Cruising with sailing vessel Phoenix

Certainly a first reason to go cruising is to see the world. Not just to see off the beaten track places, not just to see this grand globe of ours, but to do it slowly, at human speed. Leave Seattle on a plane in a cold rain in the dark, arrive Hawaii in blinding hot sunlight. There's a dislocation there that confuses the senses and makes one feel apart from the scene. We may find one day that it's chemical, physical in some way. I think our bodies know where on the globe we are and are discomfited by such sudden leaps.

However, leave Seattle in a cold dark rain and spend three weeks gradually watching the days warm and the sun rise earlier and set later... now when you arrive you're in sync. And maybe there's a sense of belonging, of having earned that belonging if you've gotten yourself there by your own efforts. Or is it that you have your home with you, so now you really do live there. You settle in and go to the grocery store and cook your meals; then you are resident, you belong, you're not a tourist.

And the bit about having your home with you. That seems important. As an introvert traveling the regular way is quite exhausting. I do retreat to my hotel room and a book to recoup, but it's still a strange room, not home. And maybe I forgot to bring my favorite tea and I certainly don't have my favorite tea cup to drink it from. When cruising I will have my home with me and I think that provides a groundedness that will be comforting and strengthening. And just plain easier.

We used to go for long backpack trips in the mountains, carrying too-much-stuff on our backs and slowly creeping over the landscape at human pace. It was beautiful, peaceful, and simple. When we dragged our young children along the lack of choices was a wonderful freedom. That may see contradictory but let me see if I can explain.

Many years ago when the boys were 7 or so we went to the Smokies for a week long 60 mile hike. We entered the park from Gatlinburg. Now Gatlinburg off the main strip may be a very pleasant place, but on a hot summer day with small children it was hell. Smoky National Park is the most visited National Park in the country with 9 million visits a year. Our guidebook said that for every ten people that visit the park only 1 stops. For every ten that stop, only 1 gets out of the car. For every ten that get out of the car only 1 goes more than 50 yards. That would mean that 9000 are actually getting into the back country each year, but I suspect even that number is high. So imagine the scene. We are in a hot car inching down the road to enter the park. On all sides there are things for sale, things heavily advertised and calling to my children. Dolly Parton land beckons, "official Indian tomahawks" call to them, Red Injun pizza and Black Bear Burgers tempt with salty fatty smells. On every side we are solicited, tempted, cajoled. The children beg to stop, they beg to buy, they beg to own these exciting but momentary possibilities. We feel tense and besieged by the garish displays, the hot sun, the slow pace and our seduced children. Later, out on the trail we realize that there are no people and nothing for sale. There are no big choices. We can make pasta tonight, or falafel. If we have one, the other is for tomorrow. We put one foot in front of the other or we pause and step forward in a few moments. For a week we see no one and the seduction is that of the sign of a bear having passed or a deer having slept here. A bush that might still have berries or a camping spot here that might be softer than over there. We are quiet and own our own minds again. The children walk and chatter and there is nothing for them to demand from us. We had everything we needed, and they seemed to know it as we did. The lack of choices was a freedom to get along with living.

So that freedom is one of the things I look for in cruising. I do not have the strength to carry what I need on my back for the next few years, but with Phoenix doing the carrying maybe we can still experience that simplicity we found in backpacking for years to come.

But freedom is only the first part of the self sufficiency equation. There's also the responsibility to take care of things. First we pare down what we own, then we take responsibility for it all. We don't send it off to be fixed, we have to fix it or do without. We can't risk it breaking, we have to watch it closely and prevent it from wearing out.

I suppose this immediate responsibility for the things that sustain us is what money allows us to avoid. We mow our own lawn, but we don't fix the mower, we pay for that. Or we don't mow our own lawn, we pay for that, too. We don't prepare our food, we pay for it. When we pay for it we lose some freedom in what we eat. Almost everything you buy pre-made has corn syrup, but how often do you use corn syrup when you prepare your own dinner? Would corn syrup really improve your spaghetti? Maybe riper tomatoes, sweeter onions would do the trick.

The movie "Off the Map" explores this idea of self-sufficiency on land. A small family lives in the middle of nowhere (somewhere must be where everyone else is). They are nearly completely self-sufficient without holding jobs. The father says something like 'it's too expensive to have a job. First you have to pay for transportation and new clothes, then for someone to do all the things you don't have time to do. Then you don't know how to do all the things these other people do for you.' I think we become poorer in the exchange of our narrow expertise in our job for all the expertises it takes to sustain our life. If we do it, we should do it knowingly, aware of what we're trading and remembering that it is a trade and not the only one possible.

