People ask us frequently, “When you leave Chesapeake Bay, where will you go?”
The first problem with answering that question is that we have not yet left Chesapeake Bay, and we don’t know yet when that day will come. The departure date is important, because we will be sailing in a 45-foot blue-water sailboat, not an aircraft carrier or the QE II. Or the Titanic. We have some limitations inherent to our mode of transportation.
Limits? For starters, a sailboat needs wind. Oh, sure, we have a nice diesel engine for emergencies and for harbor navigation, but we want to sail. The sound of the engine not running is one of the best parts of sailing. We whiz over the water, the boat and the wind working together in happy concert, and there is no noise. The rigging sings and the wind roars, but there is no engine noise. Love it.
The consequence of actual sailing is that we do not speed toward our destination by most people’s standards. When the combination of wind and sail produces 12 knots or more of speed over water we feel that we are flying. To a land-based viewer, however, it is clear that we are not actually flying. Mathematically, a speed of 12 knots is equivalent to a speed of 13.8 miles per hour. Ooooh. From the deck of the boat, that speed feels good and looks good, but it is not rapid progress toward the destination.
So, the timing of our departure from Chesapeake Bay really does matter. Because there is another limitation we will face at some point. On the weather charts it is labeled “Ice Edge.” The “Ice Edge” moves northward in summer and southward in winter. Boats, which need to move in water, must always know when, where, and how the edge of the artic pack ice is moving. We might say that when we leave Chesapeake Bay we will go north, but we always know that we will not go farther than the edge of the ice, and in fact, we will likely avoid crowding that edge. No Boundaries is not an icebreaker.
For now, when we are asked this question, we can’t give a very good answer. We want to go north; we want to cruise in the islands off the coast of Maine. In fact, I would love to go to Newfoundland and see where the Vikings lived. However, the most honest answer is this: We will go north until it makes more sense to turn around and go south.
The beauty of cruising is that people do not need to have the kind of detailed advance plans that scheduled passenger vehicles require. If you carry passengers, they all want to know what time to arrive in order to board before departure and what time they will arrive at their destination. We, on the other hand, carry no passengers. We depart when wind, weather and our inclinations agree that it is time. We can make a sudden decision to “go over there” without notice.
Right now, we are cruising on an unannounced timeline to an unannounced destination. In fact, we are tidying up and putting away and trying to figure out if we need to throw away still more of the detritus of 8 years of marina living. One of these days we will absolutely depart our present location for some other.
Oh, we will actually be more responsible than that, because we don’t want anyone to worry. We will make sure somebody always has a fair idea of our plans. It is possible we will change any announced plans without a lot of advance notice, but we would hope we don’t make the people we love too nervous about us. Part of the purpose of this log is to let you know what we are up to. Most of the content will be a record of where we have been and what we were ruminating about along the way. We will also use this log and our website to give you some idea of where we might go next. We hope you will be interested enough to wonder, and we hope we will satisfy your curiosity in each successive post.
Write a comment