Roll with the changes

The REO Speedwagon song Roll With the Changes has at various times in my life has been an anthem to listen to at loud volume while dancing and singing and of course air-guitaring. This song returns once again to be an appropriate way to describe where we’re at.

Last we checked in, we were figuring out if we and our boat were ready to sail to Hawaii. And this was a really good exercise for us in what it takes to prep our boat and to the extent we could, ourselves, to get ready for a big passage. We had done so many projects to get Horizon far more watertight and sea-ready than when we arrived in LA, and we were really proud of how we had handled our emotions and relationship under stress and some difficult conditions throughout those couple of months.

As we got closer to our potential departure date around November 10th, our first weather window looked promising as potentially a smooth sail for at least much of the first week of a two-week-ish crossing. We appropriately made our to-do lists, to-did much of it, and then when we got an updated look at the weather, the Alaskan storms were raging and would very much have affected our sail with some big waves/swell and wind events and no reprieve in sight. Some Novembers it’s a lot calmer on the Alaskan storm front — not this one. Given that we are not on a schedule at all, we decided that while we and our boat would be capable of handling those conditions, that vibe wasn’t really what we’re going for — we’d prefer to leave Los Angeles on our boat in nicer seasons and not choose to go out and beat ourselves up.

So not having left to Hawaii, we have two potentially realistic scenarios in front of us — 1) Mexico somehow comes through over the next few months with this convoluted paperwork snafu and we sail there. This is still our preferred option — anytime in the winter will have weather windows to make it smoothly down the Baja coastline or 2) in the event Mexico does not come through, we sail next March/April-ish for the Marquesas in the South Pacific, which is the right time to go hurricane-season wise. This would be a big crossing like Hawaii, but in the direction we’d prefer to go ultimately.

Given that we cannot technically live on our boat where we are keeping her in LA, and that we had been working on our boat a *lot* without that anticipated fun part of cruising we had expected (i.e., eating delicious food in Mexico, sailing to warmer waters, etc.), we decided to get out of dodge and travel a bit to give ourselves some adventure, even if it’s not the adventure we had been expecting.

It hasn’t been easy to navigate all of the uncertainty, and there have definitely been many moments of grief for our sailing adventure and what could have been except for dysfunctional bureaucracy and deceptive boat brokers. Simultaneously, we are also beyond grateful to leave our boat in a place where she is safe and to have the opportunity to go travel and see new things and be patient for the right next step to unfold. The French have a beautiful verb dépayser, which literally means to de-country oneself (to change scenery, to disrupt the routine), so for a few weeks/months we will be exploring parts of Asia new to us and will let the rich mix of cultures dépayse ourselves.

As this is meant to be a sailing blog, I’m hesitant to put updates that are not sailing related in it. There are enough people taking selfies everywhere we go on land that I hardly want to do the same (I actually have been taking photos of people taking photos/videos of themselves instead as a countermeasure, not sure of its efficacy as balm for my soul yet). So we’ll be taking a break from blog content until something in our sailing situation shifts! As always you can reach out to us via email or text and we’ll happily send you love and updates that way instead. Much love to all of you for your support and kind words of encouragement as we have navigated (yep, I did it, a sailing pun) the uncharted and frustrating waters of bureaucracy. Bisous to all of you.