ON THE RAILS

Drop boards in bad need of refinishing.

Waiting doesn't have to be unproductive. Today we taped the toe rails and I slapped on another two coats of finish -- and while I was at it, I decided to sand down and coat the companionway drop boards (our front door).

Could someone please remind me to take "before" photos? I'm lame at that, but the photo there shows pretty much how bad they were. Now they're shiny and lovely along with the toe rails.

Today was not a good day for mom. They opted to do another emergency procedure to clear some of the blood clots from her left lung. The lung collapsed on Wednesday night and has not recovered.

Drop boards refinished.

After a tense (on my part) hour, they emerged successful. Our hope is that she will now stabilize. We've purchased one-way tickets to Albuquerque leaving on Sunday, two days from now.


p.s. -- "You know what happens tomorrow," I told Chip yesterday. "The dinghy motor will be ready." Sure enough. The doors are opening.

THE GRIP OF THE LAND

Perhaps we underestimated the steely grip of the land.

Little things pile up and together become big things. Chores that should take an hour grow extracted and take many times that. Others get done but create five more in their wake.

We each had a list of people interested in buying our cars, but when we were ready to sell, the people disappeared.

The damaged grill had to be sent back and a new one shipped (slowly) to replace it.

The topper we ordered for the mattress will be here in three weeks.

That engine for the dinghy? Still waiting.

Ah, we wait -- a wait riddled with good times and good friends and no schedule. We are not suffering.

COUNTING

As this weekend approached, we debated whether or not to do inventory at the wine shop.

If the deal on the store goes through, we will have to do a complete inventory with the buyers if they choose to do so. For our own peace of mind, we'd like to know that it is as accurate as possible. We've also included in the deal a par dollar amount for inventory. If we know exactly how much is in the store, Chip can fine tune the ordering and sales to get close to the par.

But what if it doesn't go through? We will have spent an entire weekend, Saturday night, Sunday morning and Sunday night, counting -- all for naught. Will the count count?

The news yesterday about the loan approval bolstered our resolve --and our energy -- to start counting, to touch every bottle we own this one last time. We made it through all the wine, four hours last night, three hours this morning and four more tonight.

Before we started counting though, I helped myself to a bunch of Russian River Pinot Noir, but it turns out I'm just an amateur.

My bottles were in the $40 range. Chip was snagging $100, $200, $300 bottles. I love him. As we were counting, he would come across a wine he loved and call out, NAME OF WINE, THREE, no, make that TWO.

It seems a small reward for five years of hard, hard work, and for Chip, 30 years in the wine biz, the wine wiz. If you ask me, it's better than a gold watch.

And it makes me happy thinking of all those beautiful anchorages where we'll raise a glass.

CLOSE ENOUGH TO TOUCH

At 2:18 this afternoon I signed into my email and found my life free of another huge qualifier: our buyers' loan was approved! That huge "IF" is now gone.

I called Chip at the wine shop, sobbing. I'm sure he thought someone had died, but no, it was happy sobbing, relief, fatigue, joy, impatience, all coming out in great heaving gasps.

We have so much experience at waiting, but waiting for something on a far horizon is quiet, almost calming. This new waiting, so near the goal is urgent, too intense to be ignored, so deafening it commands center stage. Nothing can distract from our shining goal, right there in sight, painfully close.

And so, after the tears, we celebrate one more step on this plod to the water, close enough to touch.

AGE AND GRACE

"Why didn't I do this a long time ago?"

That's something I've said often about cruising, but, really, how would that have turned out?

My much younger self would have had some clear advantages, say stamina and grace moving about a boat, running up and down the companionway steps without groaning about it the next day. I would have been braver, more adventurous and less cautious.

On the other hand, I would have zoomed headlong, head strong and mouth first into the world, befriending and offending everyone I met. Opinion, especially my own, was synonymous with "truth." Neither did I know the difference between religion and spirituality. Subtlety was a subtlety that was lost on me.

I could not differentiate between happy people and clowns, or between being articulate and being intelligent. My place in the universe was unclear to me, I just knew it was somewhere else.

At 50, I still travel with the same demons, but I've civilized a few of them. The meaning of opinion is now clear to me, as is the realization that it rarely shares the same space with truth. And my opinion? That isn't really needed anywhere. I have grown deeply spiritual and anti-religious.

My place in the universe is more clear, and it is not on the horizon but here and now and in this cockpit. The years have shown me that if I give, it comes back, and the less I have, the richer I am, lessons too trite to put on a t-shirt.

At 50, I clearly lack the same physical grace for moving about the boat, but age has blessed me with a certain grace for moving about the planet.

DISQUALIFY US!

