Reunions

(Meander anchored at Honeymoon Bay)

One of the VERY strange and wonderful things about this lifestyle is the social aspect. You meet people on different boats, in different anchorages, in different countries, scattered around the world. You may become especially close to a couple or in our case families on board boats from all over the world. There are times you may cruise with these boats for months or just share the same hurricane hole for the whole season. Inevitably there is a parting of ways. Sometimes, if you have been traveling in a group for a while, one boat at a time will head to a different place until finally you are the one on a different heading, or the final boat left in what had been a crowded anchorage.


To landlubbers this may sound very sad, and when we first started cruising it was. But since then we have had the, unique to cruising, experience that just happened to me a moment ago, and this experience makes it all worth while. Let me tell you about it.

I was sitting below reading when I heard a rapping on our hull and a voice with a distinct Australian accent calling out and when I peeked my head over the lifelines who did I see but our friends on SV Meander! We had first met Ray and Julie and their son Sam (and Milo the dog) in the Bahamas where we spent a few nights suffering at the posh resort and Marina called Atlantis. We all continued to sail as part of a huge group of “kid boats” through the Bahamas. Those times were some of our families favorites and our kids still miss the families on board boats from that group. There was, Salt and Light, Sanity, Solange IV, High Five, Slow-Mocean, Meander, and a few others. I think the total number of kids was well over 20 during those times. We had BBQs on the beach, gangs of Dads would go out with spears and fish together, having competitions to see who had the biggest lobster that day. The kids explored, swam, built forts, and one time a huge hermit crab hotel. The last time we saw Meander was over two years ago in Georgetown, Bahamas, where they had the whole group (that’s a LOT of people) over for drinks and snacks on Meander. Since then we have continued to cruise in the Caribbean while some of those boats are now in Bonaire, a couple are in Cartagena, Salt and Light has made it all the way home to Seattle, Meander gets the “Most Distance Traveled” award for that particular group. After they left us all, they crossed the Atlantic and sailed up the Med as far as Greece, and came back across this year. If you want to read about their adventures check out their blog at www.sailblogs.com/member/meander they had some great stories to tell.

We are looking forward to spending a week or so with them here at Honeymoon Bay.

Captain Tofer

The Fall of Romeo

(Bella Americana)

The sound of children laughing followed by a splash beside our boat is pretty much an everyday sound here on Wandering Dolphin. But the other day when I heard it and looked around me I noticed that all five of my children were within sight and, believe it or not, they were all working on schoolwork.

Every one of my kids was on instant alert, books forgotten, and within a half second they were bursting up on deck to see who the “new” kids were on the mooring next to us. The boat was a 49 foot Bavaria flying an Italian flag. They had rigged a boarding platform from the transom of their boat and it was raised or lowered with a spare halyard. It hung off the back of the boat about eight or ten feet and the really cool thing about it was that with the pull of the halyard it could be raised up about 12 feet in the air, or with a quick motion it could be lowered right down to the water, perfect for divers of all difficulty levels.

The boat had two children aboard one was a little girl whose age I would estimate at eight to ten (right about the age of all three of my little boys) and a boy of about twelve. Well both kids began to put on a little impromptu diving exhibition for our children who were now lined up along the lifelines “Oooooing and awwwwing” the Italian kids. The boy was especially eyeing EmilyAnne and his dives and jumps were getting more and more daring. Pretty soon he was looking right at her and putting on a little show. At one point he stood on the end of the board backwards but facing Emily he looked at her and gave her a wink then clutched his heart with both hands and fell off the board backwards. My little boys were full of questions and an actual argument about if the girl on that boat was actually a girl or a boy. Sure she was wearing what was obviously a pink bikini bottom but her brother was wearing what to them looked just like a girls blue bikini bottom (read Speedo) and Kaleb was disgusted with his brothers for even considering that she might be a girl because she was wearing no bikini top and he was certain that THAT was against the LAW so therefore she HAD to be a boy! I broke up the fight before fists started to fly because Benny was now feeling a little strange having decided moments before this that he kinda liked the looks of this little girl so she had better BE a girl. I informed them that the folks on that boat were from Italy which was in Europe and that they thought it was ok for girls of pretty much any age to run around with no tops on…. Kanyon was disgusted by the thought but they all wanted to talk more about it. Kaleb pondered it and said, “So they are like the French only they wear bottoms?” I nodded and at about this time Romeo had moved the board to its highest postion and climbed to the top, eliciting a little gasp out of Emily, which I am sure was his intention. He had our attention and then the halyard slipped out of its spinlock and the board dropped a full 12 feet into the water with a bang bouncing Romeo a couple of times and flinging him into the water with a spectacular CRASH/SPLASH at one point his nether regions covered only by a blue speedo were on one side of the halyard while his body fell off the other so I was certain that he would be in pain. He came up crying and wailing (with good reason) but all we could hear him say as his Momma and Pappa pulled him out of the water was, “BELLA AMERICANA!!!” which I was pretty sure meant something like pretty American. He was so devastated and embarrassed that he went below and pretty soon they released the mooring and sailed away.

