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Still Speaking After
8000 Miles
1/30/02
Blaine Parks
Many friendships and marriages have failed under normal
conditions. Confining
those relationships to a forty-foot boat, and surviving, was a concern we
heard often before our departure. Janet
and I remembered a time when we couldn’t get enough of each other.
Of course, we were dating back then and everything was new and
exciting. Shortly after our
marriage, a new job left me traveling almost all the time.
As those working years went on and I continued to travel, Janet and
I became more independent and led our own private lives while we were
apart. We thoroughly
enjoyed each other’s company during our times together, but we had grown
more apart than those early years. Moving aboard ‘Charbonneau’ gave us many challenges.
One of the most important was to redefine our relationship within
our new, much cozier, home.
Eight
thousand nautical miles have passed under Charbonneau’s keel.
Some of those miles have been under blissful conditions, others a
little bumpy, and some downright scary or frustrating.
That also describes our relationship during the last eighteen
months. It should come as no
surprise that relationships aren’t perfect every day.
Living in a boat has some unique challenges that we’ve had to
adjust to. Our adjustment has
been a fairly successful one so we thought we’d share some of our
learned experiences. Remember,
I am not a psychiatrist or a marriage counselor. I’m
just a husband and crewmember who has not been asked to ‘walk the
plank’ by the Admiral (yet!).
The first
thing to understand about living aboard a cruising boat is that life no
longer resembles that sense of ‘everyday’ that we had in our land
lives. On land, our days were
very organized. We woke up,
took showers, ate breakfast, drove to work, worked all day, drove home,
ate dinner, relaxed, and then went to sleep before starting the process
all over again. If
something upset that pattern it created stress and had to be dealt with.
Depending on the event, they represented either a good spike or a
bad spike in the normal noise-levels of our lives.
Life aboard
our boat has been just the opposite.
A cruiser we met recently described it as life, only larger.
The high points are higher than you could imagine.
The lows are usually lower. But,
there isn’t much in the middle. You
simply go from the high to the low, skipping the middle noise-levels where
we lived most of our lives ashore. Life
becomes very real and, to use the term, ‘in your face’.
I don’t ever recall sitting up all night in our home watching the
other homes go flying by as they were pushed around by extreme winds and
currents – fearing that one of them would collide with us and cause
serious damage. I also
don’t ever remember being surprised by loud breathing sounds of a pod of
porpoises as they traveled with us through a long, dark night marked by a
brilliant sky of stars. It
happens out here all the time.
Combine
limited personal space, an emotional roller coaster of living, new roles,
and sprinkle in a few moments of pure terror (very few) and you don’t
have a textbook equation for solid relationships.
However, we’ve found that you can make a few adjustments that
will not only ensure your personal survival, but will enrich your
relationships.
One of the
most important things we did was to provide equal space for each other.
That includes an agreed upon division for storing our personal
belongings and the items associated with our ‘roles’ on the boat.
If the captain is responsible for boat maintenance and insists on
having the spare parts (used rarely) in the most accessible spaces and
pushing the cook’s food items to a remote location (used often), you may
find yourself eating grilled spare parts, alone!
Remember when you were younger and you learned to share nicely.
Those lessons apply here.
You also
need to have a place where each of the crew can retreat for some time
alone. If you have children
aboard, giving them their own space will greatly improve their happiness
aboard. When you spend each
waking moment with your crewmembers, there are times when you just want to
get away. Janet and I have
developed some spaces aboard Charbonneau that work well for us. I tend to rise earlier than Janet and treasure my morning
time in the cockpit with the dogs before she joins us for breakfast.
Janet tends to enjoy a specific place in our salon where she can
read or work on her cross-stitch projects.
We both respect those moments of ‘alone time’, which allows us
to enjoy our ‘together time’ even more.
I keep
referring to the new roles you’ll have when moving aboard.
Our roles have taken some traditional divisions.
While I enjoyed cooking at home, Janet has taken over the cooking
duties on Charbonneau, as well as provisioning.
She also does the research for future destinations, handles all the
teak varnishing, and maintains several inventories of items we have
aboard. I am the boat’s
chief dishwasher, mechanic, and captain.
We split the cleaning duties fairly evenly.
I usually do the vacuuming, metal polishing, and boat waxing.
Janet takes care of the other cleaning tasks. We can both do the other’s chores if necessary, but have
been happy with our division of labor.
Now comes
the part that most of you are expecting.
What about those bumpy times when the crew finds itself at odds
with one another? It happens
out here just like it does on land. We used to argue, yell a little, and walk to our respective
corners knowing that we could work it out after our tempers left us.
Now that we’re living in a more confined space, our
disagreements, or fights, are handled a little differently.
First, we always hold our tongues if we’re handling the boat in
close quarters. The boat’s
safety comes first. We resort
to our team roles when anchoring, docking, or sail handling.
We both know our roles and don’t let our anger disrupt the
well-practiced maneuvers. We
also have a rule of never yelling or fighting in public.
We’ve seen others do it and it is such bad form.
Nobody wants to hear you screaming at each other and disrupting an
otherwise peaceful anchorage in paradise.
Afterwards, and this is the part that men will hate, we try to talk
the argument through. I admit
that I can’t always talk it out immediately.
There is too much testosterone for that at times.
But you HAVE to work it out. There
is no place to run unless you plan on leaving the boat for good. And when the fighting is over, you have to let it go.
If you hang onto any resentment, you’ll never enjoy yourself.
Remember, if you’re a cruising couple, that other person is the
one you’ll be spending ALL of your time with.
How long can you go with nobody to talk to?
The good
news is that I find we argue less on the boat than we did on land.
There is just too much to see and do out here to spend time
arguing. You have to work as
a team. When we’re
offshore, we place our lives and the safety of the boat completely in the
hands of the other person. If
we couldn’t trust each other, we would never get any sleep offshore.
The satisfaction we receive from successfully negotiating a narrow
reef entry to a protected anchorage or the arrival at a far-away
destination is a bond that holds us together.
Janet or I could both run this boat by ourselves, but it wouldn’t
be quite as much fun without having the other to share it with.
So, to all
our family and friends who wondered if we’d kill each other in such a
small space, the answer is ‘not yet.’
We’ve had to make several personal adjustments, learn how to
react as a team, and we continue to evolve in our relationship.
Eight thousand miles of sailing together doesn’t make us experts
on relationships. However, it
does infer that if we can do it, perhaps you and your favorite crewmember
could do it as well.
We’ll see you
on the water.
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