41

No, I'm not referring to George H.W. Bush. Forty-one is the number of prospects that have contacted me since we listed the business in April.

Apparently business shoppers were in the doldrums in August as well. From August 3rd to August 30 I didn't get a single inquiry. Now I've had five in the last week. This is one of those weeks we refer to as 'noisy.' (You might recall, one of our prospects threatened to submit a letter of intent this week.)

Some other numbers according to my spreadsheet:

Number of emails to, from and about prospects: 267

Number of states represented: 17
Number from North Carolina: 7
Farthest away: California
Most inquiries in one day: 3 -- and this happened twice
Number of prospects named Patel: 5
Number of buyers: 0 (zero)

DEFINING FOREVER

When I got up Sunday morning and trudged into the kitchen, I found a small note tacked to the refrigerator door. It said, in Chip's handwriting, "No thing lasts forever."

I marveled that so small a magnet could hold up such a weighty thought.

There are entire books written about waiting. And now an entire blog...

UPDATE:
--Sold the Windvane (self-steering). Thanks, Jim!
--Got hotel reservations for the boat show.

YOU'VE GOT MAIL!

Our culture just isn't set up for leaving the dirt behind. Take mail for instance.

For the last year, we've methodically tried to cut back on the volume of mail that we receive. Every time a piece of mail came in, we would call and ask the sender to delete us from their list. It always got tedious when they asked why. The lady at AARP was particularly flummoxed. I don't think "Moving onto a boat" was on the checklist. She said, "I'll just put 'going to sea,'" which I'm sure must be the AARP metaphor for "deceased."

Despite our constant attention to mail issues, when it came time to move out of the house in July, I had not thought about how to handle the remaining mail, things we couldn't legally leave behind like IRS information and car registration. In a last minute effort to avoid actually dealing with the issue, I had the post office hold our mail until I figured out what to do. That was working great until I realized they were also holding the mail of the new owner of our house.

I didn't want to pay for a post office box. Our new apartment doesn't have a mailbox. So, again under the gun, I had the mail forwarded to our work address. Our official residence is now a wine shop.

You might ask, like I do, what happens next? When we sell the store, we can't exactly forward the wine shop mail. I look forward to a life without catalogs of wine diva t-shirts and wine glass flip flops, and the new owners will likely want things like wine license renewal notices.

There are mail handling services for people doing what we're doing (cruising, I mean, not waiting to cruise). This year we might actually have to talk to them at the boat show before I get our mail any more twangled than it already is. Please don't drop us a line.

BLOG OF INTENT

The last few weeks have been too damn quiet on the business and boat front, so we started making some racket.

First we decided to get Isabella some new bottom paint. We're taking her to Bayliss, yes the powerboat, fish killing boatyard. She'll be one of only three sailboats to get pulled there. We're honored, but I have a bet with John about how bad the bottom will be after sitting in the water for five years. If she's 70+% covered in debris/barnacles, I buy dinner, and he buys for anything less than 70%. I promised not to cheat by diving down and scraping off barnacles. That's about as likely as me sticking my head in a bucket of bloodworms.

Next, I did another round of craigslist posting. Since craigslist only allow you to post an ad in ONE market, I have four logons with our four email addresses. I log in and out four times to place our ad in various markets up and down the coast, a clear violation of craigslist policy. (Craig, if you're reading this, please help a girl out. Actually, you wanna buy a boat?) Chip emailed all the prospects that were left hanging. No takers so far, but we've been offered to exchange a nice plot of land in New Hampshire.

On the business side, we still have several prospects that have neither made offers (I would have mentioned this earlier) nor officially dropped out, so I emailed all of them. (Actually, that's not true. I only emailed the ones I like.) I was stunned to hear back from one of them saying that even though they haven't been in touch since August 1st, they are preparing a letter of intent. Intent to what!?!? According to our lawyer it's the beginnings of an offer. Supposedly next week. Just noise? Stay tuned.

