The Cost of Cruising

When people ask: "How much does it cost to go cruising?" They are asking the wrong question. They want to know "how much money does it cost to go cruising" and not "what are the costs of going cruising." 

While these might sound like the same thing right now, they won't when you finish reading. The financial aspect of cruising is simple, it will cost you what you have set aside to do it. You can tie up in a marina every night on a huge yacht and pay through the nose for fancy meals. This style of cruising will be very expensive and you might not be able to afford it for very long. On the contrary, if you anchor (which is free) and cook your meals on board, and buy food that is on sale from a cheap grocery store, your costs will be very low and you can sustain it for a long time. But this is not the cost of cruising! 

The real cost of cruising is saying goodbye to the people and places you love. Leaving everything behind you as you set off into the unknown. When you leave, you don't know when you will return or what you will find out in the world. You will miss years with your family and friends, as life events happen and you are far away in a distant land. 

Your friends might move away, the neighborhood you lived in will change, and you will never be able to return to the world from whence you left. If you stay, you will experience all the changes gradually, so they won't seem like a shock to you. Your life will continue as it always had and you will always dream of what could have been if you had set off cruising.  

There will always be a cost, and the price is time. You can't set off cruising and expect the world you left to pause itself. When you return, things will be different and the place that you remembered will be gone, replaced by something new and changed.  

I used to work in a family dental practice with my parents and sister. We lived a few miles from Maddies parents in Baltimore, Maryland. I would see my parents and sister almost everyday, and we would see Maddie's parents a few times a week. We kept the boat in a small neighborhood of Baltimore called Fells Point, where we would walk the streets at night and eat at our favorite restaurants.  

Change was always happening, but we saw it happen on a daily basis so it was nothing shocking. At the same time, looking back at when I moved there 5 years prior, it had changed a lot; i just never noticed it since it was gradual. While we lived there, restaurants came and went, a massive hotel was built, and crime started to become more prevalent. The old park where the farmers market would happen on Saturdays was demolished, and the farmers market stopped happening. The abandoned pier that used to play movies on a big screen at the edge of the water stopped happening. Stuff was always changing, but we were there to see it and the change was always gradual. 

With family, my sister is pregnant, and I will miss the entire process. My parents send me pictures as her baby bump keeps growing, but I will be away as my niece or nephew (she doesn't know the gender) is born. We also had to leave our pets behind, as ocean sailing is not very conducive to an exotic bird or a dog that demands a walk on shore twice a day. We know they are doing fine, but we still miss them very much as they are a huge part of our lives.

Our friends will also change as we are away, they will find new interests and have life events without us there to experience it with them. They might even move away in our absence, life goes on and no one can stop it! 

All of these factors may sound like if cruising is a horrible idea. The costs are very high when you think about all the things that you will miss while you are away. At the same time, the costs of not going are equally high if you make the most of it. If you don't set sail, you will spend your whole life wishing you had gone and wondering what lay out beyond the horizon. You only get one life, so you need to choose what is more expensive to you and which can you afford. 

We are going cruising because we are dreamers and will always wonder about what lays off in the distance. If we stayed, we would enjoy life with our friends and families but we would always have the unmet dreams of distant lands. We plan to go cruising and explore the world, then we can return to a new home where we can continue our lives with our families and friends in the future. It is a cost to pay, but if it is worth it to you, then the cost is not a concern. 

Salt Water Plumbing

A trick to save on water when cruising is to make all forms of water as available to you as possible. Salt water is by far the most plentiful water an ocean cruiser will come across, why not use it! 

When doing chores like washing dishes or brushing your teeth, you are probably going to use fresh water from your tanks. This is fine, but that water is the only water available to drink and keep you alive. The dishes and your teeth don't actually care how fresh the water is as you scrub them clean, the only time fresh water is actually needed is at the last stage, the final rinse for the plates. 

Now, you could easily grab a bucket and haul up some sea water from the side and use that to clean your dishes. Truth is, this is a lot of effort and the tap is right there on the galley sink! In the end, the sea water is present but never used because the tank water is easier to get at and thus will be used for superfluous uses. 

To avoid this problem, the sea water needs to be as easy to reach as the tank water. This means that you should have the same water pump setup for the fresh as well as the salt water sides. If the fresh has an electric pump and the salt has a manual pump, the salt will still go unused! 

In our case, the fresh water pump is a 2 gallon per minute electric pump. Therefore, the saltwater pump is the same sized 2 gallon per minute electric pump. I tapped the salt water plumbing into the hot water side, making it equally easy to use salt and fresh in any part of the boat. 

It is important to make sure you install a valuing system though, that way salt water can't backfeed into your fresh supply and destroy all of your drinking water!  

When washing dishes in the galley, the hot tap is now salt and the cold tap is now fresh! I can scrub and wash until my heart is content with all the salt water I want, and then at the end, I rinse all the dishes together with fresh water. This lets me finish the dishes with a fresh rinse and use much less water than I would have if I washed everything with fresh. 

