Lending a Hand
It really hasn't sunk in yet. Even though my wife, Harriet, and I are anchored on our new bluewater cruising boat, Hands Across the Sea, a Dolphin 460 catamaran, on the Rio Paragauçu, in northeastern Brazil, it hasn't completely registered that we've made it-that we've successfully completed the leap from land life to the cruising life.
Within the space of a single year, we'd sold our previous boat, a 32-foot coastal cruiser, wrapped up our careers, sold our house, stored our possessions, sold our cars, found a home for our cat, worked with our Brazilian boatbuilder to customize our new boat, and bought a boatload of equipment, from solar panels to a watermaker. It feels like a miracle how quickly the trappings of suburbia-home insurance, property taxes, traffic, mowing the lawn, blizzards, consumerism, the roar of media, the neighbors' barking dogs at midnight-have fallen away astern. We're just as astonished by what's ahead-a life with an open horizon, promising equal measures of freedom and challenge. No, I really haven't absorbed all of this yet.
