6 Weeks Sailing in the BVIs: Part 1

The allure of living on a sailboat has always been one of those overhanging dreams, one we would consistently return to whenever we would fantasize what life could look like if we didn’t live and breathe Cured. We even went as far as dreaming about which boat it would be and naming it (Paloma) in our fantasy other life. In the beginning years of Cured, any day that the shop was open we were there from open to close. We didn’t have a manager or enough team to leave our “first child” unattended, which meant that we had to close the store if we wanted a day off. The first year we were open we shut down for the first two weeks of January to run away to Mexico and get married. The next year we continued the tradition in order to take our honeymoon, deciding that the perfect contrast to the overwhelmingly social world of our little retail business would be a 42-foot sailboat, some sunscreen and a whole lot of rum in Antigua. Will grew up sailing, spending summers racing boats in Maine and I bought a copy of “Sailing For Dummies”, read it cover to cover, took a few notes and away we went, only slightly nervous for our checkout on the first day.  We spent two weeks finding the tiniest deserted anchorages we could in which to drop our hook, going for long swims, reading books, finding it hilarious to sail naked and surprise passing boats, and drinking as much rum and rosé as two people, without kids, on their first vacation in a year can drink. It was brilliant and spawned the ‘life on a sailboat’ dream.  When this year of exploration began to take shape, we strongly debated buying a boat and spending the entirety of it circumnavigating the world, following our romantic dream, before wisely deciding that maybe we should try sailing with the boys at least once before fully diving into the deep end. The compromise took form in 6-weeks on a sailboat in the BVIs, an area storied for its calm waters and light winds, with plenty of islands to hop between and ample exploration to be had.  

If the last eight months of our lives have been marked by moving at 500 miles per hour, in the last three weeks we have slowed down to approximately five.  For four frenetic humans such as us, it has been a wild shift but one we’re learning to lean into and embrace in contrast to our usual unbounded energy and motion. I’m not going to lie, the first few days were a little awkward…we were all pacing around the boat wondering aloud what we were supposed to do for the next 6 weeks without planes to catch, new countries to navigate, foods and customs to explore and decipher or rental houses to settle into.  Our nervous systems were used to hyper-speed, and we weren’t quite sure how to operate with so much space and time. No matter the itinerary, the Caribbean is just a really long way from Colorado. There is no way to get here elegantly, especially with kids, which is why we hadn’t been back since the aforementioned honeymoon trip. However, over the last 8 months our threshold for travel has so dramatically shifted that the boys barely blinked at the 4 am Colorado wake-up in order to fly to Houston then on to San Juan Puerto Rico before finally boarding a puddle jumper that took us to Tortola, arriving in the dark and navigating our way to the harbor to find our home for the next six weeks, a 47-foot Jeanneau monohull named ‘Silver Girl’. We found a little dockside pub creatively named The Pub and settled in with a ‘feast’ of chewy conch fritters, overly fried crab cakes, limp lettuce and ice-cold Caribe. Welcome to Island Life. The next morning we scrambled around, trying to find somewhere open on Easter Sunday (oops) to feed us all breakfast, then spent the next hours in a flurry of grocery shopping, ice procurement and boat orientation (complete with an Easter egg hunt as the Easter Bunny was somehow clever enough to find us even 2800 miles from home and had left a little treasure hunt all around the nooks and crannies of the boat) before finally sailing off into the sunset (well, actually into the afternoon sun) provisioned with enough water, fuel and food to last our first week.  The boys could not be more eager to learn the ropes, hauling on the winches and quizzing each other on the difference between a halyard and a sheet. Once the sails were up and we were cruising along, they looked at us like, now what?!? We just sit here and sail at the blazing speed of 5 knots for the next few hours? Huh…. Like I said, we weren’t necessarily used to an abundance of space and time. 🤣

However, it didn’t take us long to realize that there is something quite magical about sleeping in the same bed night after night (since we left Colorado last August, we haven’t spent more than 10 nights in the same place) and of unpacking bags and leaving them unpacked, with everything tucked away into its own little space. But perhaps most profound of all was the freedom of not having a plan; deciding each morning where we wanted to head next, choosing to stay put an extra night when we found an anchorage we really loved or to instantly change course if we pulled into someplace that wasn’t quite right. The past 8 months have been a giant matrix of flights to catch, rental cars to pick up, Airbnb’s or hotels to check into, all planned months in advance because, while we are pretty damn flexible and game for adventure, the idea of showing up somewhere in the middle of the night and not having a place to tuck our very tired boys into bed was just too much to risk. We joke that we replaced “cheese shop owner” with “teacher and travel agent” on our resumes, but it’s not that far from the truth. Being able to fly by the seat of our pants, but knowing our bed would be with us wherever we flew, was even more indulgent than we could have imagined!

We’ve settled into a routine of homeschool filled mornings complete with recess breaks to practice backflips off the side of the boat and sprint races to swim ashore and find the prettiest shell or best piece of coral to get the wiggles out. We sail during the heat of the day, doing our best to hide away from the sun under the canopy above the cockpit, wrapped in sun shirts and bucket hats, feet slathered with sunscreen, trailing a fishing rod along as we make our way. We read a lot of books and listen to books on tape when the seas are rocky enough to make focusing on small print impossible. The boys have learned how to set the sails, to tack and jibe, to anchor or grab a mooring buoy, and how to filet a fish if we get lucky along that day’s route. Once the sun settles down in the afternoon we venture out to explore our anchorage, sometimes donning snorkeling equipment to hunt for the prettiest fish, sometimes jumping on paddle boards, taking turns paddling each other along the shore. Sunset happy hour is a must each day, whether with rosé, rum, or sparkling water with lime - we’re really perfecting the art of watching the sun go down and comparing the colors inside conch shells we find with the colors in the sky each night. We tend to try and avoid people and busy harbors at all costs, but every five days or so we head into civilization to reprovision and take a break from cooking, sometimes finding surprisingly good meals and a fun little beach bar to play cornhole in front of, but other times stumble upon a relic from 30 years ago, unchanged and dilapidated, generally filled with very sunburnt and very inebriated guests and over fried, over-priced snacks. At all of them however the boys have discovered virgin pina coladas. We are always shocked by how bad, and how expensive, the quality of the groceries available are and have at least a bi-weekly longing for the luxury of a Farmers Market, a Whole Foods or just some organic produce. And ever so slowly over the last three weeks we’ve started to unwind the past 11 years of moving at Mach speed; the frantic reality of starting a small business and learning to operate it well, and then just as we got our footing, adding a new baby into the mix and then as that started to stabilize opening a second business and adding a second baby just for good measure, then weathering a pandemic and transitioning said business online while simultaneously overseeing zoom school, keeping our team employed and trying not to freak out over dwindling bank accounts, to finally coming out on the other side of the pandemic and deciding to sell the business that has defined our lives for the past decade, and while we’re at it sell our house and our cars and move our entire life into a van and a storage unit and then plan an insane, complex, wonderfully wild trip around the world, then execute said amazing trip, traversing continents and time zones, navigating homeschooling, language barriers, culture shock and endless togetherness along the way.  This moving slowly thing feels pretty nice.