Stylin'

I'd been threatening to do this since forever! Dan had mentioned to one of the shopkeepers here at the resort on Day 1 that I was interested in getting my hair braided, and next morning by the time we got back from the grocery store, "Yvonne" was waiting for me, with her comb and bag of beads. The process took about 3 hours, and we had plenty of time for conversation. I learned she's from Jamaica, and all of her family is still there. She used to be in real estate, but her boss wasn't paying her timely. She got into hair by chance, a friend's suggestion, and found it creative and fun. Our session would normally be held under a tree on the beach, but the hurricane last week made her usual spot untenable. The damaged bar we used instead attracted attention from a number of passers-by (good advertising for Yvonne).

The braids are easy-care (a.k.a. no care), cool and comfortable. The beads chatter happily when I turn my head. They've attracted a lot of attention and started a lot of conversations. I may still look like a tourist, but at least I look like a gutsy one!

Interlude: St Maarten

We left Annapolis 25 Oct, and claim we won't be back until we have a new president! Reached St Maarten just after Category 3 Hurricane Omar went through, damaged a lot of property but no people were hurt.

I'd hate to lose these

I've just learned that my blog for the paper doesn't archive more than about a half-dozen posts, and I'd hate to lose the old ones. So this is copied from Life Afloat
http://www.hometownannapolis.com/blog_jlunsford.html

and I'll be adding the photos as my internet connection allows.

2008-10-19 -- 8:34 am
Boat Show
I love Boat Show time in Annapolis! My efriend Melissa Renee put it this way: "I love this show. So many new shiny boats begging for owners that will love them. Many gadgets to buy in all the booths. Pussers painkillers in tin mugs to drink. The best weather in the history of the show."

We went on to detail our purchases. We can be excited about "girl stuff" - she bought the same nesting cookware I bought last year, and I got new shades for our portholes (expensive, but hey, this is my home). But we are sailors after all, and got equally excited about boat hardware - a snatch block for her and a 6-part purchase for me.In our crowd, no one asks "if" you're going to the boat show; they ask "which day(s)?" And the only topic of conversation in the evening is "Whadjaget?" Answers can range anywhere from "a couple of keychain floats, beer coozies, and a t-shirt" to big ticket items like solar panels, watermaker, or sails. New breathable rain gear (or "foulies" as we call them), and binoculars were other popular items.

Our boat had been used as a daysailer and floating condo before we bought it, and we're gradually getting the systems up to standard for extended cruising. Dan and I went to the show on Friday, and spent 6-1/2 hours walking through the vendors' tents. Some really clever ideas in boat gear to explore, others I can only describe as "solutions to problems you didn't know you had." For us, it was equal parts Christmas morning (without the cold), and shoppers with a mission as we had quite a list of products to research. We barely had time to look at new boats, but we certainly contributed to the local economy and now there are a fistful of receipts on our board. And in the aftermath of the show, I'm blogging and Dan's bending pipe cleaners into a model of the arch he wants the steel fabricator to build for our boat.

Of course, it's a boat show, after all, so we had to look at the boats themselves. We're not in the market for another boat, being totally happy with the one we live on, but that doesn't stop us from shopping for ideas. A lot like going to open houses and looking at model homes, I learn the most in my own price bracket or slightly above. We tend to look at boats that are more or less within our own size range - 30 to 36 feet. I can't wrap my mind around the luxuries aboard an 80-foot megayacht. The boats at the show, and their prices, were impressive for the most part. Some of the production boats were forced to make some changes, compromising on materials to keep the boat in a certain price range. (Melissa Renee confirmed this with one of the sales people at the show.) Sad in that sense, but I'm all for anything that will allow more people to get into sailing.

Most of all, I love the energy of the out-of-town crowds, the chance to meet/reconnect with friends from far away who've come in for the show. We had parties or friends over almost every night, and I had more than my fill of pizza, munchies, beer. One particularly fun gathering was a group from an internet sailing site - some of us have been emailing for years, and now have a face to put with a screen name. Mike and Christie won the 'distance award' for that group, having flown in from Colorado for the show. Now the powerboaters are in town, and its a totally different vibe. Hoping to get downtown for some good people-watching this afternoon!

