September 3

Dear Friends and Family,

We write to you from Porto Vecchio, on the southeastern tip of Corsica. After five weeks on the boat, we are finally settling into a rhythm and casually referring to our sailboat “Nowornot” as home, as in the phrase “let’s go home.” Of course, rarely does a day go by when home, as in Ladera home, friends, baseball, and burritos don’t get mentioned, with varying degrees of longing.

It has taken a while to get into the rhythm for all the reasons we had anticipated, sort of. Every long-term “cruiser” we talked to warned us that it would take a while to get a newly purchased boat ‘cruising ready’, but Type A’s that we are, we were convinced that we could be efficient about it. NOT. We are slowly learning to make the most of the waits, whether its for a part to come in, a storm to pass, or the other half of the family to wake-up and start moving (that’s toughest for guess who?). But our lack of prep/”shake-down” time up-front meant that for the first several weeks, the boat kept breaking – nothing serious, just dying batteries, an overheating engine, torn headsail, broken head (toilet)… Fortunately, we had the demi-god Vieri with us for the first three weeks, an Italian veteran of the sea who guided us through most of the fixes and/or spoke all the relevant languages to find others to fix when needed. His guidance early on emboldened us to tackle other jobs since he has left. Turns out that not speaking the language – or not speaking it well – makes finding the correct size widget just a wee bit more difficult.

We’ve been on our own now for two weeks and looks like we’re out of the shake down phase. Boat has been working and kids are now part of the operation. Since Vieri left us two weeks ago, we’ve been able to slow down the pace (we are no longer anxious about learning everything we can from him) and take the much needed break we hadn’t taken this summer. Sure, the cruising life is slow and in many ways a big step off the crazy track we were on, but actually living on a boat day to day (and knowing you’ll be doing so for a full year) is hardly a vacation. While frustrating at times, a different life for a year, and not just a very long vacation, is in fact what we wanted and set out to create.

So what did we want in this once-in-a-lifetime year? We’ve spent the past 14 years living a very full life. As a dual career couple, we’ve delegated to others nearly everything we can delegate, including most of the life maintenance stuff like laundry, shopping, cleaning, cooking, and a good part of the taking care of our children. (Fortunately for us, Denise, our caregiver for 9 years, loved our children and cared for all of us.) Our year is partly about adventures at sea and exploring new cultures together, but it is also about learning to do life stuff together and getting the kids to fully participate in this stuff. That includes the day to day life stuff people have to do everywhere, but also the very specific responsibilities of operating and living on a boat. The kids rotate responsibility for cooking and cleaning, they help with laundry, and they join us on our bi-weekly mega-shopping expeditions. (Yesterday we all walked a mile to a grocery store and returned on foot with two overflowing carts.) They also each have boat specific responsibilities – thus far, Adam owns dinghy prep, Danny is prime anchor man, and Sarah has bumper duty before, during and after docking. Both Adam and Danny have been hoisted up the mast to perform various tasks. (Adam had to retrieve a pale that he and Danny raised to the top for kicks – see Adam’s entry.) Each day they participate in more – more of the piloting, navigating, mooring, and every other aspect of moving the boat from one place to another. There can be no passive observers on board, and that sense of responsibility is very much what we wanted for the kids and ourselves, though sometimes we admit we wonder…

This means that life on board is very full, both with wonderful play time, but also with the day to day stuff and the endless tweaks and fixes required to keep us in motion. Soon we will start formally home-schooling the kids, but already each day has been filled with learning, and, as we hoped, we’ve had several priceless “teachable moments.” During a lightening storm in the distance we pulled out the science book and read about static electricity and lightening; on a long walk back from dinner one night, the kids were full of questions about stars, planets, and other wonders, most of which we couldn’t answer, but we had the right book to pull out a when we arrived “home.” The similarities in the romance language, as we move back and forth from France (Corsica) toItaly(Sardinia), are now strikingly clear. Each day we have questions about maps, weather, wind, and sea. Though in a few weeks we’ll start “school” in a more formal way, we’ll continue to build much of the curriculum around our experiences.

Where have we been? At some point in the not too distant future we’ll add to the site our daily log – at least several folks have said they’d like to track our progress that way. But for now, our basic route so far has been as follows:

We started in Cap Ferrat on the French coast near Nice and did our first overnight crossing from Antibes, Cote d’Azur to Saint Florent, Corsica on the 31th of July. Spent the next week traveling down the west coast of Corsica, rushing more than we’d like to beat an approaching “blow” from the southwest. (West coast of Corsica has few harbors with protection from westerlies.) We crossed over to Sardinia, which is just 12 km from the southern tip of Corsica. Turns out that the northeastern tip of Sardinia is full of protected anchorages, beautiful islands (the Madellena chain)… and several female friends of our Italian captain, Vieri. Spent nearly two weeks moving around the islands and the Coast Smerelda, the yachting playground for the rich and very rich. Our boat often felt like a tender to some of the yachts that wowed all of us, especially Danny. They particularly liked the helicopters perched on top of the Aga Khan’s vessel. From the Coast of Smerelda, we detoured for a few days to Bonifacio, a fabulous town built atop a cliff on the southern tip of Corsica. We anchored stern-to, with bow held by our anchor and the stern tied to a rock-cliff within a fjord across from the town. From there we went back to the north of Sardinia (had to pick up a sun shade we were having made), including a few days at harbor in Santa Theresa, sitting out a “blow”, and using the fresh water and shore power to get the boat a bit cleaner. From there it was back to Corsica – including the wonderful small island of Lavezzi, and a truly magnificent anchorage called Rondinara. From there it was north to Porto Vecchio, our current location.

We hope that this first step to get our site up and running provides a bit of an update for those who were looking for one, and we hope to do reasonably frequent updates to keep our pages current and fill out some of those currently remaining blank. We figure that using this site, rather than sending broadcast e.mails, removes the presumption that people should want to keep updated on our progress, and gives you the option to look at as much or as little as you’d like.

We’d sure love to hear from you, but please do note that, given our downloading of e.mail over a cell phone – attachments, pictures and anything else that makes the files at all large can bog down our system.

That’s it from Deb and Steve for now. We hope that the transition from summer to fall is treating all of you well, and look forward to staying in touch one way or another.