Wooing the Spouse

Here is an all-too common marine scenario. One member of a marriage (usually the man but increasing the woman) gets intrigued with cruising, does some minor coastal sailing, experiences a few overnighters, and decides they want to become a sea gypsy. 

Or, at least, retire aboard and sail the Bahamas. And, perhaps, if that goes well, to bravely explore the Lesser Antilles. Transit the Canal, even. Glance westward at Tahiti and beyond. 

Why not? YouTube is filled with loving couples doing exactly that. Why not join them? How hard can it be? Sure, it would be the challenge-of-a-lifetime—but isn’t that what they need to rekindle the spark? To see each other in a new, heroic light?

So, Mister Sailor invites his Better Half to go for a two-week sailing vacation with him—which starts off with a three-day blue water passage. 

His spouse reluctantly agrees—not because she wants to go but because she loves her husband and wants to please him. 

Now, since Mister Sailor realizes this a big moment in their marriage and the rest of his/their lives hangs in the balance, he’s excited—and he fantasizes about all the ways to show his wife how wonderful offshore cruising really is. 

Ms. Skeptical, however, is worried. Exactly how much suffering is required—and why should she/they intentionally seek out misery? How dangerous is it? She doesn’t have gills, right? Sure, she can swim—but only a hundred feet or so. Will the boat heel—like it did before? Isn’t there some way to stop that? What about all the flapping and shouting and splashing? And the whole ‘galley slave’ thingie. She hates to cook at home with all the conveniences, how is she gonna ‘whip up a meal’ in six-foot seas and twenty-knot gusts?

But she calms herself. She gets her breathing under control. Her husband has read to her—read to her aloud—lovely cruising yarns in ALL AT SEA magazine. They sound nice. Maybe it’s her? Maybe she lacks something—some sense of adventure that other, more competent women, have? And if she ends up a SAHM, a Stay At Home Wife or a FIFO, a Fly In and Fly Out spouse… might not her hubby’s wandering eye wander towards one of those surgically-enhanced, HRT-injected divorcees strutting around the Sodom and Gomorrah Yacht Club in thong Bikinis?

And, truth be known, she’s gained a little weight. Not much. But some. 

…what did her mother used to say, “Once on the lips, forever on the hips?”

Nonetheless, she promises herself to do her best. It’s still a good marriage. But the challenges never seem to end. Now that the kids are off to college, she thought that, perhaps… well, it doesn’t matter, does it? 

It never matters what she thinks, does it?

He’s the one with the dreams. She’s the one that is expected to bring the cleaning supplies, polish the silver and brass, and, once the last domestic chores are done, to don her French Maid costume from Fredricks of Hollywood. 

But that’s life, isn’t it? Yes, the woman’s movement has evolved—but modern marriage? Not so much. The woman still does most of the work, the man still gets all the credit. Yet she loves her husband—she really does. He’s goofy but he’s hers. Mostly, they make a good team. It’s a happy home—or, at least, she thought it was. 

Still, she’ll try anything for Mister Sailor—who is still such an eager, starry-eyed boy in so many ways. 

On the eve of departure, neither gets a good night’s sleep—he, because of excitement; she because of dread. 

She does okay at first. She unties her bowline and manages to scramble aboard before the boat drifts too far away from the dock. She takes in the fenders. She even bravely steers into the wind as he hoists the mainsail. 

“Nice to have good crew,” he beams as he returns to the cockpit. 

She basks in his gaze—how long has it been since he’s looked at her with… with what? Admiration? Appreciation? Joy?

And everything is copacetic until they clear the breakwaters — and the boat heels, the sails violently flap, and the salt spray begins to sting.

She’s holding onto the cabin top handrails so hard that she’s worried she’ll dent the teak. 

Horrible! In a word, horrible!

A wave appears before her on the windward side. It hesitates. She looks at it. It seems suspended. And then, as if deciding, it breaks right over her—drenching her completely.

Mister Sailor laughs. He’s having fun. 

How could he be?

She’s scared—too scared to go below. She really doesn’t have gills. This isn’t her element. She’s a home-body. She doesn’t think she’s surrounded by water, she believes she’s surrounded by liquid death. And he seems blissfully unaware. He’s still resolutely heading directly offshore, into the void. 

Land is gonna disappear. It’s gonna be too far to swim back to and too deep to touch the bottom!

“You okay?” he asks, “You’re looking a little green around the gills.” 

What’s it with all this freak’n gill-talk? 

On all-fours, she awkwardly crawls aft along the starboard side deck, slithers wetly into the slippery cockpit, and goes below. 

“Honey?”

She doesn’t reply. It’s safer belowdecks. She can’t get thrown overboard—won’t have to watch that transom, and his smile, get smaller as she drowns. But the motion inside is even more violent. The portlights are scribing crazy arcs. When the boat falls off a wave, the entire vessel rings like a drum. What if it splits in half? Or the keel falls off. Or the expensive inflatable PFD around her neck doesn’t actually inflate, just makes a hissing noise and blows bubbles in the sea? How ironic would that be?