Mike and Christie, taking a break from the show

2008-09-28 -- 6:33 pm
Going through the bridge
Last weekend we were invited to an engagement party that friends Eric and Carleen were hosting for their son, Jeff, and soon-to-be-daughter-in-law Dorri. E and C have waterfront property and it was just too tempting to visit them by boat. We went for a day sail on Saturday and finished by dropping the hook off Truxton Park. We could just hear the announcer calling the Navy football game.

Rowing in to the party certainly made for a dramatic entrance and a great conversation starter. I even managed to keep my white pants clean, no mean feat when the dock was high enough that I had to climb out on my hands and knees. The guests were a fun mix of their neighbors, soon-to-be-inlaws, and boating friends like us. Many photos were taken of the happy couple with the sunset and the anchored boats in the background. Time passed way too quickly, and it was dark by the time we went back to the dock. The tide had risen and it was an easy step back into the dinghy for the row back home.

Next day, we had hoped to have our friends over for coffee in the cockpit, but they were just too overwhelmed with the party and their houseguests, so we decided to save that for another time. Instead, our day included a long chat with the folks anchored next to us. We took the dinghy and rowed up to the very end of the creek, far too shallow for our "big boat" to go. A man in a kayak smiled at us and said not a word as we watched a heron stalking the shallows, moving in that odd, articulated, mechanical way they have. It felt like another world, although less than an hour by boat from our somewhat congested home on Back Creek. But it *was* time to go back to reality, so we packed up and headed out, trying to time our arrival with the every-half-hour bridge openings at the Spa Creek bridge. After all those times we waited in traffic behind the open bridge to get downtown, or Dan stressed behind the open bridge wondering if he would be late for work, now the traffic was stopped for *us*, as the bridge tender raised the bridge and through we went.

2008-09-20 -- 8:27 am
Of jellyfish and plastic bags
If you google "beaches" and "jellyfish" together, you get articles from the Med to Australia about resorts inundated with these stinging blobs. Here in the Chesapeake, NOAA publishes predictions of the likelihood of encountering sea nettles, based on water temperature and salinity: http://155.206.18.162/seanettles/ People are reduced to swimming in Lycra skins or in small areas fenced off with fine mesh nets. And much of the population explosion is due to overfishing the jellyfish's natural predators, sea turtles and tuna and other similar large fish.The poor sea turtles! If that wasn't bad enough, when they do try to get a jellyfish meal, they can be far too often tricked by an imposter in the form of a plastic bag. We tried a little experiment:We tried to see if we could make a plastic bag look like a jellyfish by putting it on the end of a boat pole and swirling it around in the water.
Here's a jellyfish we photographed in Mill Creek last month.

And here's our best attempt with the plastic bag.
Okay, it wouldn't necessarily fool me, but then, I'm not swimming in the murky water, either. And if nothing else, it was the starting point for some great conversation on the dock!
I doubt this was what the City of Annapolis had in mind when the plastic bag ban was being discussed last year. I hate seeing plastic bags caught high in trees or pasted to fences, and we've seen them, and mylar party balloons fallen back to earth, 50 miles off shore in the emptiness of the Atlantic. On the other hand, I'm not particularly a fan of such things as bans, it seems to me awfully like trying to regulate common sense. We bring reusable cloth bags to the grocery store (when we remember). Whether we do paper or plastic is so much about how we can reuse the bags after they've carried our stuff home. Paper bags so rarely work in our boat life - they are heavier, bulkier, and besides - you can hardly use them to pack your wet swimsuit home from the pool!
2008-09-11 -- 3:36 pm
Over-promised and Under-delivered
When a business gets you all excited advertising a new product or service, but the reality doesn't live up to the hype, you can be justifiably annoyed. But when a hurricane turns out to be less than predicted, instead of annoyance, there's relief. That's what happened with Hanna. We were prepared for stronger winds and more rain than we received, and had no damage.
2008-09-05 -- 9:24 am
Hurricane Season
Images of flooding at our marina, 5 years ago during Hurricane Isabel. Wonder what will happen this time?
It's an impossibly clear, gorgeous morning, and if we didn't know better, it would be hard to believe that we're expecting an unwelcome guest tomorrow - Hurricane or Tropical Storm Hanna. We're nervously watching NOAA and the storm track and hoping we don't have a repeat of Isabel 5 years ago. Along the docks, everywhere you see people frowning and drawing counterclockwise circles in the air as they talk. They are describing the direction of wind moving around the eye of the approaching storm and trying to decide how it will affect them.
We don't have quite the same worries as our friends who are in houses. We're not as concerned about flooding, for example, we just float up on the rising floodwaters. Nor are power outages a big deal - we're designed to be self-sufficient and make our own power. You couldn't very well run an extension cord to the middle of the Atlantic. On the other hand, if the folks in houses do it wrong, they or their furniture might get wet. If we do it wrong, we might sink!
One of our Caribbean liveaboard friends told us it takes four days to have a hurricane: a day to prepare your boat, a day to have the storm, a day to rest and recover, then a day to put everything back together. And that's if there's no damage!
Almost as soon as it was light, before the breeze came up, we took off the jib (forward) sail and the bimini (the canvas shade awning over the cockpit), both to decrease the area we expose to the wind, and to keep them from damage. We lashed the dinghy down on deck, topped up the water tanks and moved our cars to high ground. We packed our abandon-ship bag with computers, cell phone, cash, meds, a couple of energy bars, and water. Still working on the dock lines - for Isabel, we tied a spiderweb of 17 dock lines holding us in our slip against wind from any possible direction. They were extra-long so we could ride up on the storm surge. We went around the boat about every hour through the night, easing lines and making sure they didn't chafe through. In between times, we tried to read. I gave that up when I realized that I'd been staring at the same page for 45 minutes, and I had no idea what it said.
Our reward was that we ended up with no damage. But we proved our Caribbean friend's words true when we spent the entire next day sleeping, chatting, but not having the energy to put things back together until the day after!
Two more pictures from Isabel: our dock-neighbor Bill's boat at normal water level, and then in high water after surviving the storm. Hoping we all do as well this time!


