A Typical Situation In Typical Times

Have you ever felt so frustrated at some point in your life that you want to cry?

We've had many of those moments this past week. 

Just this Thursday night, I watched my husband as he crumbled, his shoulders slumping as he sat on the floor by the encasing to the mast in the middle of the boat, swearing under his breath as he held back tears. He'd been cutting wires, stripping them, reattaching them, all in the hopes of getting our radar working. Our radar had been working when we motored across from the boat yard next door to our berth at Amsterdam Marina, but somehow it stopped working. 

Not only was the radar not working, our VHF radio was not working either. Both had been working just a few days prior, so the only issue could have been when we put the mast back in and something went wrong with the wiring. 

People have this idyllic view of sailing, you know, the ocean blue, the warm winds, the sunsets...you don't realize that every day its like a game of "Whack a Mole"...you whack one problem down and another pops up. Its nothing earth shattering, as problems go, even though it can be, but before you know it, you could be sitting on a mountain instead of a mole hill! 

To rewind here a little, I will start at the beginning where I think it will give you an idea how we started with the boat coming into our possession and at the point where it became reality vs a dream. 

So far I have shared with you that we bought the boat, that I closed my restaurant and returned to Holland so my husband & his father, Erik, could fly to Sweden to pick up the boat. Mid Covid lockdowns and post PCR tests, they flew there not knowing if they would have to do quarantine there or if they were considered to be doing an essential work type journey to pick up a boat and sail it down through Denmark & Germany and the North Sea to bring our baby home. 

I returned from Hong Kong, took four days to decompress from jetlag and then went straight into solo parenting the kids after dropping Jeroen (my husband) & Erik to the train station in Driebergen. I snapped one photo for posterity, the two of them tired and masked in the cold, early morning sunlight, looking forward to the unknown seas ahead. 

Contact was initially easy enough while they were in Sweden (Henån), Jeroen said it was a small town with nothing going on at the time. They had been joined by the hired skipper who was to help them sail from Henån to Holland, a gentleman from the United Kingdom. 

Initially Jeroen had hoped for a crew of at least four people, but in the end he had to settle for three. I think, considering that their plan was to sail uninterrupted for two days straight, it was the bare minimum they could have sailed with, as you need someone on constant watch and so sleeping is done in shifts. It is why we are hiring another skipper for our upcoming journey to Spain that we hope to begin this coming Monday, a young gentleman sailor from Poland.

How do you go about finding such professionals? Online! Everything is online these days, but there are dedicated Facebook groups for people qualified to do such short journeys or to assist as crew. Anyway, more on that at a later date, back to the journey from Sweden. 

Initially I was able to chat with Jeroen while he waited days in Henån for the weather to change, apparently with sailing you do a lot of that too, you don't just sail like those guys in The Deadliest Catch, where they go out onto the sea even in the worst weather, no, you wait for decent weather, you watch the weather radar and then you head out on the course you plotted. Everything is meticulous planning and execution, something my husband was born for! 

Have you ever known a pilot? Married one or had one for a dad? You'd know, they are all about following a plan, knowing about how they will deal with all emergencies, and they can be quite difficult to live with if you are a free wheeling, fly by the seat of your pants kinda individual like me...and lord knows how the two of us have been able to coexist this peacefully for so long, but it likely has to do with the fact that for all my issues with authority and a structured living, deep down I am actually very organized and just don't know it. 

We've had an uncanny ability to work well together from the start. Sure, he can be hard headed, but so can I. We have never really ever fought in our lives together. We have always managed to talk things through, even if it meant me pulling the words out of my introverted husband, we talk things through. Over the years he's gotten better at verbalizing everything from his deepest sorrows to his greatest frustrations as well as his more vulnerable moments of fragility. He knows I never settle for an "I'm Okay..." by now. I want to be clear in praising his ability to never miss an opportunity to remind me I am beautiful or how much he loves me or even why he loves me, that comes easily to him, its the more difficult, complex, what we call negative emotions that he's had to learn to work into clear communication over our years together.

