Starting off the New Year well.....hope you are too....

HELLO MY FRIENDS- I've missed you! WOW!  2012!!  This ole' boy, here, has been trying to go cruising since 1983.....you would have thought that the gauntlet would have been thrown in by now.....my mother, bless her sweet now in heaven heart, was stubborn and hard headed.....and you know what they say...right?....."the fruit never falls far from the tree."........this is the year though.....it has to be....I'm running out of time. In two weeks I will be 65 years old...an OFFICIAL GEEZER.....got my Medicare Card the other day......Thankfully, I'm still strong and in relatively good health. Thank the powers to be for Corona, Diovan, Metoprolol, and Cialis!  But, actually there is no reason why I could not cruise for many years; except, according to this months sailing pundit in the number one consumer sailing mag in the U.S. , my boat is all wrong....first of all its too small.....Zosha is a Westsail 28. This GURU OF THE SEAS.....he's got to be 'cause his blabber is the feature article in the #1 sailing mag for February 2012 has all but doomed me to failure.  According to this expert sailor, cruiser, and delivery captain extraordinaire, I need  or, if you will? we need: ....now get this either a C&C 41 or a Swan 46 or a Hylas 56 or a Beneteau Oceanis 53 or a Catalina 445 or a Jeanneau 439 or a Hunter 50 AC or a Lagoon 450 or a Fountaine Pajot 41 or a Leopard 46.....there's more....we must have electric winches for all sails....chart plotters with repeaters......100 gallon per hour water maker......hot water for the showers.....center line head.......OK OK OK......yeah this is all nice....and as I've said before in this blog.....I'd go for it inna minute. BUT being 'sparse of purse' ....this is all out of the question.  I know that this guy is just another bucks up yachtie who assumes that we all are equally bucky, $,  too.... My axe to grind here is the influence that this so called expert Ya Hoo  has on new sailors .....newbies with limited funds but unlimited cruising dreams.....this kinda of crap is going to drive them away....discourage them before they even get started...... I was fortunate that my first sailing influences so many decades ago were Lynn and Larry Pardey and Wayne Carpenter and John Guzzwell and Robin Lee Graham. These are truly sailors extraordinaire who have completed monumental voyages in boats all around 30 feet or less LOA.  The greatest of all are probably the Pardeys because they are still out there sailing  the world in their 30' wooden, engine less boat.
Lets look at some facts......The Joshua Slocum Society International was created in 1955 to record, encourage, and support long distance passage making in small boats and to keep accounts of the adventures of small boat sailors. According to their website,  67 solo circumnavigators have been inducted into the Society as of March 2008.   Now this is remarkable:   58.2% or 39 boats were 35' LOA or less, 34.3% of these boats were 30' LOA or less, 15% or 10 boats were 28' LOA or less, and 13.4% or 9 boats  were 25' LOA or less. The smallest boat was John Guzzwell's TREKKA  at 20'6" LOA !   The four largest boats on the list are 85' , 70', 60' , and 53' LOA.  One last stat for you all: the average LOA of all the boats is 36.5' ! The Joshua Slocum Society is no longer. It was officially disbanded in June 2011. The website is being maintained for historical reasons. Go take a look.
For those of you that don't know, Joshua Slocum was the first person to circumnavigate the globe single handed. He completed a 3 year, 46,000 mile circumnavigation in his 36.75' LOA yawl SPRAY in 1898. He was around 54 years of age when he completed the three year voyage.
Sure those big, beautiful, comfy, expensive sailing machines are nice. But if you are as I....big on dreams short on cash, don't give up....there are wonderful, safe, comfortable, affordable small voyagers out there just waiting for you to come along and fulfill the cruising destiny of you both.
Keep the faith my friends....take care..

Holiday Salutations...............!

Hello All.........wishing you and yours a Merry Christmas, a Joyous Holiday Season, and a Happy New Year..........seeya in 2012

Whats the difference between a Phillips and Reed and Prince????

