Lowe is loving the strong winds. He pushes off the stays on one side of the boat and flies effortlessly around the back and over to the other side. He can do it with no wind, but with big winds it’s just so much more fun.
I was talking with my business partner the other day. The two of us have very different approaches to certain things in our day-to-day lives. He is one of those people who researches everything in what, to me, is excruciating detail. He’s into motorcycles, and if you asked him what the seat height of a 1997 BMW R1100 was, he’d have that number off the top of his head. Want to know which adventure bikes are going to be released two years from now? He’ll tell you and give you a list of probable upgrades coming with those bikes along with the suggested MSRP. He’s probably owned, and sold, thirty motorcycles in the past ten years. For him, the preparation for adventure is at least half the fun.
I’m the complete opposite. Actually, both Ali and I are the complete opposite. This is the third boat in a row we’ve bought without really looking at any others. We look at some boat pictures online, pick the style we like, find the best one we can (from what we can determine online) that’s for sale, and we buy it. We don’t dawdle with the process. We don’t spend a hundred, or even ten, hours researching what others have to say about it online. We don’t line up ten different showings of ten different boats. We just buy the boat and get on with our adventure. That’s the part we came for, not the buying of a boat (which let’s face it, a catamaran is a catamaran is a catamaran). Preparation is a distant second in importance to our actually being out doing the thing we set out to do.
I have yet to meet a person that is actually out cruising that has seriously lamented their boat choice. They may look around the anchorage or step aboard a friend’s boat and have a little boat envy now and then, but that’s about the extent of it. By the time you have dropped your anchor somewhere far from home you’ve largely forgotten about the process of buying a boat. All those details you thought were so important when you were sitting in the office planning your YouTube sailing channel are meaningless.
“My boat galley needs to have rounded countertops corners and a four-burner stove, or I just won’t be able to make Thanksgiving dinner while we are underway. And it has to have daggerboards so I can go .5 knots faster than that other boat. And of course, it needs to be at least 60′ otherwise my spouse will be on top of me all the time. And…”
Literally none of this ever comes up. None of my circumnavigator friends really talk about boats once they are out cruising. That conversation is only had online and on YouTube channels. Boat conversations with cruisers mainly consist of maintenance talk—fixing broken boat things is universal. It doesn’t matter what boat you are on, every single one of them has a bilge pump that never seems to work right. But the vast majority of our conversations are about the experiences we are having, not the boat that is bringing us from one experience to another.
Anyway, my friend asking me, “You liking your boat so far?” prompted me to ramble on like this. Point being—if there really is one—is that I wish people would stop preparing to go sailing and just go sailing instead. Online boat shopping, and YouTube daydreaming sucks. They are both designed to take more of your money. And taking more of your money means taking more of your time. It drives me absolutely bonkers how much time people waste doing things that don’t move them forward in life. Preparing sucks. Just go already. Quit worrying about the boat. Yep, a boat is a boat is a boat.
Our latest game obsession is Azul. I found this photo that Ouest took to commemorate a butt-kicking that she gave me. Sweet.
Proof that there are indeed some tsunami warning sirens. I don’t like our boat’s chances if those sirens go off, but I do like how quickly we could be ashore and climb a couple hundred feet up a hill. Sailors always say they would head out to sea if a tsunami was on the way, and that’s great if you have plenty of notice (go out to deep water and you’ll hardly feel the wall of water as it marches under you towards shallow water), but in a place like this where it’d take about an hour to lift anchor and motor out of the bay, I think I’d just head for the hills.
Garbage harbor.
You’d think they’d have a hard time giving away tuna in a place where just about everyone spends their day putting tuna into a can.
Not another catamaran to be seen since we arrived here in Pago Pago. Monohulls haven’t completely given up their dominance on the world cruising circuit.
Happy to finally have my hands on a drone again. We ended up getting the DJI Mini 3 Pro this time around (of course version 4 came out a week later). This one has obstacle avoidance, so hopefully I’ll manage to avoid crashing it into the ocean for a while, since that has been an obstacle I’ve had trouble avoiding in the past. And I like that the remote control has the screen built in, so I don’t have to plug a phone into it. I always found that process to be incredibly annoying, and it was just one more gadget that had to be charged in order to take a few pictures.
American Samoa is another one of those South Pacific islands that was drastically altered by the arrival of missionaries in the 1800s. Christians came from London to save them in 1830 and the Mormons arrived to convert anyone left over in 1888. American Samoa has a population of 50,000, but every village around the island sports at least one, if not half a dozen, humongous churches. I have no doubt they have church pew seating for at least a million. Friday night bingo appears popular.
