Somewhere out of the blue, at the age of 43, when I was
living in the heart of Manhattan with our growing family of three talented,
vivacious daughters, I decided that my life dream was to be captain of a
tugboat. I used to gaze dreamily at the East River near our apartment, watching
the Moran tugs go back and forth and longing to have the sweet brackish winds
blowing my hair back as I offered assistance to the many barges on the river.
Perhaps it had something to do with my lifelong love for the story of Little
Toot, that intrepid little tug who saved the day by blowing “S.O.S” out of his
cute little smokestack, proving that he wasn’t just a silly, frivolous kid.
Perhaps it had something to do with my lifelong sense of restlessness, ever
pacing and wanting to see just what is around the next corner.
I never did pursue that dream (way too busy at “midlife”
with school volunteering, church activities and on and off full time jobs as an
office manager/development coordinator/bookkeeper for various NYC businesses
and non-profits.) Too risk averse. Too nervous about going back to school for
anything whatsoever. After graduating from Cornell with Distinction twenty-one
years prior, I had opted never to pursue grad school due to years of PTSD-like
anxiety dreams I had of ending the semester and sitting for the final exam
after not having read one word from the course syllabus nor attending any
class, feeling helpless and terrified. I always said (and believed) that my
family was my career and that any paying jobs I picked up along the way were
simply something that needed to be done to help with the family income.
My husband, Rick, while not sharing the dream to be a
tugboat captain per se, spent his childhood weekends boating on Long Island
Sound with his family and, as an adult, always longed to get back to the water
and to owning his own boat. Life in Manhattan was expensive and putting that
much capital into a money-gobbling boat seemed foolish for our growing family.
So, in 2000, after two of our daughters were out of college
and the third one was 12, we decided to venture out to the “left coast” ~
specifically, Seattle, a city that is surrounded by and filled with a number of
bodies of water and, I believe, has one of the highest per capita boat
ownership rates in the US, with the hopes that the slightly lower cost of
living and easy access to both fresh and salty bodies of water would enable us
to spend lots of time on the water.
It took us six years, but in 2006 we did buy a tiny little
tug named Rascal aka Little Toot, and spent a fun, glorious summer tootling
around Lake Union, Lake Washington, and going back and forth through the Chittenden Locks to Puget Sound. But in 2007, Rick accepted a three year
assignment in Nevada working as the contract manager for the bridge that was
being built over the Colorado River to bypass the Hoover Dam. (Totally worth
visiting, by the way!) Selling our own “Little Toot” seemed to be the only
smart thing to do.
The Hoover Dam, of course, being 20 miles south of Las
Vegas, is in the middle of a desert, making boating somewhat problematic,
though we did manage to steal a few days over the course of two years renting
boats on the Colorado River and in Lakes Mead and Mojave.
At the conclusion of the Nevada project, we moved back to
our house in Seattle in 2011, and Rick went back to his daily scouring of the
internet for possible live-aboards in the San Juan Islands about two hours north
of Seattle.
And, then, one day in late April, 2013, Rick called me in to
his office and showed me pictures of, well, to be perfectly honest, a ship that
was for sale on eBay. The ship was berthed in Ft. Myers, FL, offering me the
bonus that I would be just two hours away from my beloved sister whom I visited
two or three times a year from Seattle. It seemed just, perhaps, maybe, maybe
to be a feasible venture, though it would mean that we would sell our house in
Seattle and purchase the boat with some of the cash proceeds. It offered living
areas that at least equaled our living areas in Seattle, three staterooms
(bedrooms), two and a half heads (baths), a fully equipped galley (kitchen) and
even a dining area that would accommodate our dining room table. It also
offered lots more for which I certainly never bargained, but that’s for another
day.
I had just returned from my most recent visit to my sister’s
when Rick suggested that we fly back down, stay with my sister, and take a look
at the boat. And so the adventure began …