Just finished reading a cruising blog where some guy went to the hardware store, bought some stuff, and went back to his boat and built a 20 GPH RO Watermaker! You gotta be friggin' kiddin me......WHOA.....!! Dude!!
I don't even know how to work one of those things let alone build one.....this guy's gotta be
SUPER CRUISER!!  But you know what......there are alot of you out there just like this guy and as I've said before in this forum....this guy, me, is so envious.....wish I had the smarts to know how to do all this stuff that you all know how to do...should have taken more shop stuff in high school.....Still goin' cruising though....keep checking in on this blog and see if we survive...........take care my friends..............

Heart of a Lion......

Last night I woke up somewhere around 3 am with small cruising boats floating in my subconscious. It's probably a residual effect from yesterday's blog entry to Zoshas Wake extolling tiny world voyagers. Wish I knew how to insert that blog as a link here but I don't..........if you are interested, check my blog archives for the November 27, 2011 entry.................anyways, in this blog, I mentioned many stalwart but diminutive cruising sailboats that have logged monumental voyages and were dear to me...........well, last night the spirits of the the many vessels that I omitted from mention but just as dear came to visit me as I slept....they asked one at a time and in unison...."why did you not include me?"......."why did you forget us?'....."are we not as equally valiant?"
I couldn't sleep the rest of the night as my mind raced through the roll call of these dauntless vessels.......somewhere in the night I vowed to try and make amends to the empyrean forces that manifest themselves in these magnificent boats....................Tahiti Ketch 30's, Flicka 20's, Rawson 30's, Gulfweed 31's, Nicholson 31's, Bingham 24's, 26's, 28's, Mariah 31's, Dreadnought 32's, Falmouth 22's, Southern Cross 28's, 31's, Albin Vega 27's, Dana 24's, ........I feel a little bit better now...but we all know there are more .....and we as sailors owe homage to them all. You know... today I went to West Marine started  sifting through the current edition of one of the big sailing magazines and the feature article was about this month's must have ULTIMATE cruising boat an  Oyster 62...WHOA Dude!!....look this thing up....its ...AWESOME.......I just hope for the family that buys this boat and is able to take it cruising that deep in its magnificent bosom beats the heart of an Alberg 30 !..............Take care ya'all

Its not the size that counts...........!

 Remember vintage 1970's and 1980's Cruising World magazines? Passage Notes was a monthly column where short profiles of cruising sailors were presented. One of the things that sticks in my memory was the size of most of the boats that these folks were cruising on were under 40 feet or so. Back then it seems to me that people made remarkable voyages in 25-27-30-32-34 foot boats as a normal course of events. Each month the cruising prowess of  Contessa 26's, Channel Cutter 28's, Nor-Sea 27's, Vertue 25's, Triton 28's, Golden Hind 31's, Spencer 34's, Westsail 28's and 32's, Seawind 30's, actually this list is quite lengthy, was chronicled. If you look back, most of the boats in the first single handed, non-stop sailboat race around the world, the Golden Globe, in the 1960's were under 40 feet. I think that the guy who won the race, Sir Robin Knox-Johnson sailed a 32 foot, tiller steered, wooden double ended cutter, Suhali.  Some of boats in the first BOC Challenge in 1982-1983, now called the Velux 5,  were in the 32-40 feet length range!  Nowadays the pundits of  Cruising World or Sail magazine are first to tell you that you need the 46-48-52-60-62 foot boat to safely cruise. Bigger is safer and more comfortable they say. Not only do you need the 52-60 footer to cruise but it's got to be loaded up with redundant computer networks linked to satellites for instant worldwide communication for safety and weather forecasting and big, flat screen TV's and XM radio for entertainment and AIS for vessel recognition, and watermakers, generators, microwaves, chart plotters , and ice makers and autopilots that work off your bluetooth and antennas that let you email anywhere from your Satellite-Phone, and instant-on water heaters.....the list is endless!
I can hear you all now......"Oh! Oh!.here's another one of those minimalist-survivalist, tiny-sailboat nuts that lives off of brown rice and waterline algae and sails around with a battery operated RDF, a hand bearing compass, and a hippy-looking girlfriend with a butterfly tattoo and macrame shoes!!!
Well! you all are wrong.....except for the girlfriend! I would love the luxury that a big boat affords......AHHH air conditioned cockpits with hard dogers and windshield wipers, electric winches, remote controlled autopilot, bow thrusters, washers and dryers, mainsail furling.......Ohhhh... the elation, the fun....the ease....the  captains chairs in the cockpit....the ice machine in the pedestal.....dampness-free bedding.....non-stinky heads.....ecstasy at high sea! AHHH!! I could really embrace this kinda cruising. "OK? why don't you"....you ask?
Two reasons: #1- can't afford any more boat that what I have; and, more importantly #2- I don't know how to work all that stuff and don't have a clue as to how to fix it when, and it will, BREAK DOWN.
Oh how I envy you folks out there that know how to operate all this super sophisticated electronic stuff  and know about modems and bandwith and SIM cards and know how to dismantle a diesel engine and re-build it on the galley table with an emery board, screwdriver, beer can and a pair of dykes or fix the autopilot with some duct tape and a piece of wire, and some surgical tubing. You guys are my idols. I'm really dense about that kinda stuff so as a protection mechanism for my fragile ego, I eschew purchasing a million dollar boat and loading it up with a half a million worth of preposterous gadgetry......well that and the fact that I currently find myself....somewhat.....sparse of purse!
Take care my friends.....thanks for checking in with us....these blogs will get better....I PROMISE!!!

