MatTag Sailabout

While I as on my book tour for Deep Waters*, Jim's been preparing Resilience for the big move north from San Francisco Bay aree to our new home in Puget Sound, Washington. For the first 2 weeks in June, Jim and crew--Brendan and Corwin--were geared up to start the journey from CA partway to her new home in Puget Sound, WA.

Sailing north along our coast is notoriously tough. The intrepid team had to wait out days of gale-force winds with 7-9 foot seas (2nd photo), but heroically squeezed in 3 transit days. Tomorrow, I fly to CA to join Jim in Fort Bragg, replacing his former crew. We've got about 760 more nm to go. Wish us luck!

* DEEP WATERS: A Memoir of Loss, Alaska Adventure, and Love Rekindled (She Writes Press May 2023). To learn more visit elizabethannmathews.com Available at local bookstores and online.

Shadow selfie from our pedalboard, my favorite way to explore and go birding. Wishing you a fulfilling new year!

For more current updates, visit elizabethannmathews.com

--Beth and Jim

Day 40 aboard S/V Resilience*: Last Saturday (7/11), we ducked out under San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge and motored north into 4-5 foot seas ~4 hours to the shelter of Drakes Bay, off Point Reyes National Seashore. The contrast with exploring the calm, warm-water Delta is striking. Everything out here feels like wilderness with a big "W." I am rediscovering my love for this kind of big-ocean exploring--impossible without Jim's constant improving of Resilience's systems and safety features, and willingness to fix anything.

We're now basing out of Bodega Bay, doing some offshore surveys and enjoying all the life out on the ocean. These days, I'm mainly posting photos, videos, and stories about wildlife and boating at my website: Your text to link...
Hope to hear from you there!

[*Full Disclosure: I returned home for 4 days to do our taxes and check in with Glen and Marina.]

The Kincade fire began on October 23, 2019 and eventually consumed 78,000 acres--the largest wildfire Sonoma County has ever experienced. The first whiffs of smoke sparked an edgy déjà vu. At noon that day, Jim left our home in Santa Rosa for Petaluma to do some work on our sailboat, planning to return that evening. Although Santa Rosa did not experience an imminent threat, as the Air Quality Index rose, and high-wind forecasts persisted, we decided to shelter on Resilience and head down river to San Francisco. Leaving also meant we could offer our home to a family who had been evacuated from Windsor or Healdsburg, the heart of the Kincaid fire. This short video chronicles our oddly serene trip down the Petaluma River, through agricultural land and past a bucolic small town.

Beth Mathews is a marine biologist and writer who set out on a three-year sailing adventure from Alaska to Mexico with her ten-year-old son and husband, after her husband had a debilitating brainstem stroke. In this video, she reads about snorkeling beneath the boat, while in Mexico, to cut the boat's prop free of a snarl of fishing line and almost becoming entangled herself.

With the New Year's first week about to vaporize, I paused today while walking in downtown Petaluma (20 miles south of Santa Rosa) to think about what I had done last year that I wanted to do more of in 2016. The list started with "exercise." Then I remembered that in 2015, I submitted a letter to the editor in the Santa Rosa Sunday Paper and it was published. Speaking out about something important made me feel so good.



The title I submitted was "Mega-drought: Consider Carbon Fee and Dividend." The paper re-titled it "A Carbon Tax." I was fine with that change (after all, it saved two rows of text), but there is a crucial difference between a fee and a tax. With the Carbon Fee and Dividend proposed by Citizen's Climate Lobby (Citizen's Climate Lobby), the funds collected at the source of the carbon extraction will be returned equally to all households, rather than available as a pool of money to politicians. The dividend offsets the rising costs of fossil fuels, helping people with the lowest incomes the most, and the fee creates more incentives for clean alternatives. I like the simplicity, market-driven rather than regulatory approach, and transparency of CCL's approach.

Simply submitting a letter to the editor is important, even if it isn't published. That's because each submission tells the editors of your paper a bit more about what their readers care about. Maybe your letter, on climate change or the rash of new pot-holes in your neighborhood, didn't get published, but it may have helped another community member get their letter published on that same topic.

My new year's resolution is to volunteer more and to submit more letters to the editor. Given that I only submitted one last year, that is not challenging myself much, but it's a start. And yes, I want to ride my bike more. A lot more.

Wishing you a wonderful new year.

Let your voice be heard.

Beth