We had a good time at this restaurant with a natural pool (the pool was natural, the patio around it wasn’t). It was especially fun as the tide came up and the waves would crash through.
Not the most scenic marina, but it was nice to have a convenient spot to leave the dinghy. No idea who actually owns and operates this place. It’s completely run down and yet they were busily rehabbing the bathrooms. For whom? I have no clue.
This is the only beach we keep returning to. It’s mostly hidden from the road and untouched except for the nice dogs that come down from the “tree-house” restaurant to watch us.
Once again we find ourselves walking and driving around with dog food in our bags for handing out to the pups we come across along the way. Every time Ali pulls a ziploc of dog food out of her bag we laugh about the time we were crossing the border between Chile and Argentina when the border patrol officer asked us if we had any pets. We told him no, and then he went about his business poking around inside the VW bus. A minute later he turned around with a big bag of dog food in his hand and a very angry look on his face. “¿Dónde está el perro?” Fortunately, it wasn’t too hard for him to finish searching the bus and our bags to determine that there was no hidden dog. We were just a couple of crazy gringos feeding stray dogs.
Little drama for one of the boats as their anchor gave way and dragged in the strong winds. Fortunately, they noticed just in time and were able to get settled again without any issues. This anchorage is notoriously bad. The bottom was probably littered enough already, but after the tsunami in 2009 the ocean floor in the bay became a deep carpet of miscellaneous debris. Everyone I’ve seen raise their anchor so far has come up with a jumble of lines and garbage they’ve had to get off.
Ali thought she saw something in the water by the derelict ship behind us, but then it was gone. A few minutes later something caught my eye. At first I thought someone was snorkeling around the ship. I thought, “No way someone can be scraping the hull on that thing.” It took a minute to realize it wasn’t a person, it was a dog. He was swimming in circles, scraping at the side of the ship trying to find a way to climb back onboard. We recognized him right away as the guard dog that lived there.
Ali called out to him, and he immediately turned and started swimming our way. I pulled up next to him and he started trying to climb up on the dinghy. I reached in and lifted him up. As I was doing so, I could feel the deep growl in his stomach while he gave me a side-eyed stare. He was clearly deciding whether to sink his teeth into my neck or just accept my help.
He got up on the edge of the dinghy and seemed grateful enough, but he wouldn’t look at me and I decided I wasn’t going to touch him again. I pulled the dinghy up next to the sailboat tied up behind the ships, where he could easily jump up and get back to guarding his ships. He was tired, though. We sat there for about ten minutes with me patting the deck of the sailboat while keeping as far from him as I possibly could on a small dinghy. He didn’t move the whole time, and his tail never wagged. I just held the side of the sailboat and waited. Finally, he stood up, took a tentative step to the bow of the dinghy, paused to contemplate the jump, and then hopped aboard. He was off.
The next day we saw the guy who lives there and waved him over. We told him his dog had fallen off the boat and couldn’t get back up, so we had helped him. He laughed and said, “Oh, that’s why he came inside all wet. Chaos does that all the time. He ends up on shore running all over the place. Be careful, he’s nice on shore, but dangerous on the boat.”
The guy isn’t going to win any Pet Owner of the Year awards.
15 Comments on “Chaos”
Thanks for posting a reminder of how you buy boats. It’s timely for me, as I am beginning the process of buying a boat to do the great loop next year. I tend to research, research, research, then buy the first thing i look at.
Nope, I am *so* with your partner on this. My sister and I were thinking about buying a catamaran about a decade ago and all she was really concerned about was price. But I had folders of photos and layouts and screenshots of information. I had spreadsheets!
And I’m the same with anything I buy that I’ll use a great deal – from luggage to phones. I wouldn’t necessarily call the process fun, but I do find it – and the results – very satisfying.
Gonna do the same with drones soon, lol. Doing it right now with a mobile app. But you know, considering how much comparison shopping I do online – which is what most of the research is – I absolutely hate shopping in person for anything whatsoever. Although I do like looking at real estate (not that I ever plan on having any again) and I think I’d have thoroughly enjoyed looking at a bunch of boats.
This was a good one. Your thoughts on boat buying resonate, even if I’ve always fallen into the over a always is trap.
