Becoming Cruisers

Last week we sailed back into Watmough Bay, the same anchorage where we spent our first night in the San Juan Islands back at the start of our summer here. In contrast to our June arrival where we fretted over our anchor location and didn’t get a good night’s rest, this time we confidently zoomed in, plopped down our anchor with practiced ease, and slept soundly through the night. It was amazing to feel how much confidence we’d gained in just a few months of cruising.

Returning to Watmough was also a fitting bookend, ending our time in the San Juans at the same place we started it. We’re heading South now, retracing our steps back towards San Francisco before continuing on to Mexico in November. We’re both feeling sad to leave the Pacific Northwest behind; this landscape of snowcapped volcanoes and misty pines has been good to us, and there’s so much we’ve left unexplored. But we have a feeling we’ll be back some day, and this will always be the place where we became cruisers.

“Cruiser” is an identity we have dreamed of for years, and one that doesn’t really have a definition. We checked the boxes of leaving the dock behind and making our home on a moving sailboat, but the term has a connotation of being sea-hardened and confident, salty and sun-lined and calmly ready for the inevitable deluge of minor and major challenges the lifestyle brings. A cruiser is someone established in the sailing lifestyle, who is no longer on a trip away from home, but is at home wherever their boat takes them.

As with anything, the more you peek behind the curtain the more the polished image reveals itself to be something more ordinary and nuanced: the more time we spend among cruisers, the more we notice there are many ways of being one. As we watch ourselves settle in and gain some salt and confidence of our own, our goals have started to shift from simply playing the part to actually sorting out our priorities in this new lifestyle. 

One of the things we learned this summer is how different it feels to be “cruising” versus “voyaging.” Our journey up the coast from San Francisco definitely felt more like voyaging; the road here was epic, challenging, and very goal-oriented. Our field of vision shrunk down to the boat and the horizon, and our days revolved around our and the boat’s immediate needs. Sleeping in shifts meant that our brains were always a little dampened by fatigue, which had the upside of being less susceptible to the habitual angst of wondering “am I doing enough?” If we were staying alive and getting from point A to point B, we were doing our jobs. For a full month we were so focused on arriving that once we did, we both sort of looked around and went “now what?”

Now we were cruising. We had loose plans for what we wanted to explore, but if we wanted to rest and stay in an anchorage for three days, we could. We were in a forgiving inland sea with flat water and mild weather, our bodies and boat were no longer subjected to the constant motion of ocean swell or the punishing winds that howl down the coast. We could check the weather as an afterthought and caper around the decks wearing a light fleece and sneakers, rather than being clipped in with head-to-toe foul weather gear. Life was much easier, with much more freedom but also less direction. Without a big distance goal to work towards, it often felt more like we were living a somewhat “normal” life, just on a boat. While some parts of that transition were certainly a relief and it was fun to explore, we quickly found it to be a double-edged sword. It became clear how much of the joy of vacation comes from its juxtaposition to work: with fewer things to grind towards we also had nothing to take a break from. More often than not, happiness in this new chapter was a matter of perspective. 

One way of describing our new daily life was this: We’re so connected with nature. We get to hear different birdsong in each new place, and the sound of water whooshing against the hull as we go to sleep. We’re in touch with the wind and the tides, always keeping track of the cycle of the moon and the march of the seasons. If the weather is good for sailing we sail, and otherwise we stay put and enjoy whatever new anchorage we’re in. We’re not sure where we’re going to sleep tonight and it’s exhilarating, each anchor icon on our charts is a different adventure we could have. We have so much freedom, and when we want to move to the next spot we can transport our house there for free! We make all of our own electricity with our solar panels so we’re off-grid and sustainable. Our car is a dinghy and it’s delightful, zipping us around and giving us access to beaches, coves, and docks that we couldn’t have gotten to from land. We get to grocery shop and do laundry in a new community every week, giving us a taste of local life and often leading to fun conversations with new people. Our bodies are constantly engaged from the motion of the boat, our muscles working to haul lines and steer. We always have waterfront property and we’re constantly in and out of the water, getting to swim and bathe in the ocean. We have new boat neighbors at each new anchorage and they all have interesting stories to share: tales from the sea, recommendations and notes to compare, and the shared experience of pursuing this unconventional life.

And a second way to describe it: We’re at the whim of nature. We’re outside all day exposed to the wind, sun, and rain, with sunburned faces and pruney fingers. When it’s windy at night the rigging howls and waves smack the hull as we’re trying and failing to sleep. Our home is constantly moving and noisy and we have to pay attention to every lurch in case it’s a sign of a developing issue. We have to be constantly vigilant about the wind and currents, checking the forecast every day and avoiding dangerous sailing conditions. If the weather doesn’t cooperate we could be stuck in an anchorage for much longer than we wanted to stay, or we might need to leave before we hoped. We’re not sure where we’re going to sleep tonight and it makes it impossible to relax. We’re constantly sifting through mixed reviews of anchorages on our phones and judging mileage, sailing conditions, and navigational hazards to figure out how to get there. We have to make all of our own electricity, so we need to always check our battery percentage and avoid letting it get low. Our car is a dinghy and it’s a pain in the ass, literally, often leaving us with wet butts and a layer of salt spray over our groceries. We have to figure out how to navigate new stores and laundromats every couple weeks, often walking miles lugging heavy backpacks. Our bodies are constantly tired and sore from the motion of the boat, gathering mysterious bruises and scrapes. Our water tanks are limited so we don’t shower very often, sometimes just jumping in the ocean and going to bed sticky. It can be hard to meet other cruisers, especially other young people, so we often feel lonely or homesick, missing our friends and community when we’re far away. 