I worked for a few years in the public information office of a nuclear physics lab. My job was to write brochures and scripts explaining accelerator physics to the public, and as if that wasn't hard enough, all the facts  came with qualifiers. It's really difficult to coin a catchy phrase with "electrons accelerated to almost the speed of light." "Electrons zipping along at nearly the speed of light." No matter how you say it, the message is that the electrons are not going the speed of light.

I remember complaining to anyone who would listen, "Can't you just accelerate them TO the speed of light?"

Definitive statements are so much more compelling. It seemed a small thing to ask...

And now, I find myself desperate once again to dispel qualifiers from my life: we're almost ready to go sailing, we've almost sold the business, if we sell the business, when we sell, after we sell, when we're sailing, if we leave in July, if we leave in August, if we sail by the end of the year, if the loan is approved, if the deal closes in June, maybe we'll sail before the end of the summer.

The weight of the qualifiers grows heavier each day.

We thought we might hear about loan approval in two weeks, and each business day past two weeks drags by. We hear rumors of SBA money running out. We wait. We watch. We toss and turn. We answer the unasked question with a shake of the head.

Can't we just GO? Set an actual departure date?

Definitive statements are so much more compelling. Okay, maybe the speed of light was not a small thing, but this? It really does seem a small thing to ask ....

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, CHIP'S

Five years ago last night, we pulled an all-nighter.

It was our 41st day straight of painting, hooking up computers, installing shelves, getting a seemingly endless number of permits, ordering products, entering inventory into the computer.

We were almost ready except for putting up shelf tags -- on 2500 items. Chip's family helped us, spending hours studying tiny labels and looking for their corresponding products. We sent them home at midnight and kept plugging away at it, hour after hour. At 6 a.m., I walked over to the California wine aisle and found Chip sprawled on the floor, sound asleep.

There was no ceremonial moment when we said, okay, we're ready, let's open. In fact, we forgot to lock the door and someone came in.

"Are you open?"

We looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders and so it began.

The business plan we wrote had a five-year exit strategy. I thought surely the way our lives go, this, our 5th anniversary, would be the day we would hear the loan was approved.

Sure enough, about four o'clock my phone rang. Caller ID said it was the buyers' broker.

There was news from SBA, but it was not approval.

"SBA wants all the paperwork changed to show the name of the buyers' corporation."

We looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders and so it continues.

Happy 5th Anniversary, wine shop.

EVERYTHING NICE

If you're under the impression I'm coating everything I own in plastic, you're not far off. So much for my earth-friendly, living-on-a-boat gloating.

As I was trying to stow things in the galley, I just couldn't find enough or at least the right spot for my space-hogging spices. I remembered reading a tip for that in one of my sailing magazines and decided to implement it today.


Supplies:

Ziploc Snack Bags

3x5 cards
A plastic bin

Instructions:
Dump the contents of a spice jar in a bag. Write the name of the spice on a card and seal them up together.

It made me miss the days of doing craft projects with the kids. And look at the result! Flat, easy-to-store bags instead of round, half-empty bottles.

These are the things that distract your mind from waiting.

Sort of.

IF OR WHEN?

Why do the waiting days drag by so slowly? As we await word on whether we have sold the wine shop, I notice an ever so slight change in our words.

At first we expressed no acknowledgement that we might be leaving soon.

"If we leave sometime this summer..."

Tonight I noticed a "when" instead of "if."

"Where should we go when we leave?"

We were sitting in the cockpit, entertaining the possibility of sailing soon, using the 'when' and 'where' words.

We spoke of Solomons Island on the western shore of the Chesapeake where we laid over one too-short night on the trip south. It was a place we thought we'd like to revisit .... sometime.

"But I want to anchor out somewhere for the first few weeks. I didn't see any anchorage space, did you?" I said.

Conversation meandered on through Ocracoke and Oriental and St. Michael's.

"Is that an Island Packet?" Chip asked.

In the Chesapeake, it is not unusual to see other boats like ours, but here on Roanoke Island, we don't spot them too often. Sure enough an Island Packet 38 passed quietly into the marina.

Almost an hour later, I said, "Isn't that an Island Packet!?!?"

Another one.

We were in the dockmaster's office when they both came to check in. No, they were not travelling together. No, they didn't know each other.

Where were they from? Both of them?

Turns out, there is good anchorage space in Solomons, along with new friends and a car we can use if we need it, or should I say when we need it?

LOCKED IN -- OR OUT

We officially signed a contract on the wine shop today with a closing date on or before July 1 -- whenever the loan is approved -- IF it is approved. Do we dare hope?

As Chip was vacuuming at the end of the day, he pushed the wine shop office door closed, and it locked him out -- with his keys inside. Or did it lock him in?

