Of Boats and Blogs

The Boat: We purchased our boat on August 1st, 2007 with the intention of keeping it for five years. Today, we are two weeks into the seventh year of our five year plan. We have been to and through many of the Bahama Islands. We have been from Key West to, almost, Maine; we have been through the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays; we have been up and down the Potomac River. We have suffered gales and tropical storms. Just about everything that can breakdown on a boat has broken down on our boat.

This last trip probably covered about 2,000 miles; all in, we are comfortably over 5,000 miles but less than 10,000. There is not much more on the eastern seaboard that we want to do. Going well south into the Caribbean would require a commitment of a year, or so, something neither of us is inclined to do. And, in truth, this last trip was wearing and difficult. The mind is willing but the body does not easily follow.

Ecclesiastes 3:6 tells us that there is: a time to keep, and a time to cast away. We have kept the boat over six years and it is now time to cast it away. We're putting the boat up for sale with no regrets.

The Blog: When we started to cruise, extended periods on the boat visiting watery places, we wanted a way to let our closest friends and family, specifically my mom, know where we were and what we were doing. I had, at the time, read a lot about blogs but had never actually read a blog. Coincidentally, at that same time, I was reading Mark Twain's (Samuel Clemens) book: Innocents Abroad. Written in 1869, it was a chronicle of his ocean voyage to Mediterranean Europe and the Holy Land. Published as a book, it was, in fact, a compilation of articles he had written and transmitted back to the USA for publication in newspapers, i.e. a travel blog based on the technologies of the time which were the telegraph and the printing press.

I was immediately struck by the fact that Aboard is an anagram of Abroad. I supposed that if one were to choose an American person of letters to emulate/plagiarize, it would be hard to do much better than Twain. And it all fit so neatly. We were, truly, innocent in the sense of naive and inexperienced, despite our serious efforts to learn about boats and boating and we were aboard our humble boat.

Thus was Innocents Aboard launched. This, the blog sign off, will be the 134th entry. Sadly, my mother passed, but the momentum of the blog continued. It has been a delight, mostly, to write about our adventures and misadventures. We have always viewed the boat not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end: new and shared experiences together. In that we have succeeded, having experiences that delighted and thrilled us, along with some experiences that were unexpected and a few, at least, that were unwanted. The best part of our six year pilgrimage was totally unanticipated: we have met so many nice, wonderful people with whom we have shared our boating lives.

As Rick said to Ilsa, "We'll always have Paris," I will be able to say to Carol,"We'll always have Ziveli."