The months leading up to today have been complicated by so many little complications and they have tested our strength in interpersonal communication and as if the constant low-grade anxiety and tension weren't enough, I have Perimenopause to contend with! Yes, Hello! Hi! I am Lisa, I am turning 45 this year, and I spend a lot of time scouring the internet to understand why on earth not more research and funding is put into saving the souls of women suffering through the hell that is Perimenopause & Menopause!

I think back to when I was in my teens and my own mother was likely suffering through it. She was such an angry and emotional person, it must have been an absolute nightmare for her to have to deal with me just as I too was going through insane shifts in hormones as a teenager. I took everything personally, I hated so many things she did, and no doubt she felt the same about me, and its only now that I can look back in time and truly have empathy for the suffering she endured alone. My poor mother, my beautiful, strong-willed, fragile and inspiring mother, suffering through the storm that all women must navigate, almost always, alone. 

Through one issue after another that my husband and I have encountered with Kokoro (our boat) I have had to remain mindful of my hormones as I sometimes hide in the toilet to cry or I choose to just cry freely where I stand. I can't always help it, the crying. Even the smallest thing can set me off sometimes. I fluctuate between feeling human and feeling like a robot. Sometimes I am distinctly aware that my body is where it is but my consciousness is somewhere floating above it, completely separate. I get ill tempered and suffer fatigue that has me napping at odd hours of the day. Some days I just don't want to cook the meals for the family because even thinking about nurturing others is enough to make me breakdown as I struggle to take care of myself. 

It is what it is. This is just another spanner in the works, so to speak. I never avoid talking it through with Jeroen or the kids. I take time to apologize when I am short with the kids, and I talk to them about menopause, about hormones I am sure they think are little elves that are sewing my clothes tighter at night...and I talk to them about how much I love them, and I hope they know how much they inspire me to be a better human being as much as I hope that I can be mindful that I am here to do much the same for them. I am always aware of how my reactions can impact them, even if sometimes it involves damage control, I am always mindful. 

The other night, the mood swings got so bad I felt so helpless I cried throughout the evening and I wishing I could be wiped off the face of the earth. In my minds eye was a clear picture of me vanishing from the memory of my family, like a wisp of smoke, and then I could feel no guilt for not being here to take care of them. That is how bad it gets, and I am glad that I am mindful, I am glad that I have spent years in psychotherapy, through my teen years and well into early adulthood, because if I hadn't, I would surely believe that what I am experiencing at this stage in my life is a peculiar and fantastical kind of madness. 

My heart goes out to every woman who has ever had to navigate this road alone and judged, my heart goes out to my mother, the woman who has loved me through thick and thin and who I am sad had to navigate menopause alone and emotionally cut off from those she loved most. Wow, tears even thinking about it. I love my mum so much, she is such a big hearted woman, a ray of sunshine in the lives of so many, and I am truly grateful that we have had my adult life to build our relationship back up to where it is today. Anyone who has met her will extol her virtues, and anyone who hasn't, really is missing out. 

If it wasn't for me going through perimenopause right now, all of this would be so much easier, but I am also grateful to be going through perimenopause through this because I get a chance to be so much more mindful thanks to the fact that this is the only thing I have to give my attention to at this stage in my life...well, the sailing the world, the homeschooling the kids, the cooking the meals, the taking photographs that are beautiful (I love photography!), the drawing and writing (that I also love to do)...I am glad that its now. I am also grateful that this experience of the treacherous ocean of perimenopause has given me new insight into my own relationship with my mother and has gifted me a newfound compassion and respect for her that I would never have thought possible a mere decade ago. 

Life...its not linear, sometimes it comes full circle...there is so much to learn along the way and so much to admire, for this, I am truly fortunate to have even made it this far and I hope to see this through regardless of the storms that come my way.

Sure, sailing life is like putting out one fire after another, but its also an opportunity to be present in every single moment, not because you choose to be or you want to be, its because you have to be. If you aren't present in every single moment, if you aren't mindful, it could be the difference between life and death! 

Okay, maybe its not that drastic, but it can be. 

When sailing non-stop back from Sweden, the first problems with the boat arose, smoke from the engine.

The smell of diesel was intense, the engine began to overheat and they didn't discover any of this until they hit a patch of sea with no wind. For the longest leg of the journey, they lucked out with the winds at their backs and they did a steady 6-9 knots through without ever having to turn the engine on...so when they did and they had been running it for a while, that was when the problems started. 