Here's part of the spiderweb of lines holding us in place, as the waters started to rise:
2008-08-18 -- 11:34 am
Housebarges?
I was all set to blog about jellyfish, sea turtles, and the plastic bag ban when this article about housebarges appeared in the Capital: http://www.hometownannapolis.com/cgi-bin/read/2008/08_17-38/BUS Links to articles in the paper expire in 30 days unless you access them from a library, so I'll try to summarize: the article is about the growing popularity of houseboats and the controversy over whether they are allowed in Annapolis. Current zoning is very restrictive, the manufacturer wants to have "discussions" with the City. Similar discussions are popping up in a lot of places, like this NY Times article "Houseboats Emerge as a Cheaper Form of Housing: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE1DA1139F934A3575AC0A960948260 The manufacturer's spin on them is here: http://www.bayacht.com/aaa/Marina/InvestorMarina.htm Note that they're billed as "cheap waterfront living" NOT as boats. If your 3-year-old nephew saw one, he wouldn't say "Oh, look at the pretty boat." Nor would your Aunt Betty from Kansas. And that's my point.Those barges? They look to me like doublewides on pontoons. And despite the manufacturer's claim, they aren't boats - can you imagine being in even mild waves in one of them? It is generally accepted that they don't move often, if at all. There are waiting lists for boat slips at many marinas here for recreational boats - do we really want to further decrease the opportunities?I'll admit to my obvious prejudice - I live aboard because I love boating. The waterfront view and the community are tremendous plusses, but most of all I live this way simply because I like to sail. Most of all I think what offends me is this: Annapolis has tried hard to preserve its maritime heritage and feel. Enterprise zones to encourage marine industries to stay on the waterfront instead of ripping out marinas to replace them with endless condos. These housebarges impress me as a disrespectful way of trying to do an end run around that zoning.
2008-08-16 -- 12:19 pm
Tourist in My Own Home Town
The weekend weather forecast was absolutely astonishingly perfect, and we couldn't *not* go out and play. We motored around after work on Thursday to take a mooring for the weekend in the thick of the action in Annapolis Harbor. What a treat, to travel like a turtle, taking our home with us, and not have to pack! Mostly we just sat in the cockpit and watched the world go by - the water taxis and power boats making their tours of Ego Alley, the silent glides of the classic WoodWinds, the kids shrieking with delight as they played pirate on the Sea Gypsy.My very favorite thing to do as a tourist is to walk and people-watch, and the weekend didn't dissappoint. It was the first weekend that the plebes from the class of 2012 had liberty, so downtown was full of mids in dress whites. Each one seemed accompanied by at least 4 or 5 others - parents, a kid brother or sister, a girlfriend or boyfriend. Lots of people on City Dock looking at the boats in the harbor - hey, that's us! And of course my very favorite Annapolis anachronism - tour guides in Colonial dress, on Segways. We did all the tourist things - checked out all the shops, bought the obligatory ice cream, went out to dinner (grilled salmon in citrus butter, yum!).Somehow this visit had a different 'vibe' than I'm used to when we go to events downtown and I wondered what it was. Maybe just that our boat/home was right there? Then I realized ... parking! Anything we do in town is twice as enjoyable when there's no roaming the streets looking for a spot, or paying the meter. We simply took the dinghy, tied it at the restaurant dock or a public dock downtown, and started walking. There's a moral in there somewhere, but it'll have to wait for another time <*grin*>.
Parking Dilemma Solved at City Dock
2008-08-03 -- 5:01 pm
Getting started
"So," asked my new colleague Trish sociably, "how're you settling in?" I had just moved here from Michigan and it was Day 4 of my new job at Headquarters. Husband Dan was still in Michigan finishing his teaching commitment; he would join me at the end of the semester."Well," I told Trish, "I'm still experimenting. I still haven't figured out the right time to leave to miss the worst of the traffic on the Beltway."She rolled her eyes at my naivety. "Have you tried 4 AM? Why Annapolis, anyway? Why not somewhere closer to the office?" So I told her about our love for sailing and the water, and how we couldn't get this close and not take advantage of the opportunity to live in a place with such a distinctive character. Then she casually asked the question I'd been expecting and dreading: "How about your new place?"Choosing my words very, very carefully, I answered, "Well, it's reeeally reeeally small, but it has everything - a place to socialize, a place to sit and think, a place to cook, and a place to sleep. And, if I look out the window over the range I can just see the boats going up and down the creek." Every word was perfectly true...and perfectly misleading. Because the part I'd left out was that our new home on the water was "on" the water in a literal sense - we were planning to live on our sailboat.Why the secrecy? Well, I didn't have a sense of how my new boss would react - he was old-school gracious and stunningly conservative. Would he have second thoughts about his newest employee, wondering if he'd hired a hippie rebel, and how would she fit in? Nor did I know how Dan and I would react, if we would find friends in the people around us, and if even after 20 years of marriage we could fit our lives into a 33 foot boat. If our great experiment was to be a failure or a career-inhibitor, I wanted as few witnesses as possible.Fast forward 5 years.Living on a boat has been, most of all, fabulously fun. I've learned a lot about boats, and weather, and Bay ecology, and downsizing. I've learned how to figure out what things really matter. I've got a different relationship with my "stuff." I've found a tremendous sense of community in my fellow boaters and liveaboards. And my boss? My fears on that score were groundless. Most people were more curious than judgemental.That curiousity is what inspired this blog, random thoughts about what day-to-day life in Annapolis is like, when "home" is a sailboat.(An article about living aboard by the same title first appeared in the Capital on 5/27/07)

