Arlo and Alma are finishing their first semesters of 8th and 6th grades, respectively, ashore this fall and are wondering what life at sea will be like. Arlo and Alma are both excellent crew, though neither has spent more than 12 days at a time on a boat before this. They’ll both be saying goodbye to great teachers and friends as well as grandparents, aunts, uncles, and a cousin. They’ll miss their school, their Ultimate team, and, especially, their dog Moby, whom we have left in the care of friends. We’ve packed books and notebooks and stored lots of novels on our kindles to make it through the year ahead.
Jason and Caitlin have both worked on boats, but they’ve never taken their own boat very far before this trip. Jason left his work at the San Francisco Maritime Museum in June to work full time on Debonair, and Caitlin is wrapping up her work as an Instructional Coach in schools. It’ll be strange to be away from dear friends and family for a year, as well as from the pleasures of life ashore like gardening, bicycling or taking a nap on the couch. It has been hard for each of us to leave work that we love, but we are looking forward to this year with each other and with Arlo and Alma.
In January 2018 we’ll head west through the Golden Gate and south along the coast of California. The plan is to sail to Mexico, across the Pacific to French Polynesia, and then to re-enter the US in Hawaii. Eventually we hope to return to the US via Alaska and British Columbia. Mostly it’ll just be the four of us, but we’ll be joined by good friends for the longer passages. We are not sure what the year ahead holds for us–we are deeply excited, a little nervous, not entirely ready, and quite determined.
In almost every way, Caitlin’s parents, Beth and Gary Schwarzman, launched us on this voyage.
Before they bought their first boat in 1971, neig=ther Beth nor Gary had sailed much–Gary had only sailed on a styrofoam dinghy on a New Jersey lake, and Beth had sailed just a couple of times on a canoe retrofitted with an outrigger and a sail. Always practical, Beth and Gary became voyaging sailors by reading the books, using their common sense, making mistakes and talking to more experienced sailors and boat builders. They took calculated risks, working to make the life they wanted to live. Together with their two young daughters, they left San Francisco Bay for the East Coast in 1976 and continued to sail for the rest of their lives.
Beth and Gary died before their time. They left us with a sense of possibility and a belief that doing good things is not just possible with hard work, but that those things that take hard work are often the ones most worth doing.
In everything we do aboard DEBONAIR–from stitching a sail, to building a rain catchment system, to choosing a dinghy–we think of Beth and Gary. They lived such intentional lives. We are full of love and so grateful.