My kids were still jabbering about it all as they continued to work on school the rest of the morning.

Arrivederci,

Captain Tofer

Kids and Cruising

(Our kids with their cruising buddies at TTSA in Trinidad last summer)

Our kids have been living aboard and cruising for almost five years now.  I often forget what a different lifestyle they have than the kids back home.  Our life is an everyday "normal" life to them now.  They think nothing of living in close quarters with their parents and siblings.  They know that kids they meet and befriend will inevitably either leave or be left behind.  They also know that they will probably see those kids again at some point and that when that happens it's like they have not even been apart.

Our youngest, Benny, who just turned seven was asking me the other day why other people wanted to live on land.  He was so little when we moved aboard that he doesn't remember any other home.  He swims like a fish and the water around our boat is as much a playground to him as the backyard is to landlubber kids.  He lays up on the mainsail on the boom and plays with his toys to get away from his brothers. 

Our oldest, Jimmy, is 17 and as he struggles through the final years of high school with his father as his teacher and trys to decide what he wants to do with his life he has naturally drifted to a career on the water (the Coast Guard.)  As I watch him go through this process I realize that almost certainly my children will all probably end up doing something that has to do with the ocean. 
EmilyAnne is 13 in a few weeks and has started talking about becoming a marine biologist so she can work with marine mammals.  She is also quite an artist and you won't be surprised that most of her art is mermaids, dolphins, and sailboats.

Our boat is so much more than just a boat.  It is a home and even more it is a member or extension of our family.  When the kids talk about the boat they call Wandering Dolphin, "her" and you can see the pride in their faces when they are talking with other cruising kids about her.  It's fun to listen to a little boy tell his friend how great she sails to windward.

I am often asked if I sometimes regret our choice to move on the boat, or if I think it has been the right choice for our children... I can honestly say that the only regret I have is that we didn't move aboard sooner!

Captain Tofer

Choosing Where to Go Part 2

Continuing on the theme from the last blog: Becky and I were chatting over coffee this morning and as we discussed the coming summer and our choices we realized that we were having the dickens (does anyone actually say that anymore?) of a time choosing our path. We began to wonder if this was just part of our nature or if other cruising friends have struggled in the same way? You all know who you are… comment and let us know if the choices you made while cruising were a difficult part of the process. We have “decided” on a course of action over and over again only to continue thinking about a different option until we were again back at square one.

I think this is part of the reason we frustrate our families… we seem to be flakey because we cannot just choose a path and stick to it no matter what. So here is the continuation of our thinking. Some of you asked to be an intimate part of our life cruising, in my opinion this whole “choosing where you are going next” is a part of the lifestyle.

The easy choice for us would be to sail back to the East Coast of the US. I have sailed back and forth from the VI to the US eight times so it is a familiar passage to say the least. Jimmy and I have delivered boats up and down the east coast of the US so many times now that there are very few surprises as far as entrances or inlets. We have a little town that is dear to all of us, (Oriental, NC) we would love to ang out back there with those folks for a season. We would be able to cruise in the Bahamas again and we all loved that too. So with all of these positive things piles on the side of heading back for the year we “decided’ that that would be our choice. At first we felt very relieved to have made a choice… it lasted about 24 hours before we were talking about sailing in the Pacific again.

Why? This is not at all the easy course to follow.  The trip would involve a whole new area of the world, the Panama Canal would have to be traversed and the Pacific Ocean would introduce us to true long distance sailing. Oh sure we have done 8 to 10 day trips but most of them are 5 to 8 day trips and even on deliveries the longest Jimmy and I have been offshore was for 13 days. We would also not be able to work in Panama (probably) so we would have to have enough money and provisions on board to get us through the summer and through the canal and provision the boat for a long (30+ day) passage.

So… why can we not just be happy to make the choice to sail back to the East Coast and be done with it? HMMMM well we want to see new places so that is a positive for us…. The Panama Canal would be cool to go through and educational for the kids… we feel ready for the next step in cruising and a long passage would be good for us… we would rather be cruising than working any day sooooo…..