Still Simplifying

I first met my efriend Krissie on a message board titled "Simplify Your Life" where we talked about clutter, possessions, excess materialism. All those lessons were brought home to me - er, slammed home to me - when we had to do the radical downsizing to move aboard the boat.

So when she sent a note asking if I was still simplifying, my first thought was - how much further can I go? My clothes closet has 11 hangers, my husband and I fit all our possessions and all our living into less than 300 square feet of space, I traded my CD collection for an iPod and my cookbooks for a Word file, what's left?

But there are some jobs that you can't do once and they stay done - like feeding yourself, it's an ongoing project. Books, t-shirts, condiments have a sneaky habit of accumulating when you aren't looking, and need to be purged on a regular basis. Fellow liveaboard Scott says that if he didn't do a major cleanout every change of season, he'd accumulate enough junk to sink his boat.

Last winter, we sorted through all our clothing and donated half. This fall, we did it again, and now I'm getting close to feeling right. Hmmm, not what the manufacturers want to hear. Have you noticed that here in the States when someone says "I have nothing to wear" it means there's nothing in their closet that suits their fancy at the moment? There are places where having "nothing to wear" is the literal truth.

My next, toughest of all decluttering challenge is going to be purging my address book. The glory of the modern technology is that distance no longer matters. The problem with modern technology is that you can't let friendships that have outlived their relevance just gracefully fade away. (If you have this blog link, don't worry, you're not one of the ones I'm thinking of shedding!)

So yes, Krissie, I'm still simplifying - and I'd love that link!