Click play on the song above for a little taste of Chuck Taylor goodness. For more music you can find bits and pieces scattered around the internet like his Facebook Fan Page. The music is down on the left hand side, they’re all great but White Picket Prisons and Pedro’s Bridge have been in my head for about 6 months now.
In the summer of 2007, Lara and I crewed on a catamaran in Europe for a few months and then traveled around the continent for a while. I wanted to build my experience a little, show her life at sea and explore part of the world I’d never been to. Getting my own boat was my next goal, the trick was where to base ourselves so I could work to get enough money to buy one. We flew out to the Pacific Northwest to check out Vancouver, Seattle and Portland as possible bases. They each had their own appeal but, I had a job offer open in Charleston at a decent pay rate. After being away for three years, going back “home” sounded like a nice compromise.
When we came back, we found that a lot of our friends from college were here and three of my best friends from growing up had since moved to Charleston…..ready made friend group — sweet. The last two + years we’ve been lucky enough to be surrounded by beautiful, intelligent and creative people. Even though I’ve been pretty much consumed with the boat (got to be somewhere nearing 1,000 man hours of labor on it) since I bought it there’s always been an outlet for fun not far away.
Bocci on the beach? check…..serious game of short white men hoops? check……Guerilla disc golf in Hampton Park? check……oyster roasts? check….last minute convincing to hit up a show at the Pour House? check…..kayak trips? check
Work got me an Iphone which served as my ball and chain for two years, 2 am phone calls from the Harbor Pilots because their database was frozen, panicky hoteliers with crashed servers or whatever else came up. That’s the crappy part, the blessing in disguise is that I took pictures of little things all the time on it — I’ve got close to a 1,000 that make like a little slide show of our time in Charleston — lots of remember whens.
It has been a blast, and somehow people have put up with my constant dreaming and hearing about this trip that’s just over the horizon for two years. We’re leaving Monday….for real. The boat is floating, the engine is running, the mast is on, the head works, hell even the radio works. These last few months have been some of the toughest I’ve ever been through. I thought we were ready to leave about a dozen times, or the work was almost done only to have the rug pulled out from under me with a new relatively serious problem. I’ve spent all of two + years worth of savings bailing myself out but even then there’s no way I could have gotten this far without the help of my friends.
Last March (that’s a year ago now for those of you keeping score at home), Lara and I moved onto the boat to commence final countdown to departure, but our clock was broken — the countdown kept going up, then back down, then way up, then we’d whittling it back down only to have it shoot way up again. Adjusting to life in the marina was a little strange, we felt in between two worlds and a little out of place. The first few months we didn’t spend much time there, we didn’t find that many people that we had much in common with, the place had a nazi dockhand with a pencil thin mustache that threw out our herb garden and most of the residents seemed interested in talking about what idiots everyone else was and how crappy everyone elses boat is.
Towards the end of the summer, a boat pulled into the first slip on our dock with a cool hand painted name and from what I could tell a young couple on board. Over the next few weeks, I’d walk past Wildflower on my way to and from work and hear Chuck picking on his guitar and Lara met Michelle around the marina. They just got back from a year + of cruising and were in Charleston to work and for Chuck to play music. After my mandatory two hours of sanding in the afternoons, I’d crack a beer and walk up the dock to listen to Chuck play and eventually we’d get into those long bs conversations about life, politics, religion and whatever else I can argue about that make me so happy (devils advocate….ahhhhhh so much fun).
The long and short of it is marinas kind of suck, especially when all you want to do is get out and away from it all but all you do is sand, having friends a few slips away to share a meal with makes a ton of difference. People say the best part of cruising is the people. When I was backpacking people said the same thing. Whether you’re in some random town in Thailand, an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, at the southern tip of New Zealand or in someone’s backyard in Charleston — the people are what make it, and we’ve been surrounded by some pretty good ones.
Peace y’all — now lets do this thing.







