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Miramar - Schedules, and the need to let them go...



Last night Jamie said to me "Well at least we only have two more night watches!" "Thank goodness," I said. "These nights are killing me." With over 30 years of sailing behind me, on boats big and small and all over the world, this has been my first passage of any distance. I have known Jeremy and Jamie for many years, and have been fortunate to be there to sail with them before, so when they called to say they were planning on making this trip, I was very excited about the opportunity to do it with them.

I have many stories to tell about this adventure, and I am sure my own blog will be filled with them in the weeks to come, but tonight I wanted to make a personal reflection about something that occurred to me earlier today. Sam, our newest crew member, calls this my Zen moment, and he might just be right.

As Jeremy noted in an earlier post, we have been beating our brains out for the past week trying to make the trip down from Hampton. From a late start (for us, due to mechanical issues and a sketchy weather forecast) to days and nights on end of trying to make up time and position ourselves for that "rhumb line run to the rum!", we have not had a single moment to simply stop and enjoy the ride. 

Last night, moments after Jamie's comment to me about the fact that we were almost finished with these miserable night watches, we finally hit the wall. The engine began to struggle as we ran out of fuel on our aft tank. We had been running long hours of engine time in hopes of making it to a place on the course where we could simply set our sails and let this boat run, but so far it seemed like one thing after another was between us and the magic of that Caribbean breeze. Once we ran out of fuel on the reserve tank, the die was cast--there was no way we were going to be able to make the run down at speed and were going to have to figure out how to do it the old fashioned way.

So today was spent in a novel way, starting at about daylight, when Sam and I were trying to sneak our way between the wall of squalls in front of us. We decided to simply rig the sails for heavy, squally weather, and see where we could get to. After 17 hours of sailing, without having turned on the engine once, we have resolved ourselves to the fact that we will be in Tortola when we get there, and we'll make the rest of this trip under sail. I realized mid-way through the day that this was exactly what sailing had always been for me--an opportunity to make a boat go from one place to the next using wind and weather alone, and somehow I had completely lost sight of that in my haste to get to Tortola for a rum punch and then head off to my next adventure.

And those night watches? Well, with any luck I'll have many more of them to come. There is nothing quite like the sound of wind in your sails, the glow of the bioluminescence in your bow wake, and falling stars one right after another to remind you that there are not experiences like this left in the world. Schedules? I don't have one this week. I'm on Island Time. :)

Bill, Jamie and Jeremy, Sam, and Quixote the Boat Cat (still alive despite threats from the crew regarding his choices for toileting surfaces)



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