We do want to sail around the world and heading back to the east coast feels like going backwards…. OH that’s because IT IS!! Our boat is a true blue water boat in great shape and ready for sea today. She needs a few things but nothing that would prevent her from making long offshore passages (we have the part in the mail for the auto pilot by the way) In my mind the only thing that would keep us from moving forward toward the Pacific is fear… fear of the unknown, of the long passages, of our own ability to handle what is thrown at us. I truly believe though that a drive in a car from North Carolina to Washington State and back to North Carolina would be more dangerous than a sail from The VI to Panama and then from Panama to Washington state via Hawaii.

This is our current JELLO MOLD plan. (Cruisers understand that comment, for those of you who don’t it means, the plans are made like jello they can wiggle around and change at any time.)

CURRENT PLAN: We will stay in St Thomas through most of May so Jimmy and I can do our deliveries (Marinette and Changin Tags) and then we will sail to Cartagena, Columbia and on to Panama where we will spend the summer hurricane season out of the path of all of the blobs of doom on the weather page. We will explore the San Blas Islands and make our way to the canal and through in time to give us a little time on the Pacific side to explore the Las Perlas. Then toward the middle of November we will set sail for Hawaii (To answer Rennie: because we have to make money and the cruising kitty will be about empty by then, and it's "on the way" to Washington State ... oh and it is HAWAII after all!) where we will settle in for the winter months working and living in much the same way we do here in the US VI. In May or June we will set sail on the long passage to Washington State where we can visit Becky’s family and drive out to see mine in Wyoming.

So there you have it… for now hehehehehe.

Trying to actually SET the mold,

Captain Tofer

Where Should We Go Next?

One of the GREAT things about our lifestyle is that we get to choose every year where we want to go next.  For those of you who do not know we are actually trying (though not very hard) to sail around the world.  We have no dates or plans beyond that thought and simply REFUSE to put ourselves on a timetable.  That being said, the weather determines a lot of things for us because of those blasted hurricanes.  So every summer we really try to find a way to get out, or nearly out, of the ZONE.  Also when planning a serious ocean leg like any of the South Pacific one simply is a fool to travel those long distances in the hurricane seasons.  With those thoughts as background for you, here are our thoughts for this year.

We feel the need to really get moving through the canal and into the Pacific and at the same time we REALLY need to get out to Wyoming and Washington to visit our families.  It has been four years since we moved on the boat and in that time we have only seen Amy and Ellie, and Cheryl, Becky's sister, niece and Mom who have visited us both in Charleston and last summer Amy and Ellie stayed on the boat with us down in Trinidad.  When I first dreamed of moving onto the boat I really thought family and friends would use it as an excuse to come see some of the beautiful places we visit but this has not been the case so one way or another we intend to get out to see them.  Travel for the seven of us by air is pretty much out of the question so we are considering one of two options.

Option #1:  We will sail the boat in May to the east coast of the US and do a little summer cruising up to washington DC, New York City, and perhaps Long Island Sound.  Then we will head back south to our favorite little town, Oriental, North Carolina, where we will put the boat on the hard for a couple of months at Sailcraft and we will lease a car and drive out to visit our families for the rest of the summer.  In September or October we would head back to Oriental where we would do our boat work and then we would head south toward the Windward Passage, Jamaica, and on to Caragena, Columbia, and the Panama Canal.  We would then sail to Hawaii in April-May.

Option #2:  We would stay here through the summer working and braving the hurricanes and leave for a direct sail from St Thomas to Cartagena next November.  We would spend Nov. - March in Cartagena and  cruising the San Blas, transiting the canal in march and heading offshore on a straight 4800 mile sail directly to Bellingham, Washington.

The other factor is that Jimmy has decided (you have NO idea the importance of that little statement) to enter the US Coast Guard so he will need an accredited High School Deploma.  He will be moving to Wyoming for his final year of High School to live his Grandparents and finish school.  When Jimmy leaves us it will be really rough.  Not only will he be our first kid out of the nest but he has become such an integral member of the crew and a delivery crew for me that his loss will hurt us more than just in the heart.  But we are very happy and excited for him to make the choices he is and support him 100%.

So... yep we have the pleasure of decideing where we want to go next... but... the choice is not that easy.

Thanks for the comments!!! It is greta to know you all are keeping tabs on us.  Let me know what you think of our options.

God Bless,
Captain Tofer

Update from Honeymoon Bay

Happy New Year... late.

I find it difficult to blog once we get into the swing of our work months.  I forget that a lot of you still want to read about our everyday life during this time as well.  To me it seems, "same old same old" but I guess it's still different from a life on land.

