Our first full sailing season is in the books. Here’s 12 lessons we’ve learned:
1. Everything on a boat is designed specifically to grab your toes and rip them off your feet or bludgeon them into unrecognizable stubs.
2. Jumping in the ocean is the best way to start your day.
3. One of the most exhilarating sounds ever to be heard, happens right after you raise your sails and they arch with full breath—that moment you reach down, turn off the motors, and you suddenly hear the sound of your boat rushing through the water under nature’s awesome power.
4. The best sleep comes after a long passage when you’re safely anchored and the work and watch hours are done. It’s the hard earned sleep of explorers.
5. The boat feels better when your kids are sailing on it with you.
6. If you’re draining a broken toilet, do not make the person holding onto the bag of sewage laugh. Things will only get worse and there will be nothing to laugh about after that. Crap is serious business and not the time to make immature jokes.
7. If you forget to close the screen on your hatch window at night, you will be slowly eaten alive by mosquitoes for the next two days.
8. Your sense of awe and wonder is amplified the closer you live to nature.
9. So is your need for bite cream.
10. Croc flip-flops are the hiking boot for sailors.
11. If you toss your leftover salad overboard, it will float its way around an anchorage and annoy people trying to swim. Especially if said neighbors are on luxury yachts.
12. Meeting other sailors is one of the absolute best parts of sailing. And hearing how people on other boats found their way to a life on the sea makes Mark and I realize we really aren’t insane after all.