They practically limped their way in to Amsterdam, discovering they had almost no fuel while they were there, they ensured to get more diesel (about 150 litres) so as to make it further inland through waterways to Wijk Bij Duurstede after the mast was removed and stored in Amsterdam. 

Our mast is 23 meters tall, and most inlet bridges aren't tall enough to handle a boat that tall, hence us removing the mast and needing to power only on the engine. The engine is a refurbished Volvo Penta, not that I know a damn thing about engines, but I believe we were told there was nothing wrong with the engine. There are issues with the fuel gauges though, we never genuinely know how much fuel is in the tanks unless its full! So we have to keep an eye on that, but you know, my husband is a pilot...so he has already calculated the amount of fuel we use for how far we go, so on and so forth, so he's keeping a better eye on that than my suggestion of a "dipstick"!

The marina closest to where we were living in Ingen, Netherlands, was the one at Wijk Bij Duurstede. Well, it was the only one close enough that could also handle picking our boat up out the water, what with our 25,000 kilo weight and our 2.3 meter deep keel. Wijk Bij Duurstede is a picturesque little hamlet with a big old windmill on the waterfront. Honestly, I wished we had stayed in that town because it was far nicer than the one we were in, but I would say its also a lot more pricey and posh, so hey, no complaints other than the real envy lying with the fact they had better supermarkets! Dutch lockdown meant the only place open was the supermarket, for so long, and only one member of a household could go do the shopping, so that was my only outing every other day. 

I live for grocery shopping, so for me, the lockdown wasn't really that bad!

The boat remained on the dry at WBD (the whole name is simply gonna drive me nuts to keep typing) from April through to the end of June when we finally had her put back in the water. Through those months my husband and his father worked tirelessly on her, first sanding down the hull and then painting her, getting her sea worthy with eco-friendly anti-fouling, and from there on in, we've been fighting one small fire after another all the way until our radar issues and VHF radio issues yesterday. 

The engine smoking could have been old diesel that had been sitting for two years, that has been the best conclusion they have come to, possible water in the diesel, so we replaced the water pump. The thermostats were cleaned, because they hadn't been much help when the lads were motoring back into Holland, they had to keep the thermostat at under 80 degrees (Centigrade) to ensure that the smoke didn't start billowing up again, this involved running it on a lower RPM, not ideal, but still within an acceptable range. 

We had the alternators rebuilt, bilge pumps were replaced, as was the bow thruster, 100m of 12mm galvanized anchor chain was replaced with new chain, the windlass electrical motor was rebuilt...and with the bow thruster, being as we were replacing the old one with a newer, bigger one more suited for the size of our boat than the previous, we had to build a custom rack to accommodate the larger new batteries we installed for the power. Carrying those 57 kg batteries were a challenge, with just my husband and I to shepherd it into the most awkward space in the bow, let me tell you, both of our ageing bodies have spent much time complaining to us at night. 

Installation of new lithium batteries also took place, to partner with the new solar panels, a custom built frame for them and a wind turbine. We installed a brand new water maker that will help us make drinkable water from sea water, and although it is all set and ready to roll, we won't know if its fully functional until we are out in cleaner waters where my husband is willing to run it, so that means we have to still be mentally prepared that the 1000 litres of water in our tanks will be enough to last 5 people (three adults, which include the hired Skipper, and two kids who think water is an infinite resource!) over the course of the 6 day journey to Spain from Amsterdam!

My husband would "head to the boat" almost daily, working from as early as 7am (occasionally) to as late as 9pm (occasionally), but his general schedule was more like 9-5, like a real job, only one where you worked tirelessly while constantly paying for things you needed to work on!

I tended house. 

Imagine me living this life...it doesn't get more traditional than that! I would clean the home we were staying in, a lovely, cozy, two room set up in a holiday village by a lake, like Sisyphus rolling that boulder up a hill each day, I would bring the house up to spotless only to have the kids wreck it before bedtime so I could go back to cleaning it all over again when I woke up. Cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, laundry, bedtime stories and cuddles...all the stuff that kinda has to happen but gets zero recognition.

