Cruising Along On a Sea of Song

Boat/US Magazine, Sept, 1999 by Becky Squires

Many couples dream of going cruising in the Caribbean -- getting out of the rat race and onto a boat, where an idyllic life of living aboard awaits. Days to snorkel tropical reefs and catch fresh fish for dinner, and nights to watch the gorgeous sunset with your arm around your partner, sipping exotic drinks and finding your mate as attractive as the day you first met.

That's the dream. The reality is a bit more complex. Living aboard a sailboat is more of a cross between getting your car fixed and having your house remodeled at the same time. While you're in it.

A few couples adjust immediately and perfectly to the cruising lifestyle, never having a single problem with either their boat or their relationship. A handful of others barely make it to the first foreign port, where they put the boat on the market, take the first plane back to the United States and hunt for a good divorce lawyer. And the lion's share find that the good -- the freedom, the beauty of the Caribbean, the opportunity to explore new places and meet new people -- far outweighs the bad, like going weeks without mail from home or Haagen-Dasz ice cream.

But for women, who usually feel the loss of easy communication with family and friends at home more keenly than men, and who often have less experience on a boat than their mate, a total adjustment to the cruising lifestyle can take a bit longer.

Long-time BOAT/U.S. member Eileen Quinn is one of those cruisers. She and her husband, David Allester, left high-pressure jobs in the Canadian government five years ago and set out on their sailboat, Little Gidding, for the Bahamas and the Caribbean. On the boat was her acoustic guitar, jammed in among the cases of tomato sauce and toilet paper that every new cruiser is constitutionally unable to leave home port without.

She hadn't touched the guitar in years, but cruising jolted her creativity. She began jotting down snatches of song, writing about the emotional ups and downs of the cruising life. For the next two years, as they traveled throughout the Bahamas and the eastern Caribbean, she wrote a lot of songs and strummed a lot of chords. In Venezuela a friend persuaded her to sing with some other boaters at a small party. "It was an addictive moment," Quinn says.

In 1997, she performed before her first "paying" audience -- meaning "pass the hat" -- in Roatan, Bay Islands, Honduras. She used those proceeds and a good chunk of the cruising kitty besides to record her first cassette, "No Significant Features," in Guatemala City. That cassette -- or its CD, which was released last summer -- now has a place of honor on the shelves of almost every cruiser who has heard her perform, right next to Jimmy Buffet.

Quinn writes and sings songs about sailing that, often in the same verse, bring tears and laughter to her audiences. One of her first songs, "I Love Sailing" speaks to the love-hate relationship that many boaters have with the open water:

Come on darling come with me

I'll take you sailing

On the deep blue sea

Set our sails under a perfect sky

Drift on down where the tropics lie

I love sailing

Except for when I'm hanging

Over the railing

I love the seven seas

Except for when my head is tucked

Between my knees.

Quinn learned a few other truths in those early days. In the Bahamas, she and David met "a really lovely couple, the kind who smiled idyllically at each other and held hands the whole evening." The next night, the entire anchorage witnessed a "gruesome scene," Quinn relates, as the same couple screamed insults at each other while they tried to set the anchor. Since very few people manage to stay on the boat more than a couple of weeks without an argument over setting the hook, it's easy to see why cruisers howl with laughter -- and recognition -- when they hear Quinn's "The Anchoring Dance:"

Capable cruisers

In a sturdy little boat

Mastering the challenges

Of living afloat

Know what you're doing

Do it all by the book

So how come you lose it

When you drop the hook?

A little disagreement rises to a shout

All the other boats get binoculars out

Wouldn't be anchoring if nobody rants

When they do do do do do

Do the anchoring dance.

But the challenges of navigating a relationship aren't confined to the sea, and there are a lot of benefits to cruising that don't exist ashore. For example, weekly sailboat races in their home ports started many on the path to cruising the Caribbean. Why give up the fun and the competition of regattas just because you've traded in that super-fast J-24 for a floating RV? Almost every Caribbean island holds an annual regatta with a "cruising class," and the experience, while decidedly different, has its own rewards. As Quinn describes in "Gotta Regatta:"

We trim the sails, do the best we can

Still it's like racing the Indy in a mini-van

Got so much gear aboard, she barely floats

Who are we kidding, racing these boats?

We're slow even by corrected time

Although we're often near the front of the buffet line

Takes a while to sail very far

But we can strike like lightning at an open bar.