Missing Being Afloat
July 16, 2011
A hot cup of coffee is sitting next to me as I listen to Seafaring.com radio sea music and look at my screen saver of a sunset at Grabbers, Fisher Bay, Great Guana Cay, Abaco. Wow, what great memories. We remember that day, that sunset and the friends we met there. It was a great phase of our dream and one that made definite permanent dings in our minds hard drives. There have been so many of those events along the way since we started nineteen months ago. It seems like Port Aransas is so far away even though we spent almost twenty years sailing that area. Our Texas friends have scattered some with one crew in Carrabelle, one in St. Pete, one in Marathon, one in the Chesapeake, and one in Pensacola. That is a good number who are living the dream. We are in the middle of the pack, age wise, and nearly all of us have no intention of ending the dream any time soon. As to our future, we will definitely get back aboard as soon as possible once the medical issues are resolved. After all, those anchorages, sunsets and sunrises and the constant motion of the boat are some of the rewards of long term dreams. Did we wait too long to drop the dock lines? Most likely. Will it keep us on land? Not likely. Why Knot sits patiently in a snug, unbelievably quite harbor just waiting.
Of the past six phases of our cruise we can say that even though they have not all been beautiful sunsets, it is the whole package that must be graded. It is the whole experience that has been unbelievable. Were it not for the zillions of pictures we have taken, it would be easy to forget some pretty little out-of-the-way place where we dropped anchor late one afternoon only to awaken to a double wowzer sunrise. That first impression of the cobalt blue Gulf Stream as the early rays of sunrise revealed it is solid gold. The transition from that to the crystal clear water just before making port at West End was something beyond description. Passing between Forts Moultrie and Sumter as sunrise was nothing less than awesome. My active imagination allowed me to join the fleets that have passed that way. Sometime we were a galleon, a barque, an ironclad, a sloop blockade runner, a U boat, or aboard Red October in the moonlight looking at the lights on shore. Might that be in indication of a slipping mind? In New Plymouth, Green Turtle Cay we were pirates making a port call. Can you imagine what the first explorers were thinking that gazed upon Cape Fear or any of the other inlets to the New World? It is something to go to the beach at such places and look “out there”. It is another thing to gaze the other way. The first sight of land has always been a wonderful experience so much so that for thousands of years, sailors have run to the rail to catch the first glimpse. The approach takes on mystery, even with the chart plotters of today. That first time to make an inlet is to have curiosity about what’s around the bend, just out of sight. So far, we have been fortunate to have sailed through five centuries of American History from St. Augustine in the 16th to St. Mary’s Inlet and the boomer sub of the 21st. Phase VII starts when we climb back aboard.
Now that we have a fast internet connection, we will start posting more photos. They will be in the gallery section of this blog.