Caro Babbo sleeps, John has nightmares

Port Townsend, WA – 14-NOV-2022 – Traveling from Homer to Port Townsend was uneventful. We’ve been flying more and more the last few years, nothing like we did before I left the workforce, but we’re probably doing over 30,000 miles a year, each.

While Homer is seeing more and more private jets as the very affluent find the next place to colonize, for Jennifer and me traveling between Homer and the lower 48 involves multi-hour layovers in Anchorage. This time we got pretty lucky. Our flight left Homer at 10:15 PM arriving in Anchorage at 11 PM with a 1 AM connection to Seattle.

We took mass transit from SeaTac to Bainbridge Island and were in Port Townsend mid-day, Labor Day Monday.

Caro Babbo now has an inverted ‘‘V’’ on her skeg, which was not there when she went in the water.

When Caro Babbo came out of the water the aft lifting strap slipped further aft. Aaron, the man running the hoist, saw this and seemed to think it was okay. He has much more experience with this than I do, and I deferred to him. This may have been a mistake, as Caro Babbo now has two lines in an inverted ‘‘V’’ on her skeg, which, when we compare photographs, we see that they were not there when she went in the water.

Aaron said he would get an expert to look at it, but he has not responded to an email from me that was opened. I will see him this coming weekend at ‘‘Fish Expo’’ here in Seattle.

Throughout our summer, I slept very well on Caro Babbo. Jennifer didn’t always, but I had no trouble falling asleep and generally stayed asleep the entire night. I teased her that I had a clear conscience. (The ‘‘entire night’’ doesn’t count the nights when I needed to be awake to check our anchor drag, or on an overnight passage, but after those intentional awakenings, I was able to instantly go back to sleep.)

Returning to Port Townsend, I found I was having nightmares that I could not remember. They would wake me up but I wouldn’t be able to remember them; I would be anxious but I wouldn’t know why.

Over time, I began to remember the dreams. They were anxiety dreams, but not the anxiety dreams that have bothered me and seem to be common among everyone in our Western world.

When I started working in my 20s, I would have anxiety dreams that I had not been going to class in school, or had forgotten about a test. These dreams would return periodically throughout my entire 40-year working life.

Once I left the workforce the school-related anxiety dreams changed into work-related events: missing a meeting or not having a proposal ready, or something like that. It interests me that the anxiety dreams are one phase of my life behind where I am.

In a famous scene in the movie The Graduate, the young man, played by Dustin Hoffman, is told that the future is, “plastics.”

My anxiety dreams exactly: plastics.

No matter where we went in the Aleutians, and we’re talking places where there are no residences for hundreds of miles, there would be plastic on the shore. Away from civilization, it was never very much, as opposed to the inside passage where beaches can be littered knee-deep in plastic. In the Aleutians, it was generally a box or a container that was visible. They could be American, but often times they were Malaysian or Indonesian: things that probably fell off a fishing boat.

Further out west we would find vertical sand walls on the inland side of the beach. They were remarkably stable because they were made of plastic fishing nets.

In 2020, 800 miles north of Hawaii, we picked up a fishing net on our propeller. The water was warm and standing on the swimming ladder hanging off the transom, I was able to cut loose the buoys on one side of the hull, which unfortunately got away from us, and drag the entire bundled net into Caro Babbo’s cockpit. The net was alive with crabs. We threw as many as we could over the side, and then bundled the net with any creatures that were still inside of it into a double layer of plastic garbage bags that we delivered to the harbor people at Dutch Harbor for disposal.

A friend recently told me that I have nothing to worry about with plastics. They decompose easily in the sun, and in 500 years or so, all will be gone. There’s nothing to worry about.

His assurance didn’t quell my anxiety. Taking that statement at face value, it means that 500 years’ worth of plastic will always be around us.

The real rush to plastic use didn’t start until probably the 1970s. I remember, as a child, all soft drink and beer bottles were returned for reuse, as were milk bottles and many other types of sturdy bottles.

Sometime in the late 1960s, post-1965, single-use disposable bottles showed up. They were much thinner glass, generally wrapped in a thin layer of some plastic that looked very much like Styrofoam. Steel cans with aluminum pull tops were starting to show up as the packaging revolution started. Some time in the early 70s packaging became everything and we tumbled down the steep path to where we are now: very little is shipped, packaged, or displayed in anything other than plastic. Marketing has told every manufacturer of anything that the consumer wants to see the product inside the package. Cardboard boxes and paper wrapping will not suffice.

Single-use is everywhere. It’s not uncommon for Jennifer and me to be aboard a  sailboat that has cases of bottled water aboard.   A frequent topic of discussion among cruisers is the correct way to store all that waste plastic until the next port.