Something inside of her shifts. Her stomach lurches. There’s no time to scramble on deck—that’s too dangerous anyway. She crawls to the head—and hits herself in the forehead while frantically yanks open the wildly swinging door. 

Once there, she loudly ‘calls her ole friend Ralph! on the Big White Phone.’

Afterwards, she’s too weak to pump—too weak to even wipe herself or rinse out her mouth.

She lays on the hard fiberglass sole—praying for a sleep that never fully arrives. 

Once Mister Sailor sticks his head below and says, contritely, “Hey, this is always how it is at first—it will get better, I promise.”

Maybe it will, she thinks grimly, but not with me.

That evening, in the dark, she has to use the head—and can’t find the elusive light switch. She and her buttocks are still wet from the wave—and she slides around the toilet seat as if a seal on ice—praying her and her bowels get their bomb-sight timing right. 

…do I really want a retirement in which the simple act of pooping is nearly impossible? she asks herself. 

We’ll gently close the curtain there, dear reader. 

How often does this happen off the East Coast or West Coast or the Gulf of Mexico? Once a month? Week? Day? Hour?

The poor woman has been thrust into a totally foreign environment—forced into doing something she didn’t want to do… and all for love. I find that incredibly touching and admirable—romantic, even, in a perverse way. 

Let’s contrast this with two real people—Eager Robert and Reluctant Tina of Shirena. They took this process of going offshore far more incrementally. They sailed dinghies together before acting as racing crew during inland Yacht Club races. Next, they purchased a used boat to sail aboard. Finally, they chartered in the BVI and, on the final leg back to Road Town, Tina turned to Robert, hugged him contentedly, gazed up at him with love, and mused, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we didn’t have to bring the boat back—if we could just sail over the horizon?”

Eventually they cruised the Indian Ocean, South Atlantic, and the Caribbean together for years. 

In short, they gradually and mutually worked up to offshore cruising as a couple. 

Going offshore is a shock—even for seasoned couples. Take my wife and I as example. We shoved off on our fourth circumnavigation cautiously. We didn’t just do it—we worked up to it. We said goodbye to friends and family—then sailed ten miles down the coast. We anchored for a week while I puttered around on deck and Carolyn got her galley together (and with nearly a year’s supply of beef, pork, and turkey she had canned). 

Then we went another ten miles down the coast. We anchored again—this time in a slightly rougher anchorage. 

Throughout this process we were getting acclimated to each other, our 43-foot ketch Ganesh, and with Mother Ocean. Finally, three weeks after our going-away party, Carolyn yawed and asked, “…you been watching the weather?”

“Yeah.” 

“… is there a weather window on the horizon?”

“…might be.” 

“I’m getting bored.”

“Me too,” I said, and we left the next day for the Panama Canal, the Pacific, and the Indian Ocean beyond.

We left when we were both ready—when we were both confident and when we both wanted to. 

The first three days of a circumnavigation are always the most difficult. Your stomach isn’t adjusted—nor your bowels. Your sleep patterns haven’t had time to sync with your new shaken-not-stirred reality. You are not in the habit of continuously hydrating. All your muscles, especially your stomach muscles, aren’t used to ceaselessly clenching and unclenching. 

However, sometime around the fourth day, all these factors magically morph into an oceanic equilibrium—and you can sail almost forever. 

My biggest regret after our longest passage of 48 days at sea, was actually ending it. I wanted to sail another month to Nova Scotia—not because I wanted to cruise Canada but because I wanted to share another month offshore with the woman I love… before I had to wearily trudge into Babylon, answer my email, and allow modern, money-grubbing reality to intrude into our marital bliss.

Interestingly, we’ve known three cruising couples who have split up—and the woman kept the boat while the man kept the house. 

“Our first gale off Hatteras was a humdinger,” one wife reported to us later. “By its end, I was intrigued—and he was shaking like a leaf, asking which way was the nearest yacht broker. The simple truth—Mother Ocean scared him while it enthused me.”

The most important thing for a long-term cruising couple is that both parties get the payoff they individually desire. Carolyn and I have cruised 200K nautical miles together in the last 55 years. I’m a sailor who loves to travel. She’s a traveling student who loves to sail. She has sailed some of the roughest waters in the world—while I make sure to escort her to every museum and educational opportunity we find along the way. (Last night was a talk on Ritual Buddhists Bronzes at the Asia Civilization Museum of Singapore—which utterly riveted my wife while I quietly & politely suppressed my yawns.)

Each to his own. Perhaps part of the reason for the success of our relationship is that we lived aboard in Chicago, Memphis, Greenville, and New Orleans for nearly two years before we experienced our first kick-ass gale in the Cozumel Strait between Yucatan and Cuba. 

And I don’t sing my wife’s praises upon these hallowed pages because she is the best sailor I’ve ever met. She’s not. Nor am I much of a sailor. But she’s the best human being I’ve ever met—which is much, much more important, both offshore and on. 

 

Fatty and Carolyn are, at 73, happily forgetting things together in various harbors of Southeast Asia. “Actually,” grins Fatty, “the more I forget, the more honorable I believe myself to be! If this keeps up, I’m destined for sainthood!”

Cap'n Fatty Goodlander has written for ALL AT SEA since 2005.