With brushing your teeth in the head, the salt water is all you really need! The hot tap is salt, so you can wet your brush, scrub them clean and then rinse with salt water. Seawater is actually very good for you gums and you don't need to rinse with fresh (unless you can't stand the taste of salt). As a dentist, one of the treatments for people with severe bleeding gums (gingivitis) is to rinse with salt water after they brush because the salt water helps their gums heal faster! Why not take advantage of this on a daily basis while out at sea! 

Weather Windows

When people hear the term "weather window" they usually think it means smooth sailing from Point A to Point B. This is far from the case. A weather window is smooth sailing from Point A, and nothing more.

When you first depart land, you are now as close to land as you could possibly be. Should a storm crop up and you heave to, you are now close to land and have less seaway available to you for drifting. The idea of a weather window is to give you that necessary seaway. 

When you depart land, you want at least two full days of smooth sailing so that you can make your way far from land. Your heading towards Point B is irrevalent at this point, as what you need to do is get as far from land as you can. In two days, you will usually make around 200 miles from land, and this will give you plenty of seaway to drift in should a storm arrive on day 3 of your voyage. 

When cruising, a storm near shore is something to avoid or seek safe harbor for. A storm at sea is something that you must deal with accordingly. Having that seaway is the best thing you can do to safely deal with a storm. 

This is why it is important to wait for a weather window to present itself that way you can slip out to sea and far from land without any hiccups. Now, if you see that a nasty storm is approaching on the third day but it is clear for a week after that, common sense would tell you to wait a little longer and enjoy the longer weather window instead of jumping out to sea to experience a storm. 

Nervousness Before a Journey

Maddie and I are waiting in Deltaville, VA, for a weather window to leave the United States and head out to Bermuda. As it stands, the forecast on various websites says that Saturday will be a good time to leave. We will need to leave here at dawn to make our way down the bay to the mouth of the Chesapeake on Saturday, then spend Sunday heading far from land, and hopefully Monday to cross the Gulf Stream. 

Tuesday starts some foul weather up in this area, but if we are far enough south, we will be able to avoid the worst of it and have a nice and gentle sail towards Bermuda. 

Maddie is totally calm about the whole ordeal because she fully trusts that when I say it is time to go, it will be safe for us to go. This is what makes me nervous. This will be our first ocean passage on our boat Wisdom and I want it to be a wonderful experience. I worry that if we run into some serious weather, that it might set a bad taste in her mouth for future passages. 

My other concern is if I say it is safe to go and something bad were to happen, I would have put her in danger. 

I know that no voyage would be complete without a storm at sea, and I know that we are far more than prepared for anything like that but I still worry. 

As our planned departure date approaches, I feel my heart race and my stomach twist with anxiety as we prepare to leave the safety of the marina we are tied up in to head out into the great blue waters of the Atlantic Ocean. 

This has been a dream of mine for 9 years, and now the moment I have been waiting for is 2 days ahead of me, and I would say that stage fright has struck!  

Tangier Island

Here's a little history and information about Tangier Island.  It's in the Chesapeake bay, 14 miles from the West coast, and 7 from the East.  It's part of the state of Virginia.  There's only one town on the island with a small population hovering around 700.  It was important to us that we visit the island on this trip because of its large erosion problem.  It is very likely that the town will need to be abandoned within the next fifty years since the island is rapidly eroding away with each passing year.  The people who live there are extremely dedicated to preserving it, however, for as long as they possibly can.  It's been settled since 1770 and its inhabitants didn't take long to move from an agriculture of farming to one based around crabs and oysters.  The incredible thing about the island is that, due to its seclusion from the mainland, its people rarely left and had a history of not being very welcoming to newcomers.  This preserved the very distinctive dialect that Herby and I heard from the locals that most likely has been passed down from those first settlers in the 1700s.  It also means that there are only a handful of last names on Tangier as you saw on the gravestones. 

Now I said that the first people to settle the island arrived in 1770, but these people were by no means the first to visit.  John Smith is credited as the first European to explore Tangier.  He gave it its name because he thought it bore a striking resemblance to Tangier, Africa.  He went on to name a neighboring island "Smith Island." He wasn't very creative.  Before him, however, the island was often visited by Pocomoke Indians.  Although we didn't find any, there are supposedly a great deal of arrowheads scattered around the beaches as evidence that they had been there.

Today, the island is in great danger.Many houses have been abandoned, their inhabitants forced to retreat to mainland Virginia due to the intense erosion.The water creeps inward on all sides further and further each year.Some families are desperately trying to sell their soon to be worthless property at extremely cheap prices, while others are doing everything in their power to remain on their island home.The population is shrinking right along with the island mostly due to the new generations of its inhabitants.There are very few opportunities for Tangier youth.Most go to college on the mainland and never return.There is very little promise of even a career in crabbing or oyster farming now and the economy is mainly reliant on tourism.A tour boat arrives each day at 11am and leaves at 3pm.We watched as the people walked around the island, took ten minute golf cart tours, and slipped in and out of quiet gift shops.After they left, the whole island seemed to let out a breath it had been holding.The locals came out and chatted in their special dialect, the gift shops closed, the children played soccer outside the school.It's a simple existence, and they choose to keep it that way.It was a pleasure to witness the energy of the island, both the sadness, and the hope.