Bittersweet

As anyone who reads my blog knows, I am not a fan of sailing, I can, in truth say that I hate sailing. I have, thankfully, over the last three years completely lost my fear of deep water, and now happily swim off the boat wherever we are. However an appreciation for the actual sailing still eludes me.

I'm quite happy when we're anchored, moored or alongside, and I love many aspects of living on a boat with the exception of sailing, if I could simply get off and fly to meet the boat when it reaches its next destination I would be perfectly happy, unfortunately that's not possible, so I grit my teeth, down a big glass of something alcoholic, and pray with a passion.

Its funny because despite having attended Catholic school, I've never been very religious, that is until recently, since living on a boat I find myself praying all the time, in fact I talk to God more than anyone I know. He's obviously listening to me because despite many terrifying encounters I'm still here, obviously he has a purpose for me, so I trust in him to protect me from the dreaded sea for a while yet at least.

Bob on the other hand, has always been quite religious, and is in his element, never happier than when he's at the helm when we're at sea. While I sit frozen (depending on how much alcohol I've consumed) praying for us to reach our destination as quickly as possible. Well, actually, there have been times when we've been at sea and I've loved it, but unfortunately those occasions are few and far between.

This is a bizarre sort of life that I lead, given the terror I feel, although most of it I love, so that sort of makes up for the periods of panic and terror. Anyway today we are done with our varnishing, polishing, boat tidying, and fun stuff like sunbathing and snorkeling, and are about to go sailing "OH JOY".

We have to go back to Sopers Hole to check out of the BVI's, then sail over to St.Thomas, where we will take our life raft in for service, collect the satellite phone that hopefully has been repaired, check in, and wait for Edi to arrive tomorrow night.

I'm never quite as nervous when we have other people on board, especially any of my children, all of whom fortunately love to sail. We have the dreaded passage to St.Maarten coming up, a 14 hour passage that usually finds me in a horizontal position for 12 out of the 14 hours leg, thank God Edi will be with us to help Bob as I am always reliably useless!