November:  One stormy night a boat drug down on us in a squall with up to 50 knots of wind, it wound up getting pinned to our bow with our mooring line between its keel and rudder where it pounded our bow and bow pulpit for about 20 minutes in breaking waves of 4 to 6 feet.  Our buddy Christian was anchored out next to us and in the middle of the squall he came over in his dingy to help us but was thrown end over end by one of the breaking waves... his dingy was upside down floating away and he scrambled aboard our little hard dingy and continued to try to help us even as his own situation was perilous.  In the end, once the wind stopped and the waves died down we freed the ofending sailboat from our bow and rafted it to us for the rest of the night, Christian was ok but a little beat up and we recovered his dingy and almost all of the gear that had been set free when she was tumbled upside down.  A couple of guys from another boat got out of bed right then (1:00am) and proceeded to take Christian's dingy engine, which was almost new, appart and rinse it in fresh water, drain it and refuel it and it started right up in the morning.  Our bow pulpit will need to be rebuilt and we will probably never see a dime from the owner of the boat that dragged that night but it sure could have been worse.

December:  Benny's Birthday on the 4th... Kristofer's Birthday on the 19th, Christmas, Kaleb's birthday on the 27th, Our 21st wedding Annaversary on the 31st....  Wow it's a hard month on our pocketbook but we had a great one and our little Christmas Tree had plenty of fun stuff under it on Christmas Morning.  (A different boat dragged down on us Christmas morning too hehehe)

January:  Kristofer and Jimmy delivery with Dick Shirley onboard his sailing vessel "Changin' Tags" from COLD and snowy Norfolk, VA to St Thomas.  We zipped along the rum line to St Thomas with the help of NW winds blowing at Gale Force for seven days.  It calmed down to 30 knots for most of the rest of the trip and we ended up doing a record (for us) 9 day trip.  We also had a passenger along on that delivery, a bona fide movie star named Patrick Houser best known for his 1984 T and A flick "Hot Dog The Movie."  He was alomng for the ride and boy did he get one but he ended up standing watch for a lot of the trip and was a great hand to have along.  It's always fun to put a liberal Californian on a small boat with no escape from a Conservative Wyomingite we had some rather heated discussions as those of you who know me can imagine.  No one was thrown overboard although I am sure Dick was considering it one night.

Today:  It has rained for the past three days and actually feels like winter to me... we have the fans off, we pull a blanket over ourselves at night, and Jimmy turned positively blue while cleaning the bottom today.  Temp: 74F ..... brrrrrrr I wore a T-shirt most of the day.  The kids all still went into the beach in the rain and Beck worked. 

If you want feel free to comment... I am more likely to blog when I get feedback sometimes I am not really sure anyone is out there paying attention to it.

God Bless,

Captain Tofer

Thanksgiving on the Beach

Yesterday Rebecca had to work so I loaded our two dingy’s with food and kids and headed to the beach where the Water Island Community Association was putting on a pot luck Thanksgiving dinner. Often when our big family goes to these things we feel a little strange and get some odd looks even if we bring a ton of food ourselves. I always kind of feel like the fat man muscling his way up to the buffet table as I head in with our 5 kids. The folks on Water Island made us all feel very welcome and there was food enough for seconds for all. Benny, of course, only wanted to eat cake. He has somehow become a VERY picky eater which makes his life a little tough on the boat because we have a set food menu and he doesn’t like most of it. We also invited a guy named Shawn who lives alone on an old ferrocement ketch here. He sat at our table and gorged himself along with the rest of us.

Thanksgiving was always a really big deal when I was growing up. It was the holiday that would draw in more of my seven brothers than any other (of course they are all BIG guys so the feast probably played a part in that. I called home to Wyoming and talked with my Mom and could hear the sounds of family in the background. My niece Dr Sara is there with her new baby and several of my brothers were there. All of my kids talked on the phone with Grandma and we all missed them just a little bit more.

Later in the evening Rebecca called her family and they got on Skype so we had the cam going on our side and they could see us. We laughed and had a grand time like we were all together. Rebecca’s sister Amy and niece Ellie were there helping the rest of the family understand our life a little better since they stayed on the boat with us for a while last summer in Trinidad.

This lifestyle is great and none of us want to move on land again yet but during the holidays it sure is hard to be far away from those we love. Our buddy Christian would say, “Hey it’s part of the price of admission.” I think that is true, no matter what life you choose you have to take the good with the bad.

We Miss YOU ALL!

Captain Tofer, Becky, Jimmy, Emily, Kanyon, Kaleb, Benny and the dog Charlie