REFLECTIONS OF A REAL OCEAN CRUISER
As I was coming in to my anchorage tonight, I looked at Exit Only with a sense of awe and gratitude.
This amazing fiberglass sculpture on which we sail has taken us on unforgettable voyages and did it in safety and relative comfort.
At the same time I felt gratitude to the yacht designers and builders who put this sailing machine together and made it possible for us to live our sailing dreams.
Multihull sailboats have been a mixture of miscarriage and the miraculous.
Mainstream yachting regarded early catamarans as suicide machines, and to a degree I understand their skepticism. The first home home-built multihulls varied greatly in quality of construction, and more than a few of their voyages ended in tragedy.
It’s unfortunate that multihulls got off to a rough start in the twentieth century. It gave them a bad reputation, and people forgot about the Polynesian voyaging catamarans that carried sailors across the Pacific Ocean.
In Polynesia, multihulls sailed the islands of the Pacific for thousand of years. Their catamarans propagated Polynesian culture from Asia all the way to the Eastern Pacific.
When European sailors first reached the South Pacific, giant sailing canoes, catamarans, and proas were still in existence. Over the next 300 years the Polynesian voyaging catamarans faded from memory, and as far as the western world was concerned, catamarans never existed.
In spite of the ancient Polynesian voyages, monohull sailors developed amnesia regarding those voyages.
Fortunately, a small slice of the sailing community remembered what everyone else forgot.
I will always remember a conversation I had with a monohull sailor on a camping trip in Saudi Arabia. He discovered that I was sailing my catamaran around the world, and he said that doing a circumnavigation in a catamaran was both brave and dangerous. He told me that catamarans flipped over and the occupants of multihulls are frequently lost at sea.
I asked him how he knew so much about multihulls sailing offshore, and he told me that he was a monohull sailor. He added that he participated in a transatlantic race in which the monohull he was sailing sunk in the Atlantic ocean after a collision at sea.
It was strange to hear a monohull sailor expound on the dangers of sailing in catamarans when his own monohull boat sunk at sea.
According to him, we have been living and sailing on the edge for the past twenty-seven years.
If this is living on the edge, then living on the edge works for me.
What a way to go!
Exit Only has been a member of our family for twenty-seven years, and my kids became citizens of the world on our voyages. They transitioned into adulthood while standing on her decks.
When you know your boat as well as you know the members of your family, you establish a relationship that makes it possible to have incredible adventures.
You don’t sail offshore and around the world unless you trust your boat, and our faith in Exit Only remains unshaken.
We know that if we take care of Exit Only, she will take care of us, and you can’t ask much more than that.
Awesome music video that captures the essence of what it's like to sail offshore in a catamaran around the world when conditions are less than perfect. David Abbott from Too Many Drummers sings the vocals, and he also edited the footage from our Red Sea adventures. This is the theme song from the Red Sea Chronicles.
Sailing up the Red Sea is not for the faint of heart. From the Bab al Mandeb to the Suez Canal, adventures and adversity are in abundance. If you take things too seriously, you just might get the Red Sea Blues.
If you like drum beats, and you like adventure, then have a listen to the Red Sea Chronicles Trailer.
Flying fish assault Exit Only in the middle of the night as we sail through the Arabian Gulf from the Maldives to Oman. And so begins our Red Sea adventures.
Sailing through Pirate Alley between Yemen and Somalia involves calculated risk. It may not be Russian Roulette, but it is a bit of a worry. Follow Team Maxing Out as they navigate through Pirate Alley.
Stopping in Yemen was just what the doctor ordered. We refueled, repaired our alternator, and we made friends with our gracious Yemeni hosts. We also went to Baskins Robbins as a reward for surviving Pirate Alley.
After you survive Pirate Alley, you must sail through the Gate of Sorrows (Bab Al Mandab) at the southern entrance to the Red Sea. The Gate of Sorrows lived up to its name with fifty knots of wind and a sandstorm that pummeled Exit Only for two days. Life is good.
Although I like the feel of a paper book in my hand, I love trees even more. When people purchase an eBook, they actually save trees and save money as well. Ebooks are less expensive and have no negative impact on the environment. All of Dr. Dave's books are available at Save A Tree Bookstore. Visit the bookstore today and start putting good things into your mind. It's easy to fill your mind with positive things using eBooks. No matter where you are or what you are doing, you can pull out your smart phone or tablet and start reading. You can even use electronic highlighters and make annotations in your eBooks just like paper books.
