PNW Family Life Afloat

Matthew and I have lived aboard for long stretches of time (years each) in the past and now spend life together with one foot ashore and the other at sea in order to balance our growing daughter’s schooling needs with our seafaring passion. We may elect to home school at sea for a short stint someday in the future – I’m thinking those socially cringe-worthy junior high grades may be an ideal time to cast off on a South Pacific/Australia/New Zealand adventure for a couple years – but that will be a different blog for a different time. I can already feel how tricky it will be to disentangle ourselves from our happily deepening roots spreading across the special small island community that we now call home. The trade-offs are challenging to calculate. We shall see.

You only live once.

Living aboard as a family brings amazing quality time and a satisfying organic connection to the rhythm of the tides and the marine environment at large; however, this existence is balanced with the constant need for intense, unwavering vigilance about water safety, especially with a kid. Our water-world experiences as single adults were quite different than our lives aboard with our daughter, but all phases of life on the water have required an awareness and active management of the unforgiving dangers around you. Let me set my valid mama-worry-tone down for a moment and focus on the joys that lured me to a life aquatic in the first place.

Jamie’s Live-Aboard Life Before Family

Through the serendipity that often follows a particularly rough patch in one’s love life, I pivoted to a path less traveled and became the new owner of a modern 45-foot housebarge in Seattle’s Lake Union. My housebarge, Mermaid Crossing, would become my light-filled, single-girl sanctuary and my blissful home base filled with music, friendships, and carefree heart-healing fun.

Summers were warm and full of sailing whimsy. I rediscovered my belly laugh through semi-reckless Tuesday night Duck Dodges. 

I learned how tightly friendships can be forged and renewed among the diverse collection of characters that make up the tightly-knit marina communities around the lake. I stood up to the myriad of challenges that boat ownership brings and conquered them alone, one by one, building character and perspective with each temporary set-back. The self-reliance was nourishing. 

Eventually, my pursuit of happiness led me to skippering my own 27′ sloop, Affinity, and I took great pleasure in the freedom that exploring the Sound by small craft afforded. With my nautical passion to guide me and the enduring support of dear girl friends and family, I finally came to peace with pressing realities back then: the sun was setting on my potential for a family and life as a single-handed cruiser was my most likely course. So be it. As the old adage goes: you can’t change the wind, but you can adjust your sails. I had mentally set my new course, trimmed my sheets, furled up my jib, and embraced the coming horizon.

Then I met Matthew.

(And isn’t that always the way…to find what you seek, you have to let it all go.)

Then Jamie Met Matthew

Our story is basically a nautical, Seattleite version of Girl-with-Cat meets Boy-with-Dog.

We joked very early on about sharing a brain cell for the manner in which we approach the world. We bonded over our common short-bus-riding roots in childhood and the various windmills we’d battled in our lives that brought us to the very same point on map. As a large-vessel multihull broker who frequented the big shipyards along the industrial Ballard waterfront, Matthew vaguely recalled shipyard chatter about the odd-novelty a few years prior: a single girl was buying her own housebarge all alone…

The spark ignited, we checked our compatibility as sailors do with a relationship-testing shake down cruise for several weeks up into BC waters aboard Matthew’s beloved 54′ foot, ketch-rigged sailing catamaran, Boondock.  Turns out, you can find a mutually perfect match later in life and fall into intense love, even with a pair of heavily seasoned hearts.

Matthew proposed at Christmastime with a golden ring he had commissioned from a native BC artist. The design on the ring threads our story with that of a relevant native legend about catching a mermaid. Inside the ring is inscribed:

“May a gentle wind drive our canoe.

May we reach safe harbor together.”

Our daughter was born a year and a half later.

And Then There Were Three

After a brief time living ashore in Ruston, WA as we adjusted to new parenthood, Matthew and I were eager to reclaim the live-aboard life we loved. With Mermaid Crossing sold to the perfect set of new owners, we set our sights on the next vessel for our little family and our future aspirations to visit distant parts the world by boat.

Being the lovable control-freak, data-queen that I am, I set my free-time to Googling the pants off yacht sales postings across the entirety of North America and beyond. Luckily, my husband is a genuine expert in large, ocean-faring catamarans and he flies under The Multihull Company flag – the largest multihull brokerage on the planet – so the volume of worldwide inventory at our finger tips was plentiful and, for me, nearly overwhelming. Of course, that also could have been the new-mom sleep deprivation snowing me at the time. Matthew’s patient coaching and educating technique, usually reserved for his clients, was now given with equal care to his wound-up wife for all the technical variables, needs, wants, worries, hopes, and fears that pour into finding the right boat at the right price. We scored. And so did I in the husband department.

Our daughter was just over a year old when we found and purchased Awesome in Florida and it took a couple months for Matthew and his crew to get her here to the Seattle area. I’ll leave that as a story to be told by Matthew in a separate posts someday. Once the excitement settled, we moved aboard Awesome when our little girl was 18 months of age.

In parallel with my boat shopping obsession at the time, I was also intently researching a wide range of practical “How-To” resources for keeping a toddler happy, healthy, and safe aboard a boat.

I gratefully give props two well-written, inspirational sailing blogs, namely Windtraveler and Log of Del Viento, that each provided me with insight and the information I was looking for to help me confidently embrace life with a kid on a boat.

Thanks to Brittany of Windtraveler, my daughter’s bunk has been safe, fabulous, comfortable, and organized. Through her posts, my momma-anxieties have been stayed with her real-world descriptions of managing life, from boat-fridge organization to intense, life changing storms such as having twins and surviving the total destruction of Hurricane Irma.

Thanks to Michael and Windy and their two girls from s/v Del Viento, my whisper-quiet worries about fundamentally “screwing up” my daughter’s childhood by disconnecting her from the mainstream cubicles of suburban life have been allayed.

Thanks to the thoughtful blogs and excellent book about family (Voyaging with Kids) by Michael of s/v Del Viento and others, I feel secure that Matthew and I are, in fact, giving our sweet girl the rarest of foundations to succeed and stand-out as a confident, world-savvy, environmentally-aware citizen of earth.

I am so grateful to have been able to pull into the worlds of other cruiser families as we transitioned into a family afloat. Hopefully, our GPS tracks will cross someday and, in the meantime, I endeavor to pay it forward.