Dan and Jaye's cruising blog: Kumatage (reflections on the water)

So, CNN (!!) is developing a piece on small space living and they asked for contributions from people who live in less than 500 square feet.  I'd been wanting to write about what downsizers could learn from our living aboard experiences for some time anyway, I just needed a push.  Below is a slightly modified version of my very first submission for them.  The CNN version is here ; the version in this blog has more photos than I was able to include for CNN, and here I was able to include captions with the photos. Imagine downsizing to the point where everything you own now fits in the cabinets of the average kitchen.  Everything – not just your pots and pans and dishes and canned food and boxes of breakfast cereal, but also your hiking boots and tools and guest towels and computer printer and winter sweaters.  That was the challenge we faced when we moved from a 3-bedroom house to a 33-foot sailboat, 10 years ago. The main salon in its everyday configurat...

We hauled the boat out of the water yesterday to try this new  copper bottom paint  that everyone’s raving about. Like every haulout we’ve ever done, I’m sure it will be an eventful project.  And the adventures began before we  even got out of the water. The marina staff has never used this material before so they really wanted to do it right.   (Of course, we want that too!)  The guys who would actually take our boat out of the water and block it up on land, knew that we were living aboard and hence wanted to put us in the most comfortable place for easy living, close to all the marina amenities (thanx, guys!)  Meanwhile, the guy who was actually going to put the paint on, wanted us in the most isolated out-of-the-way place possible to minimize the chance of dust or spray messing up his work and give us the best job possible (thank you, too!)  – which was of course the exact opposite of the place the first crew had in mi...

This way? or That way? So, early in the  blog hop ,  Jane  asked if we’d take a stand on the question of whether we’re sailors first, who like to travel, or travelers who like to sail.  I really thought the two evolved together for us, as  I wrote a few days ago .  But the question also generated a lovely long conversation with Dan in the cockpit as I was refining the first draft of my blog post.  Because although I agonized back and forth about “why” we were doing this cruising thing -- was it to fill our desire to travel or give us lots of opportunities to indulge our love for sailing -- Dan had no such uncertainty.  “Well, travel, of course!” he said.  The quickness and positiveness of his answer surprised me because of the difficulty I had coming to a conclusion, or maybe underscored that it was a distinction that made no difference to me. I realized in the course of that conversation that he was right – travel was the most i...

Just peeking through the tropical vegetation,  Cinderella  at anchor in the Bahamas. Is it all about the travel? En route to Oxford, MD on a light air day, Dan wonders if he can tweak and extra tenth of a knot  by adjusting the sail trim.  Is it all about the sailing? Some people we know who are currently cruising got their start because they love to sail, and the travel was just a side note.  Others love to travel, and getting there by sail was a practical solution.  Are you a sailor or a traveler?  There’s a  bloghop  on this topic this month, a dozen or so of us cruising bloggers (or blogging cruisers) are posting on the same topic so you can see the range of their various viewpoints. For me, the question of whether the sailing or the traveling came first is exactly equivalent to whether the chicken came first or the egg; or whether it’s about the journey or the destination.   You just can't know; i...

Add us to the ranks of Washingtonians who learned a new word last week.  For those who might have missed it [insert sarcastic face here; I don’t know how you could have missed it if you’re local; even my friend Krissie as far away as western Australia, read about it], we experienced a derecho windstorm – thunderstorms with near hurricane-force winds that came on us with little warning.  They didn’t last very long here, only about 10 minutes for the worst of it, but those 10 minutes left an amazing amount of destruction.  Five days later, there are still a lot of people without power, and my Facebook feed is filled with pictures of LARGE downed tree limbs – the scariest pix show those limbs crushing cars or buildings. So what was it like to experience this storm on the boat?  Surprisingly, relatively easy.  We saw the line of storms approaching on weather radar and Dan went outside to adjust the docklines. The first strong gust heeled us hard to port, and desp...

The sky is more whitish than blue, and the sun is more glaring than shining.  We're experiencing the dreaded HHH (hazy, hot, humid) weather of Washington summertime, with temps in the upper 90s for the next several days.  Dan loves summer warmth, but this is definitely too much of a good thing! So how do we keep our cool on the boat?  You'd think we were in the ideal place to keep cool in summer.  After all, what's the first thing you think of for a hot sunny day?  Going to the beach, right?  And we basically are already there since we live on the water all the time.  For much of the summer, we do in fact have it better than folks who live in the city.  Temperatures are a little bit cooler here at the shore than in the concrete jungle of downtown D.C., of course, and there's nothing to block the light breezes that the Chesapeake in summertime is famous for.  So when it's "sorta hot" out, our favorite strategy is to get away from the dock a...