09 May 2023 | Willemstad, Curaçao - Dutch Caribbean.
Dave Ungless
Photo: Marie's birthday, The Pier, Spanish Waters, Curaçao
It's been close to a year since our last post. To those of you who follow us I apologise, the last twelve months has not been easy. It's been tough, it's been hard. It's been like, well, you know, like those times we always hoped would never happen. It's something you know already because you're more in touch with reality than we are, when you might lose someone, someone you cherish, you know what I mean, you know the hurting pain of loss.
Last year, it all began well enough, I already told you about our escape from the madcap world of covid Panama, about our time in the magical San Blas islands, about our stormy voyage to Cartagena in Colombia when we lost every one of our sails. You read all about that, you know it's what we do because we don't have better to choose from, that it's our way of life, our dream, our nemesis, our stupid existence that was always gonna turnaround and kick us hard. Well it did kick hard, I got kicked and Marie, she got kicked too.
In March we left
Sänna in Cartagena to fly to England for a long awaited wedding. Unexpected, a couple of weeks later, my mom, bizarrely, out-of-the-blue, stupidly, she passed away. Okay, she was old, she was eighty-nine, she was always gonna go when she finally decided it was time to teach me a lesson. What made it harder, awful in fact, was that four days after my mom died Marie got diagnosed with something not good, the bad one, the one you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy. You know the one I mean but Marie has banned me from using the 'C' word. We always knew our good times might one day turn bad, but me, I never realised that fighting that bastard storm to Colombia, that heaving down our ripped sails with Marie pinned back against the stanchions, the angry green ocean breaking all over her, was not that much compared to what we had ahead of us.
Writing these sail blogs, for me, was always a convenient way of keeping my ageing mother informed of where we were, what we were up to without the tiresome chore of actually calling her. She religiously printed out every blog post I ever wrote to keep them in a cardboard file, to proudly read each one to all her elderly friends at the conservative club or the pensioner's bowls club, so I wrote them in a way to make her laugh, in her own way proud. Now she's not around anymore there's not the reasons to write - also we've had a real fight on our hands with Marie's cancer. I apologise, of course, I should've written more. And I should've called my mom.
Where the hell do we go from here? Well, we're running low on our double-down reserves of steam. I still heave coal into the fire-pit of life tho every two or three shovel loads I pause to wipe the sweaty coal-dust from my black-faced brow. I dutifully crank up the engine revs when Marie pipes down 'full steam ahead'... but when I tap the pressure gauge hard to see what steam we have left that cold feeling of sadness draws over me, when I see the needle hover well below where I would like it to be.
Of course, at this time of writing things are improving. We are in Willemstad, in Curaçao, in the Dutch ABC islands. In the end we left Cartagena in a hurry, we had to, the gang in the marina there were giving us a hard time. So, we headed out, Marie in pain, we sailed one of the four supposed toughest passages in the world, Cartagena to Aruba. Marie is fine, she is getting well, her cancer is not cancer, her doctor told her it's something else, something more curable...
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Please visit our SV Sänna website for more details of our circumnavigation voyage from the UK. Also at www.facebook.com/SV.Sanna. Like our Facebook page if you'd like to receive more news about our sail adventure. You can contact us here.
Read more about the mishaps and mayhem of
Nellie, The Ship's Cat