February 2018 – A Year and a Day

Life on a Boat

–by ARLO

We moved onto Debonair four weeks ago, and we are starting to develop and settle into the new way of life. But it is still a world away from riding my bike in Alameda. One of the biggest differences from life in Alameda has been school. School on the boat is so different from ACLC. We only have one teacher and only do an hour or so of school a day, but our education is happening all the time. Our curriculum varies in every

A pod of bottlenose dolphins swimming under our bow

way from what is taught in ACLC in every class but math, in which we just follow along in our textbooks. We also learn some stuff that is not taught at ACLC, like oceanography, in which we see stuff from the text book in all parts of our life, from kelp beds to gray whale migration patterns, to being bullied by 4,500 pound bull elephant seals, and we get extra practice on subjects like Spanish, that we can go ashore and listen to and speak.

Another big difference is getting around. To go to the grocery store, we have to get in the dinghy, row ashore, either to a dock or to the beach, and if we land on the beach, we might have to make a surf landing. When there is a lot of surf on the beach, and you need to get ashore, you have to position the dinghy just right, and wait for the smallest wave that you can find, and then time it just right so that you surf in on the back of it. Once you hit the beach, you hop out into the ankle deep water and haul the dinghy up the beach, while waves break over you and go into the dinghy. You had better hope you put your phone in a dry bag. When you return from your trip to the store on foot, you have to launch the dinghy through the surf. You put the person rowing in the boat, and then the other people wait for a the smallest wave that you’ll get, and then push the dinghy out until you are knee deep, and then jump in, and yell at the person rowing to row like hell. We also have a two person inflatable kayak that we can use for smaller expeditions.

Once we return from shore, if we wanted to make lunch, we could either use the fresh food that we just picked up at the store, or use some of the five minivans full of non-perishable food that we jammed into every nook and cranny on the boat. For breakfast, we usually have cereal, either oatmeal or cold cereal. Dinner is the meal that is most like what it was at home. My mom will make something tasty, like soups, or pizza, and occasionally we will go out for dinner. All in all, the eating is much better than one might expect on a boat.

As for sleep on the boat, that is one of the few things that is pretty much the same. I have learned to like waking up at six in the morning, to the engine running, and hearing the boat leaving port, with my parents driving the boat up on deck, and then going back to sleep for another hour or two. When you finally do come up on deck in the morning in your pajamas, looking out at the coastline 5 or 10 miles away, with you bowl of cereal in your hand, you might sit around for a while, and then have to tend the main sheet, or rig a fishing line. This is all just part of life on the boat.

One of the only downsides of life on a boat as a kid is the lack of people your age. I haven’t talked to anyone under 35 in a month! But in the end, there are many more upsides than downsides, and living on a boat for a year is definitely worth it.

Dad and me at the end of an uphill hike on Santa Catalina Island

Sea Vegetables

From ALMA:

About a week and a half ago, we were in the Channel Islands. We were all rowing back from a hike on San Miguel Island when Arlo and I saw some seaweed float by. We collected it and decided to cook it. We have the book Sea Vegetables, which identifies lots of edibile seaweeds and ways to cook them. We used this book to identify the seaweed that we had collected! We identified it as Perennial Kelp, or the scientific name Macrocystis (Mac-row-sis-tus), and in California, it can grow up to 200 feet or more!

Arlo took the blades (leaves) and the floats and fried them. I took the floats and fried them. Then I stuffed them with cream cheese. It was all very good. My favorites were the fried blades and the stuffed floats. The leaves tasted like seaweed that you get at the store! We didn’t salt the seaweed at all, the saltiness came from the salt in the sea. I hope to cook more seaweed in the future!

Arlo’s seaweed peices ready to be fried!

Mexico!

We sailed into Mexico this morning in the dark. Lots of vessel traffic in these waters—fishing boats of various sizes, a cruise ship, merchant vessels, and naval ships—kept us watchful. Ashore, a string of yellow lights, which we presume marked a border fence, crept up the hill and followed the contours of several hills beyond as far as we could see. And then the sun rose over Mexican mountains and the breeze began to fill in. After 6 days in San Diego, it was good to be underway again!

Sailing (and reading) wing-and-wing in Southern California. The windvane is steering.

The seal weighs about 4,000 lbs more than the dinghy.

Some of our favorite spots so far have been in the Northern Channel Islands. At San Miguel Island we anchored in a cove with about 3,000 elephant seals declaring all sorts of things loudly all day and through the night. I appreciate our friend Glenn pointing out the humor of the scene as we rowed up

and down the least populated section of beach looking for some real estate to land on that hadn’t been claimed by an elephant seal bull. On one end of the beach we realize that the gap between bulls at the other end of the beach is just a little bit bigger. Once we row back to the other end, we are certain that the gap we’d just left behind offered a little more space. But when we look again, it seems very tight and we think about trying the other end again Somehow we do get ashore alive—through the surf and beyond the bull seals. Of course, following a hike, we return to find one of the seals has up and moved his 4,000 lb bulk directly between our path and the dinghy. I appreciate Arlo for pointing out the humor in this moment.

Other highlights of these three uninhabited islands: tiny anchorages, whales and dolphins, tide pools and more tide pools, and several types of kelp, which Arlo and Alma identify and cook in a variety of ways. On the downside, it turns out that California has a mylar balloon problem—over the course of about 120 miles we spotted 14 mylar balloons floating in the waters between Los Angeles, the Channel Islands and San Diego.

San Diego was a world away from the Channel Islands, but we felt right at home thanks to friends of friends who hosted us and lent us their car and generally supported our week of logistics.

Water, diesel, propane, laundry, groceries, marine hardware, a dodger repaired, new foam for our bunk, miscellaneous galley items, and, maybe most importantly, Jason’s first pair of flip flops in years.

Our Mexican courtesy flag and the Q flag fluttering beneath it still have creases from being stored for so long. Tomorrow we’ll head into Ensenada to check in with customs and immigration and the Port Captain, we’ll find an ATM, some showers and I’m sure, as it turns out that we arrived during the week-long Carnival celebration, some music and tacos.

We all loved reading your kind words on our first blog posts. Thank you! Do feel free to send any questions you have—large or small—our way. And we’ll keep you posted.