July - Boston to Boothbay

"Where have you been?" asks a friend. “There has been nothing on the blog for ages." Sorry about that, we've been rather hectic ... I went back to England to celebrate my stepmother's 80th birthday, and take my father on a trip to old friends and old haunts, and Anthony sailed on without me, in the company of his brother, Richard and wife Suzanne, and a new friend, Arthur. Arthur is "sort of family" - the sort of loose connection (his grandfather is the uncle of Anthony's daughter's husband's father) that means, when we were put in touch with each other in New York, we could both have said “thank you that was lovely” and gone our separate ways, or, as has turned out, been delighted to spend plenty of time together having fun.

Arthur and Richard / Suzanne have both written guest blogs about their time on Tomia – here is Arthur’s.


After following the adventures of Tomia for the past 2 years and living vicariously many of the great accounts of cruising in the Caribbean I finally had my chance to sail on her. Sadly, Celia could not make a planned cruise from Boston up to Boothbay Harbor, but Anthony’s brother Richard and his wife Suzanne seized the opportunity and flew over from England to join. And I was invited as well, having met Anthony and Celia a few weeks prior when they anchored at the 79th street Boat Basin in the Hudson River off Manhattan and Patty (my wife) and I shared a few NYC land-based adventures together, including an evening game at Yankee Stadium (Yankees lost).

And now I am just back from 5 days living with 3 virtual strangers in a 43 foot space. So what was it like?

Great time. Anthony, the Captain was amazing. In constant motion, moving effortlessly and unobtrusively (always barefoot) like a cat, gracefully and sure footed across the decks (even in 25 knot winds with boat heeling)--hoisting and trimming sails, furling and unfurling the head sails, setting lines (including some fishing lines), rigging and trimming a cruising chute while manipulating a heavy “spinnaker” pole , moving up and down the companionway unobtrusively to manage navigation, replace filters, replenish water supplies from the excellent Tomia watermaker and even prepare coffees for the crew. Just a normal day in the office I suppose, for someone living on board for two years. And he willingly and patiently shared his extensive knowledge of the sea, sailing and all mechanical aspects of his home, a well equipped 43 foot sailboat that felt more like 50 feet for some reason- maybe a result of the feeling of security from the center cockpit design, as well as the vessel weight and obvious stability.

The watermaker was the best bit of kit on board. An advanced filtration system allows you to draw in seawater (except in really funky harbors) and converts to fresh drinking water. At first I held onto my Poland Springs stash but after a couple of days could not resist the luxury of drinking fresh water right from the tap on board- in the heads or in the galley. Ok it’s not Evian but a fantastic convenience for cruising. As is the wind generator which can be flipped over into the water when there is no wind and magically (to me) function as a propeller, generating power underway as it turns with the rush of water.

Richard was a solid number 1 mate for his brother and a great guy as well. Also a highly experienced sailor, he and Anthony owned a 32 foot sailboat together prior to Tomia and speak the same language. Half the time I needed a translation. But it was engaging and I kept learning, as knowledge was imparted generously and patiently. Especially the anchoring. As a weekend sailor for too many years I still always opt for a mooring. Given a choice Anthony anchors. This makes perfect sense as they are free of charge and he and Richard have the skill levels to size up an unfamiliar harbor quickly and set an anchor relatively effortlessly. No sea dramas for this pair. The anchor has an all chain rode and a meter to keep track of the amount of scope let out. Very secure and convenient - no fear of dragging loose during the night!


Suzanne is also a very competent sailor with deceptively “keen” perceptions …for someone living in NYC for 40 years it came as I surprise that I (and my habits) were apparently not invisible to others. Then again it was only a 43 foot space……but who is complaining? Not I. Suzanne and Richard (and Anthony) were all easy going, great fun and we had lots of laughs and mini adventures as you might expect from a 5 day July cruise off the New England coast, from navigating through an unexpected fog off the coast of northern Mass to a more structured whale and dolphin watching tour off Boothbay Harbor (the watch boat did circles to allow the large schools of dolphins to swim, jump and surf the wake!) to the usual fresh lobster fests and even an impromptu dinner at Kittery harbor with friends of a friend of Anthony’s.