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Wanted to wish you all a very Happy Thanksgiving.....this is my favorite holiday. Since I no longer own a house and don't have any room to have people over, the Thanksgiving Dinner Torch has been passed to my lovely daughter Johanna. She does a remarkable job.  Last Thanksgiving was her first year to shoulder the responsibility for care and feeding and entertaining of about ten or twelve family and friends.  The centerpiece of her dinner was of course the turkey....this being Johanna's first Thanksgiving preparation, she was unsure of how big a turkey to buy? Somewhere she acquired a 32 pound turkey!! This thing looked like a pony! The oven door barely shut!  She had two or three of everything potatoes, veggies, relishes, breads, rolls, and desserts. She easily could have fed fifty people! Her poor husband and kids ate turkey leftovers for weeks. We had a little pow-wow this year. I explained that  a 12 pound bird will be enough for the people coming and she really doesn't need three kinds of potatoes,  six different veggies, five desserts.......etc, etc. She looked  at me with those sweet little eyes and  said "yes daddy, I know."
We are heading over to her house in a couple of hours and I just got off the phone with her. I asked about the size of the bird......"twelve pounds just like you said daddy" . "That's great baby" I remarked.
"Oh, I got a Ham too" she interjected at the last moment!!! "Wonderful" I remarked!
Oh well, "Tana" I yelled to my hunny bunny, "where are my FAT jeans?".... "You're wearing them" she retorted ! "Oh yeah I forgot....ARGHH."
Such is life at the dock............Have a Happy Day my friends.

I can see the light.....almost!

Its been a few months since the topic of minimalism and eschewing superfluous baggage has been mentioned here so it is time to revisit this issue. Its funny how things that seemed so important  in days past now upon present reflection have no import at all. The date for the onset of our journey is fast approaching. Yet here I sit with a storeroom full of stuff that is useless to me and is not worth the money that it cost to store it for the past 12 months.  Is this lunacy?  It's all  headed for Goodwill where it can hopefully better serve someone else. Too bad that the storage fees are not now in my pocket. That money could serve us well in the Bahamas or the DR or PR or anywhere on the windward/ leeward trail. "Learn from your mistakes" is  conventional wisdom  that  we have all heard many times. Well,  for me, on this issue....point taken! and ...never again! If you can't remember it was it really memorabilia?

The goal is not only to pare down my personal belongings but to minimalize and simplify my boat ZOSHA. Last week  the almost new Harken Furler was removed and sold. Am returning to hank on headsails with downhauls. The Cruiseair marine air conditioning is next to go.........wanna buy it? ...cheap!.....let me know. The propane stove, tanks and plumbing are gone. We are going back to non-pressurized alcohol or maybe pressurized kerosene which is my personal preference. Slab reefing on the main with  lazyjacks. Hand pump water system. Simple stuff.

Spring 2012 is almost here. Wish we were almost ready. 
Take care my friends.......
"Simplicity, Patience, Compassion...these are your greatest treasures" - Lao Tzu