‘Twas the day before Christmas (Christmas Eve), and I wanted to send a little update and Christmas wish to all of you. Of course, an update should consist of news of some sort, maybe a description of where we are, what we have seen, maybe the weather endured to get here, and possibly a tip of the hat to some wonderful piece of technical gear that helped make it all happen. That is always the challenge of a blog. How should one approach saying what one wants to say?

Then it struck me that what I just listed are perhaps the various ways NOT to say it (at least from my point of view). Maybe that is what I ought to talk about – the traps blogs fall into.

For example, there are blogs that I call “And Then We Went Here, and Then We Went There. An easy trap, and it goes like this: We have left the boat in Majuro for the two months that we will spend at our house in California. During this time, we spent a week house sitting in a friend’s lovely house in the Oakland Hills, went sailing on Clear Lake, attended our friend TJ’s birthday party, met many nice people at the local café where we can access Wifi, attended Thanksgiving dinner with good friends, Rick and Judy….. The list goes on, but this is not what you want to read about, trust me.

Then we have the trap I call the “Overly Sweet Syrupy Prose” blog. Another easy trap. Often what we see out in our travels is beautiful beyond description, so why not try and describe it? “So there we were…the soft velveteen brush of the satin air of the evening gently caressing the green grass of my mind, softly lifting my spirit into a merangue of heartfelt ecstasy as the myriad colors of the day bid us both hello and goodbye, all in a single delicious instant while we savored and tasted it all with the joy of a new born horse galloping for the first time while our sturdy, strong and ever watchful and caring mother mare of a boat named Proximity coaxed us along……..” I’m sorry. I have read these blogs, and while I can understand the desire to convey the moment, this is not the way to do it.

If you have read more than one sailing blog, then I am sure you have come across the “We Barely Escaped With Our Lives” blog. Let’s be honest here. To take off in a small sailboat, to head out across thousands of miles of open ocean with no one to call if there is trouble, often with only one’s spouse as crew, is huge. The trip from Mexico to the Marquesas in French Polynesia is nearly 3000 miles, and we had never been alone offshore more than 200 miles when we did that. Often the weather is quite nasty and uncomfortable. The trip from Fiji to New Zealand is notorious, and for nine days, we were quite cold, uncomfortable, and learned how to deal with higher winds than we had ever seen. Sometimes it is quite frightening. On the return trip to Fiji from New Zealand, we encountered a lightning storm, the likes of which we had never seen, and we hope we never see again. But the fact remains that the boat always floated, our lives were never in danger, and eventually we reached our destination – a little stronger and wiser. We promise never to exaggerate to you and tell you that it was worse than it was, nor will we tell you what super beings we are and that any lesser mortal might not have made it through. Those too, are boring blogs.

Finally, we are supposing that many of you are not sailors, and if you are sailors, that you don’t need us to teach basic refrigeration, electronics, or navigation to you. This only bores the non-sailors and insults the experienced sailors. Holy smokes, there must be legions of technical masters out there telling us that the way they have re-wired the negative field, internally regulated Volvo high power alternator to a Yanmar-like externally regulated, positive field alternator solves the problem of too fast a charge on the high capacity bank of gel cell batteries, while still allowing the Blue Sea Solar Booster to provide an adequate charge in conjunction with the self regulated Super Wind Wind Generator, all the while showing no voltage alarm at the engine panel. For this sort of thing, we’ll be happy to share, in serious detail, what we can, and what works well on our boat. Just send us a personal email, we will respond. I promise.

So these are the things I thought I would talk about in this posting, but you know, all that I really want to say is that “Your Rock and Roll Argonauts” just want to thank you for spending the past year with us, we have enjoyed having you along, and that we wish you all the very best for the Holidays, and a prosperous and Happy New Year.

Be Excellent to One Another!

Rod and Elisabeth
“Your Rock and Roll Argonauts”