Bill McKibben's book Deep Economy touches on why we might want to move towards self-sufficiency (or local-sufficiency at least) even if we weren't driven to sail around the world. I want to live with deep economy, not deep pockets. I want to know what I'm eating and have time to care. I want to live lightly and responsibly. I want to know where my trash ends up and re-use what I can. Humanure is my other favorite book this year and provides a solution to a significant part of this problem. Another is Collapse which talks about what happens when societies forget how closely tied to nature they are. Sailing on a budget will throw us into these questions naturally, but it's where I want to be when I go back to land as well. High Energy, a film by Amory Lovins and bullfrogfilms, tells us why our fast-paced money-intensive lifestyle makes these questions hard to look at. When you're moving fast all your solutions have to be fast, too. The slow enduring answers are just too hard to see at the speed we're moving. Well, Phoenix goes alot slower than our subaru - I hope we'll slow down, too.

And there's the reality of money. I can't afford to go traveling around the world in the normal way in some sort of early retirement. It's not clear that I could retire at the normal age and have enough money to live at my current standard. I think the experts suggest that you need at least 2/3 of your current income to live comfortably during retirement. Cruisers suggest that two people can live on a (paid for) cruising sailboat for $10,000 to $20,000 a year without feeling deprived. People in their 20's do it for even less, although they often go back to the "real" world after a year or two of what may feel like deprivation.

But it costs to get ready to go cruising. Of course part of the secret here is to get an inexpensive boat - and it is certainly possible to find a seaworthy boat at an affordable price. Many of the cruising life style books in References talk about how to do this. Also check our costs for Phoenix. But let's look at some numbers.

Assumptions

1. You can afford to buy some kind of seaworthy boat ($15K-$80K) while you're still working - maybe instead of a new car, maybe instead of some vacations, maybe from savings - not by borrowing money.
2. You can afford to work on the boat yourself to get it ready, or you can afford for someone else to while you continue working.
3. You are willing to work at piece work while cruising until you can get to your retirement income.
4. You will have some investment or retirement income when you get over 60.

Let's say you go cruising 5 years before you would normally retire. You buy and outfit a boat for $50,000-$80,000 while you still have income. You go cruising and spend $12,000 per year*. For the years until you would officially retire you make this amount by stopping to work until you have the money to go on (boat work, computer work, bar tending, writing stories for magazines, whatever you can do as piece work). Burning question: is it feasible for a couple to make $12K to $15K a year in foreign ports?

Of course some people have $12K to $15K a year in investment income. This would be ideal but we didn't manage to put away anything but 401K contributions which we can't use effectively until we're retirement age.

After you retire you draw $12,000 a year from your retirement income (assuming you have something). Your retirement years (say, 15) will cost you $180,000.

If you stay home and work until retirement, your retirement years will cost you 70% of your current income - say $70,000 * 15yrs or $1,050,000. That initial $50,000 boat cost is looking pretty affordable. Go down to one car and you may save that amount alone in the five or ten years before you go cruising. Unless you and your partner are living on $18,000/year now, retiring to a sailboat could be much less expensive than retiring on land.

But maybe you don't want to go cruising for 20 years or more. Is it a lifestyle or a vacation? If it's a vacation for a year or so and you don't have enough savings to pay for it, you probably have to stop and work. But working in Yap or Fiji or Sydney for part of a year so you can go sailing the rest may not be that bad (see Burning Question above) ... or you may hate it.

*See Beth Leonard's Voyager's Handbook 2nd Edition for a great presentation of different sailing budgets.

"Sailing is not an escape but a return to and a confrontation of a reality from which modern civilization is itself an escape. For centuries, man suffered from the reality of an earth that was too dark or too hot or too cold for his comfort, and to escape this he invented complex systems of lighting, heating and air conditioning. Sailing rejects these and returns to the old realities of dark and heat and cold. Modern civilization has found radio, TV, movies, nightclubs and a huge variety of mechanized entertainment to titillate our senses and help us escape from the apparent boredom of the earth and the sun and wind and stars. Sailing returns to these ancient realities. ... the real underlying source of cruising depression is that they have thought of sailing as one more civilized form of stimulation, just like movies or spectator sports..." From Cruising Blues, Robert M. Pirsig.

Pirsig's article is splendid - I hope I feel the same after cruising for a bit, but I am still just the vacation sailor. But what he describes is certainly the rock bottom reason for cruising. The raw reality of the thing. No hiding behind the various demands and stimulations that make up modern life. Is this worth losing our financial place in the world? Will we regret the exchange? Maybe, but I want the chance to explicitly reject reality if that's what I'm going to do, not just forget that the exchange exists and has been made implicitly every moment of my life up until now.