GREAT post, Pat. My wife and I fell in love with an S-2 9.2 C docked across from our bareboat in Peters Island many decades ago. We searched around for the perfect used one, had it surveyed, etc. and still ran into ‘issues’. We should have known what was coming when we requested a look at the Seller’s maintenance records. He had none. We bought it anyway. I spent 32 very happy years thereafter fitting it to be the perfect cruising S-2 . . . always with the dream of casting off for the wild beyond. Well . . . time ran out over a decade ago. But you know what? I don’t think either of us regretted a moment of it. One final comment. I have always viewed the state of boats we passed by at anchor or tied up to a dock as an indicator of the status of the owner’s dreams. It never fails. There are a lot of broken dreams out there, and it always made me very sad. Our boat reflected that our dream was alive and well . . . right up until the day it was sold due to our age and my spouse’s increasing health concerns. I am proud of Ali, the kids, and you for ‘grabbing the dream’ for all of us. Wishing you safe passage and fair winds as you keep on, keeping on.
Rex, we bought Genesis from you a decade ago; what an awesome boat! When we left BYC that day, we had visions of full-time cruising with our daughter. We were new to sailing, and on our 15-mile trip to our marina a squaw came up and I couldn’t see as far as the bow. Genesis rounded up, we got knocked around a bit, and I’m sure I wasn’t the model of composure that a Captain should be. Unfortunately, our daughter, who was six at the time, never had a love for boating after that sail. She’d go out, but begrudgingly. My wife and I also found that on a good day, with good winds (and the winds were always too light, too heavy, and always on the nose), it took all day to circumnavigate… Ana Maria Island. This led to boats with throttles attached to bigger engines. We eventually sold Genesis, and the new owners sailed her home to Jacksonville. I hope she still shines with the same pride of ownership (and Poli-Glow) that I remember. Our daughter is now sixteen, she’s a competitive swimmer who loves the water, just in a pool. She has two and a half years until she leaves for college. I’ve followed Bumfuzzle since before we bought Genesis, and Pat’s article on mono vs cat vs trawler had a huge impact on my wife’s and my thinking. The house is sold and we’re in a rental while we prep our GB 42 Europa to go. Although, years back, we could have told our daughter that “we’re all going”, it wasn’t the right thing for us. Yes, I’ve been thinking, reading, and YouTubing for too long, but the “dream was alive and well”, a plan was in place, and action was being taken. I’ve never posted or responded to anything online before… I just thought you (and maybe Pat and Ali) would like to know.
Hey, Rich. I responded to your very nice e-mail last evening. I hope you received it!
Hi Rex and Rich, thanks for sharing your boat stories. Rex, I forwarded your email to Rich this morning. Such a cool connection.
Between the nasty boats and that dog, I suspect he is not on Ali’s favorites list. You are right as rain about just get a boat and go. We were waiting for the last kid to finish college. One year to go I had my first heart attack. Two more over the next two years sunk us. The last half of my 40’s just sucked. I remember reading Harry Pigeon’s story. He built a boat made from drift wood with a mast made from a telegraph pole and rope found in the trash on the beach in San Pedro Ca. Sailed most of the way around. Just about any boat now is like the Starship Enterprise compared to his. Just get one and go. Ken
“I wish people would stop preparing to go sailing and just go sailing instead.” I’m of your persuasion entirely. I remember when I first started using Cruisers Forum thinking of cruising soon after you left with your first catamaran, and there was heated discussion about you crazy nuts who didn’t know squat having the effrontery to just buy a boat and go. They had obsessed on every aspect of sailing and boat buying and you guys were serious heretics in their eyes. I found your blog a few months later and have followed your adventures since, running into you in La Paz a decade back. Happy October!
Similar, “Run what ya brung” is a favorite saying of a rat rodder friend 🙂
Hi Pat and Ali,
A great post as always and your boat buying story resonates as Will commented, a great bit of wisdom.
Thanks,
Bob
Utterly irrelevant joke, except for the dog’s name: The lawyer and accountant were arguing about which profession was older.
The accountant said, “clearly accountancy. We brought order out of chaos”.
The lawyer said, “yes, but who do you think created the chaos?”
Although you have had really good luck buying boats with minimal if any research, I think it could have come out not so well. There are a lot of badly-designed and badly-built boats out there, and your boating experience might have been miserable if you ended with one.
I am the same as your business partner– I LOVE the process of researching. It’s fun for me, and I have felt satisfied many times after buying something (a car,a boat, a TV or whatever) that I ended up with the best one for our needs. I admire your ability to simply buy and GO, that is why I enjoy following your adventures.
haha, I think some would argue buying the delaminated Wildcat wasn’t great luck. Or the Spindrift needing an engine rebuild. But to me those expenses are just a cost of getting out there and doing things.
I will say that your good will towards dogs offsets your lackadaisical attitude towards preparation, karma wise!
As someone here noted you two were well known for your contrary opinions that would upset the internet community. I have waited all these years to see if you would be feeding your kids the fast food heavy diet you took so much flak for. I thought not!