(Sure would be nice to have a roof on our car. Too bad we went with the convertible model 🤪)

These two interpretations often seem separated by a thin thread, and can flip flop in our heads based on how much sleep we got last night or whether the sun is shining. And really they’re both true simultaneously. The constant newness, adventure, and freedom is totally the point of what we’re doing, but can start to get exhausting and feel hard to keep pace with.

When we’re feeling overwhelmed by all the newness, we find ourselves craving stability both literally and figuratively. We picture an apartment that doesn’t move, a consistent view of a garden outside. Or even fantasize about the predictability of a 9-5 job. We imagine how peaceful it could feel to have a routine. To complete a task someone else assigned, in a building that’s not swaying in the waves, while we give zero thought to what the weather’s doing outside today, let alone a week from now. But the same constant adventure that can make us want to seek cozy refuge often supplies the antidote in the form of something that helps us wake up to the moment: a tiny crab plucking at seaweed, a glimpse of glorious sunset out of the window, a bright purple starfish splayed out on the dinghy dock, the swaying of the boat from a passing wake. With these little jolts we become conscious again of the miracle that we’ve made it here: onto a boat, up to Canada, with the wild number of new skills we’ve needed to safely navigate and maintain this life. We have so many years in the future where we can sit at a comfortable desk after a long hot shower, and we’re so grateful to be doing this now, instead.

(Prime example of the sailing life throwing new experiences at you when you least expect it!)

One thing we’ve found to reliably get us into that mindset of conscious gratitude is having someone visiting who can help us see the things that have become normalized through fresh eyes. We experienced that many times in August, which was a month of prioritizing more visits from friends and family. Jeremy’s parents came to Nanaimo and we explored Vancouver Island, going on lovely hikes through incredible forests, and Maddie’s sister Amelia came out for the epic trip to Princess Louisa Inlet. Back in the states we got to visit Evy at her aunt’s farm in Friday Harbor for plum picking, zoomy dinghy rides, and a sweet picnic lunch. We then headed up to Bellingham so we could meet Julia (who we hadn’t seen for years!) and Nicole (fresh off the PCT!) for a few days of blackberry picking, pizza making, and a fun sail across Bellingham bay. 

Though we’ve been loving these visits, they can be challenging to pull off. It’s hard for us to pin down dates and locations to meet people since our schedule is so dictated by the weather. And to build in flexibility for weather changes we sometimes have to cut other plans short in order to arrive somewhere with buffer time. We’re grateful that so many people have made the effort to come visit us where we are, often managing long flights, drives, trains, or ferry rides. From the get-go, pursuing this dream has come at the cost of us feeling like we’re being worse friends. We became flakier socially in our San Francisco life when we started prioritizing boat jobs and getting ready to cruise, blocking off our weekends and passing on friend events to do shakedown sails, re-bed windows, and replace boat batteries. And now that we’re out cruising, we’ve made the hard decision to miss big life events like graduations and weddings, realizing that there’s a big switching cost to things that take us away—not just the money and logistics, but the mental reset it takes to leave this rhythm behind and then pick it up again. These decisions have often left us feeling disconnected and guilty, even as we know they are part of what it takes to do justice to this chapter. 

We’re working on figuring out the right balance between fully committing to the sailing life and not trying to keep one foot in our old lives, while staying connected to the people and moments that matter most. Part of figuring that out is deciding how long we’re going to do this for: is this a year of going all-in, knowing that a year is short in the scheme of life? Or is this a longer-term lifestyle we’re shifting into, where we need to make sure it’s sustainable long-term and create space to invest in friends and family despite being far away? We don’t have the answer yet, but it’s been a valuable lesson of this chapter that these friend visits leave us feeling better than having any amount of gorgeous anchorages or easeful mornings with nobody to share them with. As we leave the PNW in our wake, we can look back on it as the time and place where we started to fully inhabit the cruiser lifestyle, and learn that it’s about more than just salt in our hair or ease at the helm. It’s about discovering what sustains us: the balance between freedom and direction, newness and overwhelm, commitment and community.

As of the time we’re sending this, we’ve officially set sail on the next leg voyaging back down the pacific coast towards the Bay and Mexico beyond. We finished our first jump down the coast and made it to Newport, OR (where college friends Sabine and Libby and their partners all drove out for another lovely friend visit!) and are waiting for the next window to open up to continue South. We’ll have more updates about the trip to share soon!

Lots of love,

Maddie and Jeremy