Does the wine shop want us to stay -- or go?

Only the crowbar knows for sure.

TO DO: Get new doorknob for office door.

ROCK AND ROLL

We're still in the grips of Rock Hall. It's blowing all right. Straight across our beam accompanied by two foot swells. The motion of the boat makes me wonder how loud music purloined the term "rock and roll."

AND it's cold. The wind chill drops down in the 30s at night.

"We gotta get outta here," we keep repeating. Today it seemed even more urgent as the wear and tear on both us and the boat began to show.

I want to leave so badly, I peeled the tape off the starboard rail in a 30-knot blow, freezing. Chip offered to help, but I excused him from the nasty task and crawled on alone. There's never pictures of the good stuff.

When the boatyard closed we took their truck and puttered around town like two bored teenagers, looking for anything to keep us from our rocky, rolly, noisy home out there.

For a while we huddled in the hospitality room, me sleeping on the couch, Chip watching American Idol. Pitiful.

Good Company is begging us, "Get me outta here!"

 CHESAPEAKE MONITORING
National Highs/Lows
7 day Rock Hall | Weather.com Rock Hall
Chesapeake Wind Forecast
Maryland Tides
Virginia Tides
NOAA Coastal Waters Forecast

THE BIG WAIT

Does it seem like we do a lot of waiting?

That's where we are again. Waiting. Chip's back. We're ready to go (sort of), but the weather calls for high winds the next few days, so we'll lay up in Rock Hall until it passes.

We could have made it across to Annapolis today, but the boatyard had to make a final trip up our mast to fix the light they forgot to fix last time. By the time they came back down, it was too late to start.

In the meantime, we've put ourselves on a system-a-day plan until we get it figured out.

While Chip was gone, I tackled the water heater and AC/heat unit.

Today is the navigation system. Chip brought an adapter to make the GPS talk to the laptop, so we're poring over Nobeltec software and the Garmin GPS -- and their manuals -- attempting to find ourselves and our route easier on the way south.

Our days are filled with packing glands and Y valves, bilge pumps and water filters. One at a time.

I only got through half the toe rails before the weather moved in. I've left the starboard side taped in hopes of getting another coat on before we untie.

The wind blows. And so we look longingly out across the water. And we wait.

STORMY THOUGHTS

About 11:30 last night, I thought, "Well, Mr. Automaton, where's your big-time storm?"

A few minutes later, as I was brushing my teeth I heard something that sounded like a tractor rumbling down the dock. I turned off the water and cocked my head sideways, like a beagle, listening. 

At the same moment I identified the roar as wind, the boat made a sharp heel to starboard, the lines groaning at the shift.

"Really? Zero to 30 in the time it takes to brush my teeth?" I asked.

In answer the starboard rail squished the bumper into a piling with a loud SCREEEEK.

I realized in that moment, that most of my attention had gone toward keeping the boat away from the dock on the port side, to the complete neglect of anything that might push us to starboard, like a 30-knot wind at midnight.

That's when the gusts turned into a steady blow, and my guts turned to jelly.

The rain started pelting on the fiberglass roof. Lightning flashed. The boat started rocking in earnest, bang, bang, banging against the dock lines and screeching on the bumper. It sounded like I was lying beneath the tracks in a busy subway station.

This boat weighs more than 10 tons, and in that moment the whole of it was resting on my shoulders.

It was not the storm that scared me. No, this was much bigger.

This boat has been on the water -- and around the world -- for 10 years. Now in my first week as caretaker, is it doomed to break apart on my watch? Am I actually capable of taking care of a 40-foot boat -- by myself??? Have I finally taken on more than I can manage?

And worse, if I can't manage tied up to a dock, how will I react in the big, wide ocean? Will I even survive? 

I was having an existential crisis with a thunderstorm as the soundtrack.

I called Chip. 

"It's blowing. I don't want to go out there. What if a line breaks? What if I loosen the line and the wind gusts and the boat gets away from me?" I babbled.

He calmly talked me down, or in this case, up.

"It always sounds worse than it is. Just put in some more bumpers if you can't pull it off the piling."

So, I took a deep breath, put on my big girl foulies and went up there. As advertised, it wasn't all THAT bad. It was cold and raining, but it was the foulies that got wet, not me. During the previous week, I had learned how to unwrap the dock line from the cleat part of the way, wait for a little break in the wind, then haul it in before the next gust. And that's what I did, hauling in the port breastline, between gusts inching by little bits away from that starboard piling.

But, just in case, I jammed in one more bumper before going below.

And by morning, I had conquered a few more items on the checklist:

30-knot squall at the dock: CHECK
Existential overreaction at midnight: CHECK

There are never photos of the good stuff.