Its a thankless job, I vocalized this feeling at a low point one day, likely another day when I cried in the toilet and wish I could be wiped off the face of the earth, and my husband said he too was working at the same factory! Thankless jobs for everyone, hurrah!

Ah, but here we are, in the Marina, a day after Erik came to the boat to help my husband and the two of them somehow magically figured out how to reconnect power to the radar and get the VHF working, as we wait for our hired skipper to arrive tomorrow. 

Roman, our hired skipper, was supposed to meet us on the 29th of June! Alas, on his flight into Warsaw from his last job, someone on his plane tested positive for Covid-19! Yes, you see where I am going with the "small fires" and "whack-a-mole" analogies? So despite him getting out the airport with ease thanks to his Seaman's ticket, he was called back to get tested, which he tested negative, but then he was told to quarantine for 7 days. He's been tested again, negative, and now finally, he is going to be able to meet up with us and as the weather looks good, we hope to sail straight through from Amsterdam to Bayone, Spain. 

Our initial plan was to sail to Plymouth before making the crossing, but that was when we were planning on picking up fridge/freezer components & one more lithium battery that got "lost in transit" (I would say stolen) thanks to UPS. The lithium batteries we installed for our new Victron Quatro charger inverter, we purchased 10 of them from the UK prior to Brexit, was quite the challenge receiving post Brexit! There was much drama in receiving them, it took well over 2 months before we finally received them, but not before paying about 800 Euros in tax and still receiving one package empty! We needed a minimum of eight batteries to run the renewable energy set up we have, and currently we have a comfortable nine, but ten would be ideal.

In the end, we bought the refrigerator components from Germany as they shipped it to us in three days (the dealer here was saying it would take them two weeks at best), and we are going to pick up the final lithium battery we paid for, in Spain from the dealer there. Installing the fridge and freezer coils ourselves was also a challenge that took the greater part of about four days and involved drilling holes, removing doors and shelves, generally making the kitchen and dining area a no-fly zone for the duration of the installation. I forgot to mention that initially we were running on one fridge on its last legs, likely leaking freon, although we don't know for sure, as that strong chemical odour coming out from the storage under the sink could be anything from diesel to the oily residue that occurs when freon reacts with particles in the air. Main thing is part of our stay in Amsterdam Marina has needed us to be out of the boat so we could run a machine we rented to remove or neutralize some of the chemical odours still clinging to the interior thanks to the smoking engine on the journey over and who knows, even the bilge. 

Main thing to note now is that we don't need to go to Plymouth & since the weather seems to be favourable from Monday, Roman has said he is confident we can make the journey to Spain in one leg of about six to seven days. 

Seven days at sea. That will be the longest I have ever sailed anywhere, straight. I think while we were in Hong Kong, we did five days on the water, but we weren't sailing constantly. We made it as far as the China border, to some marine reserves, we went snorkelling, paddle boarding, and we ate and drank while we watched the sun set into beautiful reds, purples and pinks...that doesn't sound like what we will be doing if we sail non-stop for six days with three people taking shifts while scanning the horizon, ensuring we have our data on predicted wind and following a course we chart. 

Its go time, just about. I still haven't stocked the fridge or the freezer as I have waited until the very last possible day before Roman gets here. The last time I stocked up was ten days ago and although we have barely put a dent in dry provisions, I am almost completely out of fresh and refrigerated provisions. Its good, at least now I know that it cost us about 200 Euros to eat for ten days on the boat...that is if you don't include our outings into Amsterdam where we may have eaten out about five times in total. When you eat in, especially with my experience of working as a Chef & a restaurant owner, you can do so pretty lavish but low cost.

I am looking forward to hitting up the grocery store today! Oh yeah, to buy provisions for at least 10 days! I am gonna love this! *genuine happy dance happening*

So that will be it for this week's update. I hope to write a blog once a week, being mindful that we won't always have access to internet. For all those following our journey, Blogger doesn't send an instant message to let you know I have posted, but if you check in on the weekend, I should have something up that I hope you find worth reading. I enjoy writing, so have set myself a schedule of doing an entry every Saturday, so here's to keeping that going. 

Wishing you all fair weather and positive vibes.