But it is the experience of cruising that I am left with ...essentially living out of doors 16 hours a day, sleeping under the stars albeit through the lens of an open hatch cover above, and slowing down as the official Tomia crew T-shirt advises, "sail fast and live slow". The exhilaration of moving along on a magic carpet over the sea, under the vast blue sky … it takes a few days to let go of habits- addictions,—the NY Times and constant background music … mainly in the head but also on the radio, on CDs, an iPod ..after a while all the noise melts away and one experiences the music and food for the soul—the harmony and routines established in living in close quarters with people of good will and equally committed to maintaining harmony by sublimating their own needs and neurosis to as minimal a level as possible … the feeling of perfect harmony when the mind finally stops rushing around for stimulus and the oft-talked about feeling of oneness with nature and the elements slowly and subtly but unmistakably sets in … the open sky, the perfect air temperature and gentle breezes, the rush of water along the hull and the vast blue ocean all around cast their spell … deep quiet … one tends to see oneself and one’s habits in a mirror as the calm and peace move in … thanks to Anthony and Celia for making this possible.

Happy Birthday to me

What could be better?  I have a gorgeous man to cook me breakfast, and some beautiful sparkly presents.  My dear friend Harriet gave me a magnifying glass to help my aging eyes, but we will skip past that.  Who could want more?  We are in a beautiful place, the sun is shining, and the sand dunes beckon.  the only thing missing is you.  Have a lovely day, everybody.

Swimming is good for you when the water is only 60 degrees!

   Behind us is a replica of the Mayflower.  Shame about the white van.

And here is the lobster - very good indeed

It's  been a wonderful birthday - masses of friends took the trouble to email or skype or phone or text, Charlotte arranged a party, and two even baked cakes - Fiona sent me a photo of hers, I am so sad that it's the wrong side of a broadband connection.

Thank you for sharing it with me, and making it special.

From the New York Times

I can't resist this from the normally ever-so-reliable New York Times of 30th June:

"Correction

An article on June 18 about programs to teach families to sail misidentified the function of steel railings on a boat.  They are intended to protect passengers from falling overboard, not to keep the boat from tipping over." 

More Gustatory Delights

Tuesday 6th July 2010, day 627, 11,408 miles. 41° 11’.44 N, 071° 34’.79 W, Block Island, Rhode Island

And now – the Block Island Sinker. A doughnut like no other. Hand-made, served too hot to touch, dusted with cinnamon and sugar, wonton-crisp on the outside, the inside a hot, soft, butterfly-light miracle. It lasts a grand total of 15 seconds from pan to gullet, leaving embarrassingly ecstatic exclamations floating down the street, and a blissful, stunned sense of satisfaction as the final crumbs of sugar are licked from fingers. It’s like the best, most eagerly awaited doughnut you ever remember from your childhood, brought back to life even better than memory suggested.

Two minutes later, you realise how it got its name, as the lump of oily dough thuds to the bottom of your stomach like a runaway lift, and settles in for a couple of hours. Never again, you swear. And a few hours later, back from a bicycle ride … well, some of us just have to check to see that they are as good in the afternoon as they were in the morning. But this time, washed down with peanut butter chocolate chip ice cream. Will our clothes ever fit again?

The other foodie pleasure from Block Island you have to work for – fresh clams. We dug for them with new friends Dick and Carol, combing through the black sand for ones large enough to fail to pass through the gauge, and so end up in our bucket. Shops on the island sell all sorts of refined rakes to pull the shellfish out with minimal effort, but the best method is the straight-forward, bent-backed fingernail-filling scrabble, in a few inches of warm(ish) water in the Great Salt Pond.

