Tight squeeze coming through Wrangle Narrows:

So my short work season came to a close about a week ago. I got in one short 5 day trip up to southeast and back and then a 44 day trip hauling freight from Seattle up to Seward, Dillingham, Natnek, Bethel and Nome before I had to fly out of Seward on the return trip. I sure would have liked to work more this Summer, but this should be enough to last me for another season.

Dinner coming past Cape Spencer:

Dan with a grizzly behind the barge in Natnek:

The last week has been a whirlwind of good times. Tiffany and I drove down to Oregon for my good friends Tate and Beth’s wedding. The wedding was at the house where Beth grew up outside of the small Siskiyou logging town of Powers. Mark and Kathy, Beth’s parents, have a phenomenal place that they fitted out beautifully for the wedding. Add the Foghorn Stringband, two great families and a great group of friends that couldn’t stand around 15 minutes without pickin and it made for an amazing party.

A bit of pickin before the wedding:

Myself, Tiffany, Johnny, Alexis and Hoss before the wedding:

Tate and Betsy making their vows:

Tate and Betsy taking over from the band at the reception:

More pickin at the reception:

After the wedding, we all took off for Tate and Beth’s place in Coos Bay for a couple more days of hanging out, cooking food, making music and hanging out on the beach. We tried to make it up the 101 on the way home, but with the rain and fog, we only made it up as far as Newport before heading back to I-5. I’m back up in Bellingham now. I’ll be splitting my time between here, Seattle and Spokane for the next couple of weeks until I start my STCW Basic Safety Training course on September 20th. That class will finish off my credentials for working internationally if an opportunity presents itself. Then October 3rd, I’ll be off to Hawaii for a week and then it’s on back to Fiji and Bodhran.

Hanging out at the beach at Coos Bay:

Back in Bellingham:

How time flies when you’re not doing a damn thing. It’s been nearly a month since I got back to Bellingham. Everything started out well with a trip down to Coos Bay Oregon for the 2nd Annual Glasgow gathering. The Glasgow Gathering is basically Tate’s way of getting all his buddies from up north to make the drive south to visit by organizing a backyard bluegrass festival. This year’s was great with some fine sunny weather and an average of 12 hours of pickin a day.

Pickin till our fingers bled at the Glasgow Gathering:

Tiff and I riding her work boat, the Victoria Star II, back from Victoria:

Since then I’ve been not making any plans waiting on a call from Western Towboat so I could go back to work. They haven’t needed me yet, but fortunately I’ve been around to help a bit with my brother and mom’s move down to West Seattle and my dad’s move out of his condo. Too bad I’ve been trying to live out of the condo while he’s moving out. Still the time in Bellingham has been good hanging out with Tiffany and all the fellas from back home, but I’ve been slowing going insane waiting. So now I’ve enrolled with Compass Courses in Edmonds for the 100 Ton Masters/200 Ton Mates course. When I finish I still won’t be able to work as a mate on the tugs, but will start building up sea time towards my towing endorsement which would allow me to move up in the towing world. The license will also let me work on all sorts of different boats up to 200 tons gross. Hopefully I’ll be able to work for Western later this summer, but if not at least this license will open up some more job opportunities for me. So the license will be nice, but I still need to make enough money to go back to Fiji in September.

Well at one time I was planning on leaving for the Marquesas today, but the fates have been against me. The biggest is the underdevelopment of the trade winds. Right now they’re a good 600 miles offshore and blowing less than 10 knots. I’ve also had a hard time getting someone to come out and clean Bodhran’s bottom. I wanted to have a good professional job done before I left, not to mention the fact that I really didn’t want to snorkel in the lagoon. The divers just got done cleaning the bottom and I should be renting a car tomorrow to drive to Manzanillo to provision and clear immigration. Then it’ll just be a little matter of waiting for the wind to build, but I’m going to try to be out of Mexico by the middle of next week. Of course the little matter of clearing out of Mexico may throw any number of monkey wrenches in my plans.

These guys drive around the lagoon every once in a while cleaning 4 or 5 boats in a day:

Well we’ve been sitting on the dock here in Oakland for a week now. We originally figured that we’d be here for 2 or 3 days, but it turns out they had to re-engineer how they stayed the crane, so it’s actually taken longer to shore the thing up than it took them to load it down in Long Beach. Hopefully they’ve got it right this time. We’re leaving today and will hopefully be up in Dutch Harbor in 15-20 days.

Ryan above and Godspeed below

Ryan off Godspeed is one of the youngest cruisers I met in Mexico this year. He’s doing research on how younger folk are able to get out cruising. He came up with a great questionnaire. Here’s my response to his questions:

OWNER/CAPTAIN: Jason Rose
YOUR AGE: 32
BOAT NAME : Bodhran
HOME PORT: Bellingham, WA
BOAT DESIGN: Downeaster 32
LENGTH : 32
PURCHASE COST: $24,000
YEARS OF SAILING EXPERIENCE: 8

In a nutshell how did you get started cruisng?
I lived aboard while paying off / fixing up my boat getting out sailing as much as possible. I would take a lot of weekend trips and generally take off and cruise for a month each Summer. Then I started reading books by singlehanded sailors, Slocumb, Grahm, Aebi, Jones… This got the idea stuck in my head to go out cruising. A couple of years later, I was cutting the dock lines.

What do you do/did to support the cruising lifestyle?
I was a computer programmer at a startup that never worked out. Fortunately they didn’t completely fold until a couple of months before I planned to take off. I’m home for the summer right now working on people’s boats and crewing on tugs.