RHYTHM & BLUE

After my first night alone onboard, I was chatting with a local and mentioned "that storm last night."

"Huh, I didn't even notice," he said.

And that's the kind of storm it was, the kind that passes without notice on land. In a house, with the doors and windows closed, with the heat on, it's easy to sleep in total ignorance of what transpires just beyond the walls. But on the water, a thin piece of floating fiberglass separating me from the wind and water, I live at the whim of nature, unable to shut it out.

I watch the barometer for changes. I check the tides, the wind prediction, the radar. Three times a day, while preparing meals, I turn on my new talk radio: marine radio channel 1, DJed by a cold automaton droning about wind direction and wave height and small craft advisories.

I've settled into the sounds of my boat and the water on her hull. My ears have tuned to the new normal and prick instantly at change, an unexpected bump or a wind shift.

My sleep is at the same time soothed by the roll of water passing by and peppered with alert for the midnight call of my boat needing assistance.

My muscles are sore from constant motion, subtle as it is in this quiet marina.

All my senses are adjusting to a totally unfamiliar world.

Sometimes I peer out the port, 30 yards down the dock, at that other world and ponder lines and crossing them, waves and wind, and what a difference a few yards can make.

WHITE OUT

Chip's Mt. Everest metaphor for our lives seems pretty accurate about now. We're up on Hillary's step, summit in sight. We're freezing and a blizzard's a-coming.

Actually, I mean that in a literal sense. This has been an epic winter with record snow falls north of us -- north where our new boat awaits. As it turns out, we chose the only day in January that we could have managed a sea trial. YAY.

But now that the deal is done, we're Jones-ing to bring the boat here to the Outer Banks, so we can move onboard. What do we get? "Snowmageddon." "February Fury." The boat is covered in about two feet of snow. The water is frozen over again. Sigh.

AWAITING THE THAW

"You guys should go on a vacation," a friend told us today.

"We have too many things going on. All this, um, waiting..."

"Exactly," she said. "Go on vacation, and everything will happen."

So, if we go on vacation, the Chesapeake will thaw, the business and the boat will sell? I'm good with that.

New problem: where to go, where to go?

ICED IN

Parties behind us, time to move on to the sea trial on our new boat.

Or not.

Sailing is all about weather windows, and ours slammed shut, or at least froze up. We'll be in the waiting zone until the water thaws and all the players can orchestrate a convergence on Rock Hall: the current owners from South Carolina; the surveyor from Virginia; and us from North Carolina.

Waiting. We have a lot of experience at that.

So for now, we're back in the little house, watching the weather and trying to remember where we live.

A NO DAY

I bought a pair of shoes yesterday. You wouldn't believe how much I loved them. They were beautiful and felt like slippers.

This morning I put them on, and they were too small. Well, bummer, but let's just try a bigger size. The store didn't have them in black. I tried another color in the next size. They were huge. No. How about this one? Didn't have my size. This one? No. This one? No.

Yesterday we decided we definitely want a traditional main -- no in-mast furling. That narrowed our choices to New York and Good Company in Rock Hall. We both felt confident: make an offer on Good Company.

After sleeping on that decision, and agreeing once more this morning, we were ready. I called Michele, asked her a few questions and as I said, "We want to make an offer...," the phone went BEEP BEEP BEEP. The connection was lost.

No shoes. No offers.

Does that mean we should go for the New York boat? It does have fewer engine hours and that amazing watermaker, but it's out of the water and won't be available until the spring. If we bought it, we couldn't do a sea trial until April or May. Do we want to wait in limbo again?

We'll see what tomorrow brings. Please be a YES day.

LOST

This week we felt the need to look outside our little apartment, to indulge in some serious escapism, maybe a deserted island, palm trees, beautiful beaches. Thanks to hulu.com, we were completely transported.

Unfortunately it was to an island where the inhabitants shot, stabbed, head-butted, tortured and lied to each other while being attacked by polar bears, ghosts, psycho French women and bees.

We survived 14 episodes of Lost before deciding this was not helpful escapism.

Sometimes we have really bad ideas.

UPDATE:
--We've been approved for a boat loan. We leave for Rock Hall on Sunday.
--Some new business prospects have emerged.
--Isabella has a new lower price and another round of online ads.

TRUTH OR FICTION?

Our future seems so fictional. We talk about sailing but it circles so far outside our current reality that it might as well be a movie we're going to see.

Sometimes I try to pull it closer, but that has its own pitfalls. If I start placing myself inside the movie, imagining the warm, clear water, the palm trees, the tradewinds, it becomes maddening.

But the fictional version lacks motivation, spark, a certain je ne sais quoi.

There we are in-between again. In between the real and the imaginary, the truth and the fiction, today and the future.