UPDATE:

• I started a new blog to help Casey (and me) with French: Un mot a la fois (translation: one word at a time). I'm trying to get back up to speed (2nd grade level), and Casey's trying to live in French. Next up: Spanish. Some French and Spanish will allow us to tell people we don't understand them in the Caribbean, South America AND the Med.
• We made our first re-purchase of a previous belonging: a heating pad. My old stomach pain was back the last few weeks, although I did avoid the emergency room this time. We've now got it mostly figured out -- and it's treatable and maybe even preventable.
• Remember when I dropped my cell phone in the water while I was working on the boat? Chip did exactly the same thing this week. I asked him what it means. He said, "we're fumbling our communication." Eke.
• Our 11th anniversary (we think) is next week, so we're headed to Ocracoke for four days to sleep, eat, walk on the beach and play cards. Next month we're headed once again to the Annapolis Sailboat Show to pretend we're cruisers. Plans. We're good at making plans.

THE FOG OF AUGUST

About seven years ago, we went on an overnight sail in the Albemarle Sound in Bella Luna, a sweet little 26' Balboa. We anchored in an ill-chosen spot and, like two fools, failed to check the next day's weather, which called for a nor'easter and a small-craft advisory. About 6 a.m. I clung to sleep in a v-berth that was not unlike sleeping on a bolting horse. Chip drug me out of my warm nest to say, "LET'S GO!"

At the helm, I watched Chip, sprawled on the foredeck, losing a head-to-head standoff with boarding waves as he tried to raise the anchor. About ten minutes into our pounding path across the sound, a gray fog came down on us, shrinking our entire world to a 30-yard bubble of gray. Since, like two fools, we had not taken a compass heading, we were adrift with no real idea which way to turn. We had only our instincts and a vague notion of which direction would take us where we wanted to go.

That's exactly what last month was like. The days of cloudless skies (a couple of hurricanes notwithstanding) and brilliant sun couldn't pierce through our personal fog. We had burst out of July riding the crest of selling the house. We were barreling along towing several business prospects in our wake. We were ecstatic, certain that cruising was at hand.

Then came the fog of August. Our world shrunk to a 30-yard bubble of gray formerly known as Camp III. Everything went quiet in the bubble. No wind. No sound. Just us waiting, playing cards in a near empty apartment. We had only our instincts and a vague notion of which direction would take us where we wanted to go.

Seven years ago, we found our way, lessons learned: carefully choose your vessel; research your anchorages; faithfully track the weather; don't both be fools at the same time; always plot your location and destination, no matter how close and obvious it seems.

We found our way through August as well, and fortunately ended up in September, not July. Another summer of retail behind us. The fog is beginning to lift, and so far we have no idea what August's lessons might be, no matter how close and obvious they seem. Sigh.

FATTY CHANCE

"I'm a typer who WANTS to be a writer..." --Cap'n Fatty Goodlander


I've never met Fatty, but I know the sound of his voice and his amusing way of turning a phrase. I ponder Fatty's advice on preventing sail chafe and proper anchorage etiquette. I know his wife's name is Caroline, that she's Italian, that his daughter Roma Orion was raised on sailboats and that she recently married and honeymooned onboard with her parents in Thailand.

In the small pond of sailing literature there loom great giants: the many that sail, the small subset of sailors who write and the tiny subset, really a handful, that do both well. Cap'n Fatty is one of the latter.

While I've known that Fatty makes a comfortable living from his writing -- comfortable, that is, in cruising terms -- I didn't know anything about how his writing career developed until my friend Jim forwarded an article by Fatty describing just that.

He did not land in my magazines by happenstance but by setting his sights on a goal and relentlessly tilting at it for hours, days, weeks, decades. Typing alone in a small empty room for hours a day. Submitting articles and query letters by the dozens. Reading about writing. Talking to writers. Going to lectures on writing.

"I ... continued to write six hours a day, five days a week without let up. "The job of a writer is to write," is the best advice I've ever received," he says.

Just as with the hard work of going cruising, there's no such thing as "lucky."

Time to get back to my typing career.

PLACES EVERYONE!

DYLAN
Stone Lake, Wisconsin
August 25, 2009


CASEY
Angers, France
September 1, 2009


CHIP & TAMMY
Still here.
September 2, 2009