Yesterday evening, we steamed them quickly in white wine, tomato salsa, garlic and spiced sausage, and ate them in the cockpit; fat and sweet and tender, mopping up the juice with home made tomato focaccia.

A Maryland Crab Feast

Friday 11th June, 2010, day 602, 11,028 miles. 38° 47’.20N, 076° 13’.06W, St Michael’s, Maryland

“How about crabs for supper?” asked our friends Don and Mary Kay. Well, that sounds nice, we thought, imagining neatly dressed crabs lying open on their backs, with perhaps a little salad and mayonnaise tidily arranged beside them, and a slice of two of brown bread and butter, all set off with a lemon quarter, and of course a knife and fork.

Not a bit of it.  Maryland Blue Crabs are a wonderfully full-on physical, down-to-earth experience, a finger-licking, chops-smearing, tooth-picking feast for taste and touch and smell. If you crossed all-in wrestling with fine dining, this is what you might get.

The scene is set with a bundle of newspapers brought in from the garage and spread over the kitchen table, onto which is emptied a vast brown paper bag full of crabs, steamed and dusted with Old Bay seasoning, and set off with an array of implements: mallets, screw-drivers and pliers.

A platter of just-picked Maryland maize, so young and fresh that it still has a sweet green flavour to it, to set off the crabs, a quick lesson for the newbies in the tactics of successful dismemberment (in short, “get stuck in, and don’t forget the claws”), and off we go. Ooh, those crabs are good. Salty and fresh and spicy with the seasoning (which doubles as snuff if you sniff it), quite delicious, and all the better for the slightly ruminative atmosphere that develops as we all chase the last sweet fibres of flavour down into the claws and crevices. You can’t have a serious discussion picking crabs, with half your attention focussed on choosing the next spot to attack, and wondering whether you’ve picked that one dry and should move on the next, or is there just a little sweet something lurking in that joint. So we chat in a relaxed way, and eye the growing pile of shells to make sure we haven’t eaten more than our fair share, and lick our fingers, and decide we could just squeeze in one more … and chat again, and realise that essence of crab has found its way slowly up our fingers and around our mouths until we are one cat’s-dream flavoured mess. What a great way to spend an evening.

Thank you, Don and Mary Kay for all your kindness and hospitality, but thank you most of all for introducing us to Maryland Crabs.

Backwards to Bonaire

Monday 22nd March 2010, day 521, 8,840 miles. 12° 09’.58 N, 068° 16’.98 W. Kralendijk, Bonaire


Backtracking to before we went to Cuba, we had a lovely three weeks in Bonaire, which sort of got forgotten in the horrors of the Windward Passage.


Bonaire is one of three little Dutch rocks off the coast of Venezuela, the other two being Curaçao and Aruba. It is a barren place, useful back in the days of the slave trade only for salt – one of the most economically satisfying manufactures: you create it from salt water, sell it to people, who eat it, and then excrete it into the rivers which replenish the sea – and there you are, your raw materials are furnished right back to you for free by your customers. Neat.


Salt water is once again how Bonaire makes its money, but now from the fantastic, fish-filled reefs that surround it and attract tens of thousands of divers. We’d learnt to dive in St Eustatius (Statia) and plunged right in, having endless wonderful dives, and starting to identify some of the hundreds of fish. The wonderful thing about the diving in Bonaire is that the whole island is just the tip of a steeply shelving coral reef, so from anywhere on the coast you wade into the water, swim out a hundred yards, and there you are in 60 feet of water, looking down on a brightly coloured, infinitely varied world. Tomia found herself turned into a dive boat and took us off to reefs up and down the coast, from where we launched ourselves down the bathing ladder in full dive regalia and went off to explore the endless beauties under the sea.


I’m not sure that it’s possible for non-divers – as we were a few months ago – to understand the hypnotic magic of breathing underwater, in the fishes’ own environment. It’s partly the weightlessness and freedom, partly the concentration, partly the constant procession of variety and beauty, partly it just simply being a whole new, undreamt of world, hidden from surface-dwellers by the interaction of light and water. 

