Sailing with Renegade

Something that I was not prepared for on this trip was how quickly we would meet and then have to say goodbye to new friends. Leaving our amazing tribe of friends behind in Santa Cruz, we are all longing for the connections that ground us and make us whole. This can be a hard thing to do while cruising. As our paths cross with other families and like minded sailors, we find that we are all on different time lines, heading to various destinations, with many goals in mind. What this means for us, is that as we meet amazing people and great families, we only get to brush the surface of getting to know them. We start with the basics of where are you from? and where are you going? Then as we delve deeper into the intricacies of lives well lived, raising kids, family connections, etc, we learn that we really, really like some of these families. They are the kind of people that we want to spend months and years getting to know, however with this lifestyle we have days and rarely weeks to spen

On our second mornings in Fiji I awoke and looked out the cabin porthole, happy to be on our boat at long last, to see the boat next to us sinking! (see photo) By the time I got on deck the Marina staff was in full action, assessing the damage, getting pumps set up, putting a diver in the water, and preparing the boat for emergency haul out. Thankfully they were on it. My heart sunk for the owners of the boat and my mind swirled about how this could have just as easily been us. A thru-hull on the boat had failed and an insufficient repair left this boat with several feet of water inside. That day we checked all of our thru-hulls on the boat. Several had completely rusted hose clamps that broke when we checked them. So, we got busy replacing all of the clamps, making sure that there were at least two at each thru-hull, and double checking them all to ensure that they were solid. Unfortunately, this was not the last sinking boat that we encountered in the Marina. Fast forward a f