How long did it take to get your boat ready?
2 Years paying off the boat and working moderately hard on it (ie boat projects 2-3 weekends a month.) Then 2 years building up a cruising kitty and working really seriously. Boat projects every night after work plus 12 hour days on the weekends.

Where have you cruised?
Washington, BC, California and Mexico

Do you have health insurance?
No. I’m young enough that I feel it’s a reasonable risk to not have health insurance. I did slice up my toe dragging my dink over the rocks in La Cruz. I had to get 5 stitches. The doctors visit, stitches and antibiotics cost a total of $40. I’ve heard that health care costs are similar in most countries where people go cruising. Before I left, I shredded my finger on a router and needed stitches. I was employed at the time and had Blue Cross. My share of the ER visit, stitches and meds came out to almost $300. If I were in the US without insurance, the incident with my toe would have put a serious dent in my cruising kitty, but as long as I’m sailing in countries with cheap health care I can afford to self insure.

Do you have boat insurance?
Not last year, but I’ll be getting liability coverage next year. Matt and April on Sonadora would have gone to jail if they didn’t have insurance. They were sleeping at anchor early one morning in La Cruz when they were hit by a charter fishing boat heading out through the anchorage. The person chartering the boat was seriously injured and had to be med-evaced to Guadalajara. There was a dispute as to whether or not Sonadora’s anchor light was on or not and to who was at fault. Because Matt and April were essentially transients who could leave on the boat at any time with little possibility of being traced, the local authorities wanted to put them in jail until blame could be determined. Because they had insurance, they were allowed to remain on their boat as long as they didn’t leave La Cruz. In the end they had to say there for 2 months until they were cleared of any responsibility for the accident. Imagine what it would have been like if there was an incident where they were actually at fault. I’ll be getting coverage next year.

About how much do you spend in a month cruising and what is it roughly spent? on ( food, booze , email, parts, ect )
I didn’t keep track of monthly expenditures by category, but I ended up spending a total of $4500 for 6 months in Mexico. I tried to limit myself to $15 for food and alcohol. As it worked out, I spent far less than this when in remote areas and probably a little more that $15 when anchored in town. Email costs are generally negligible, $1 an hour when I couldn’t poach a wi-fi signal. As for parts, this was my first year out, so I had lots of spare parts and not much went wrong with the boat. My head broke and my exhaust elbow sprung a leak. I spent less than $100 to fix each. On top of that, I had to do a bunch of fiberglass work on my dinghy. All in all, I probably spent about $400 on parts and supplies for the year.

What are the rewards of cruising for you?
The single largest reward is just being out at sea. You spend hours seeing nothing, but then you see a giant manta ray, a breeching humpback, or dolphins putting on a phosphorescent light show during a midnight watch. Beyond that you get to see new places in a very intimate and novel way. You slow down and enjoy simple things more. Additionally you become part of the cruising community. It’s so easy to meet people while cruising and pretty much everyone you meet is interesting and willing to come together whenever anyone else is in need. My absolute favorite times cruising have been spent playing music in bars, on beaches and on boats with the other cruisiers I’ve met along the way.

What are the downfalls of cruising for you?
The lack of other young cruisers out there. It’s great meeting new people, but it’d be nice if there were more people out there under 50. There’s the lack of certainty on where your next buck is going to come from. There’s also a lot of mistrust of locals by lots of the cruisers, especially the older/wealthier ones. I had my dinghy and outboard stolen in Mazatlan this year. It sucked, but these kind of things happen when people who have so much interact with people that have so little. Still the most rewarding times out cruising are when you meet the locals and are able to experience foreign cultures first hand.

Any tips you would give a budding cruiser to get them out there now and don’t have a million to spend?
Cheap boats aren’t necessarily deals. It’s far better to spend a little more and get a boat that is in decent shape and hopefully already outfitted. That means you will have to settle for a smaller/simpler boat. On the other hand if you’ve got the time, a reasonable source of income and are a little crazy, then buy a project boat. I spent almost every weekend and many nights for 4 years and around $25,000 fixing up my boat. This left me with a boat that I knew inside and out, but if I had to do it again, I would buy boat that was already outfitted and in better condition.

What in your opinion is the toughest obstacle/s to overcome before taking off.?
Making the decision to go. Come up with a schedule, stick to it and leave. You’re not going to be ready. Don’t worry nobody’s ready. Once you’re out for a bit, you’ll find out what you really need. Until then, just take care of the essentials.

Any fears of not having a 9 to 5 job or security net? Do you worry much about it?
Yes and Yes! On the other hand you meet lots of retired people out cruising and I have yet to meet one who didn’t say that they wished they had left at my age. Nobody recommends that you go back and spend 40 years in cubicle before taking off. You may not have a good pension, you may work until you’re 90, but at least you’ll live an interesting life.

Where do you want to cruise?
I’ll spend at least one more season in Mexico, then I’ll probably be making my way to the South Pacific. I try to keep plans simple. I go wherever is interesting at the time. I doubt that I will circumnavigate, but I would like to sail to the South Pacific and SE Asia.

When will you stop?
When it’s no longer fun or when my life changes and something else comes along that I want to do more.

Any last words of wisdom or advice ?
It’s a bit cliché, but to quote Lin and Larry Pardey “Go simple, go small, go now.” I can’t really top that. Don’t spend too much on a boat, don’t worry about saving up enough money to go for years. I actually like coming back, working for while, catching up with friends and family and then heading back to the boat. Don’t wait until you’re too old to enjoy all that’s out there. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve met a lot of older people out there in better shape than me, but every marina in Mexico is choc full of very expensive boats with owners who aren’t healthy enough to sail them.