The fish are endlessly fascinating and varied, with each dive showing us new creatures.  We love the gorgeous little trunkfish, with little yellow fluttery fins, large luxuriantly fringed eyes and pale pink pouty lips, who will swim straight up to you to ask in a friendly way if you are new here.  Unlike the purpled, "nesting" sergeant majors, who make it quite clear (to a creature hundreds of times their size) that this is their patch, and you will find nothing here to interest you if you're wise.  And the herds of parrot fish, turquoise with pink and yellow stripes, grazing on the coral in the shallows, making a noise like - someone chewing coral.


http://www.breathebonaire.com is an underwater camera giving a little glimpse of the sub-aqua life.


We started accidentally dropping things overboard – but, in contrast to the normal cussed run of things, in a place where we had ample means of retrieving them. “You’d better go and get a tank” from Anthony was code for “Oh damn, I’ve dropped a screwdiver”. However, although we could get things back from the deeps, a drill-bit down the shower drain continues to elude us. Like the Bellman, we seek it with tweezers, we seek it with care, we hunt it with blue tack and string, we charm it with magnets, with chopsticks and skewers, with just about every darn’ thing. But to no avail. Only on boats.


Our time in Bonaire was enlivened by the visit of Anthony’s son Chris, and Anna, who were the perfect guests. With them, we rented a jeep one day and drove round the northern end of the island, a nature reserve stocked with cacti and scrub, and climbed the highest point, in the baking heat, finding their first hummingbird in an acacia tree, and then down to a tiny cool, fresh, shaded pond in the middle of all that sucked-dryness, smelling of green, visited by every bird and iguana around.


Another day we drove out to a mangrove swamp and took a tour in kayaks, swimming through a narrow muddy channel in company with a vast porcupine fish. We drove round the east and south coasts, with the waves pounding in, and back up to the sheltered west coast, with the modern salt pans looking like giant icerinks, sparkling purplish in the sun.


There were a lovely bunch of yachties there, all the boats strung out in one neat line down the shore just above the start of the reef. Several of the women were keen readers, so one night six of us gathered for a “one off book club” and sat in a bar pulling together our all-time favourites – and we barely strayed off topic all night, while our other halves discussed holding tanks and sikaflex in comfort on Willow. They managed to get the dancing girls out of the way just before we came back.


Sad to leave, as always; we have met so many wonderful people on this trip, and pulling up the anchor and waving goodbye not knowing when we shall meet again always brings a lump to the throat.

Is Deltaville the nicest town ever?

Monday, 7th June, day 598, 10.904 miles. 37° 47’.62 N, 076° 19’.56 W. Deltaville, Virginia

Is Deltaville the nicest town ever? It takes small-town friendliness to new levels. Hurd’s hardware store (motto “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it” – well, that would be true if we weren’t finicky boaters wanting everything in marine-grade stainless steel) boasts the tireless Roy, who not only searched through all his shelves for something approximating to our needs, but took us out back to his workshop where he had a collection of cast-off bits “bound to come in useful someday” from where he dug out 75¢ worth of thing-a-ma-bob which will do the job perfectly. The library was selling off its unwanted books; the most friendly librarian ever took time off from her lunch-time muffin to help me sort through the dusty shelves of American History to find the two most appropriate volumes. And to cap it all, we were lucky enough to meet the cheerful and generous Hop Murfee (and later the gentle Genia), who not only gave a lift to two strangers trekking off to the supermarket for provisions, but waited for us while we whizzed round, and then drove us two miles back to the boat. But, wait for this, Hop isn’t a vicar or a teacher or someone from whom you might expect spontaneous kindness – he’s a realtor (estate agent). A town where the estate agents are selflessly helpful to complete strangers – that’s somewhere special.