chip. You know who that leaves.

I was cleaning up after lunch and found a tiny farewell note from a tiny girl, who dropped by Engelhard yesterday to see us off. A girl we've been with since the first minutes of her 20-month life. Those miniature pencil marks (to which she had given her entire attention) clobbered me with the full meaning of goodbye.

"I was trying to go the whole day without crying," I blubbered.

To help pull myself back together, I pulled out the staysail. Some 8 knots of breeze had kicked up, and I was anxious to accomplish at least one of my goals. We raised the jib and picked up .2 knots. The wind was almost dead ahead. We dropped the canvas and motored on.

This was not our first approach to Oriental. We came down by car many times over the last 8 years to look at boats for sale and sometimes merely to revel in a community focused on sailing, wandering around as pretenders. Over those years, we've maintained virtual citizenship via the local, cheeky news site, towndock.net, where Chip faithfully, daily peered through the harborcam, imagining adifferent life.

At 9 hours and 9 minutes, we were pulling into our slip in Oriental, when we heard someone nearby shout, "CHIP!!!"

The moment was captured on that harborcam Chip used to traffic:

A welcoming committee in Oriental? We don't know anyone here, and very few people knew we were sailing in.

We had three lines on the pilings before the shouters came running down the dock. With lines in hand, we turned to see Pete and Suzanne who bought our dear, old boat, Isabella.

"I can't believe it!" Suzanne said. "We never come to Oriental. Isabella is right across the water!"

Here came the tears again, this time I was not alone. Chip had joined me.

But wait! The guy on the boat across the finger dock, 6 feet away, shouted out, "Hey, I have a dinghy that's Island Packet beige!"

We looked where he pointed atop his trawler to see a beige Trinka dinghy the exact same color as our boat.

"My son just bought it."

Chip and I looked at each other. I haven't asked what he was thinking, but I was just thinking, no way. NOT POSSIBLE.

Chip asked, "Did he get it in South Carolina?"

"Yes."

"Did he buy it from someone named Marvin Day?" I asked.

"How did you know?"

Marvin Day was the owner of an Island Packet named Good Company, now known as Cara Mia.

Oriental, NC  35°0248N | 76°6948W

OUR NEW WORLD

Manteo  35°54.525N | 75°40.119W

Typically I would not endorse starting a blog with weeping, but in this case I'll have to make an exception.

At 6:40 this morning, we untied the lines and slowly pulled out of our home slip in Manteo, and that's when I started tearing up.

The waning moon got up early to see us off, and just as we headed under the Manteo causeway bridge, like some sort of weird portal, we entered the dawn of our new world.

In a continued stroke of our lives as a Hallmark movie, the moon and a big, corny piece of my heart stayed behind in Manteo.

And that's when the real weeping began, not in an austere, Ingrid Bergman sort of way, but more of a Meg Ryan, messy, he-just-didn't-want-to-marry-ME sort of way.

My wracking sobs were bubbling up from a deep bilge full of emotions: relief, sadness, nostalgia, excitement, profound joy and even a little fear laced heavily with exhaustion.

Last night, the seemingly unshakeable grip of the land had us pinned to the ground, right up to the midnight hour. As we were entering our route in the new GPS, it didn't respond like the manual said it should, not allowing us to save our route, perpetually, repeatedly. One time I zoomed in and the entire screen filled with capital A's and foreign symbols.

After four straight hours of repeatedly entering the waypoints (a lot of them), rebooting, cursing and questioning the premise of our entire future, the GPS warmed to us and faultlessly saved the route.

This morning we left Manteo on four hours of sleep, nervous, fidgety and lacking faith in ourselves and the GPS. Chip and the GPS performed flawlessly. I sat on the life jackets and wept.

I'm sitting here thinking how that seems an inauspicious way to begin our new life, but come to think of it, I guess that's how all new lives begin: pop out of the womb into a new world and then start wailing. All I did was add safety equipment.

Engelhard  35°509N | 75°989W