We’re not everyone. On land, our kitchen is full of what a friend describes as “no food, just ingredients.”

We try very hard never to use paper towels or anything else that’s single-use. All this plastic and other single-use waste weigh on me.

Perhaps my anxiety is nothing more than a symptom of something else that I’m not willing to face, or haven’t yet understood. 

Here in PT, Jennifer and I are working through all of the chores that are not done when we’re not here. When we returned all the gardens were overgrown with weeds; Jennifer spent two weeks at it, adamant that we would put heavy black tarps over the vegetable garden rather than allow anyone else to garden there. She was fuming that all the nutrients she had added to the soil were just being depleted by the weeds. We’ve done most of the maintenance on the house and Jennifer is just finishing up the Murphy bed for her office.

Jennifer is currently thinking she’ll not do any more passages. We are each discussing with the other, when we are alone together, what is our purpose, and what gives us purpose if we’re not going on passages that stretch our abilities?

My original 2016 plan* was that we two should go sailing for 10 years and not return, it was a non-starter with Jennifer. But since 2016, we have been going on ever-increasingly adventurous sails lasting up to six months. When the boat was in Puget Sound, we would also go on shorter multi-day, or multiweek trips in Puget Sound, in the San Juan’s, up north past the Nanaimo, over to Vancouver, and wherever else we thought we might want to go.

We’ve started doing road trips, which may fill the bill. But we’ve become people who keep pushing our limits. Road trips are wonderful as relaxation and fun. There is never any worry that the car will drift away if the wind comes up, or that an engine failure will cause us to drift onto the rocks on a lee shore. Is this enough to give us purpose?

An email arrived this week from a friend looking for crew to sail to New Zealand. The boat is somewhere in Southern California right now.

I found last year I did not enjoy sailing on vessels when I was not the captain. And, I suspect, I would not really enjoy selling on any vessel where there is more than just Jennifer and me. So I haven’t decided what to do.

I am seriously considering single-handing if Jennifer decides that she doesn’t want to do passages anymore.

Before I met Jennifer I saw myself single-handing around the world and having special friends flying in to meet me in faraway places. Is that a viable future now with Jennifer as that special friend?

Perhaps my anxiety isn’t about the world ending buried in plastic that will slowly decompose over the next 500 years leaving only the previous 500 years of decomposed plastic waiting its turn to turn into… What?

Perhaps my anxiety is merely selfish anxiety about taking Caro Babbo across open oceans without Jennifer who provides her remarkable navigational skills and attention to detail. She also provides the reason for me to be so very careful. I’m not protecting me† when I’m out there, I’m protecting Jennifer. That responsibility does not weigh on me lightly.

We’re both back in Port Townsend until mid-December. I was on the East Coast for a few weeks and we will be here for six weeks together before Jennifer flies to Berlin for two weeks, then returns for a few weeks before we head down to Mexico.

The anxiety and the dreams have passed for the most part. Last night, for the first time in… I don’t know how long… I slept through the night here in Port Townsend. Is the anxiety plastics, and my inability to influence or even slightly change the unimaginable amount that is used for the shortest of duty cycles and unnecessary packaging?

Is it not having a clear purpose moving forward? I’m finding that writing the books I said I would write is not giving me the satisfaction I had always assumed it would.

Is it the anxiety that to maintain face, at least to myself, I must go single-handing out into the ocean and spend time away from Jennifer, who for the last 18 years I dedicated my life to not being apart for long lengths of time?

Enough.

I’ll try to follow this introspective, and perhaps even depressing post with the more typical Caro Babbo posts: the work that was done on Caro Babbo in the last year, and work I’ve done on my friend John Riley’s boat.

I’m happy and healthy, as is Jennifer. Jennifer seems to sleep well, and any unhappiness I may be experiencing shows up only in my dreams. I have a hell of a life, and I don’t think I’d trade it with anyone.

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*My original plan was that we’d sail down the west coast and through the Panama Canal, then hang around the US gulf coast before working our way up the east coast, then through the Erie Canal to the great lakes, spend two years there and then head out the St. Lawrence Seaway across to the UK and Scandanavia and down through the canals in France. Spend a winter at the Arsenal Marina in Paris. Then continue south and work our way back. Ten years, total. It was a non-starter. Instead, we have done the inside passage and the SoCal, Hawaii, AK loop.

We’ll see where this takes us.

†The number of friends who have died in boating accidents has increased again: Our friend Des fell from his boat while boarding at anchor in Scotland – his home country. He was very drunk.