All The Words

We’re about to leave for St. Croix and I’ll be out of cellular range and I’m going to try and hammer out a post as fast as I can—so prepare for typos.  There are a lot of little things I took note of to write about as the day went along yesterday.   It was an action packed fun day of sailing.

The title of this post is about my daughter.   There are phrases we say on the sailboat that indicate we’re all aware what’s going on when the captain communicates to us.   For instance, Richard will say, “prepare to tack” shortly followed by, “tacking” to which we all respond, “tacking, aye”.   We need to know because either we have a job to preform when he says, “prepare to tack” or we need to be safely out of the way when the tacking happens, which is why we all respond with, “tacking, aye”.

My daughter loves these phrases.   She knows where to be and what to respond and her responses are always the loudest and most enthusiastic.   As we prepared to “come about” or turn two days ago I was with my daughter.   We were heading up to the front of the boat to the trampoline (a mesh covering between the two halves of the boat that is fun to lie or sit on because the water is directly underneath you.).  As my daughter and I moved carefully forward she reached up and felt something. “what is that, mom?”

What was it?  It was one of the sails.   She knew all the words to say, knew what to do and where to be, but we had completely neglected to show her what a sail looked like (or in her case, felt like).  It’s these kind of things that kill me.   We’d shown her all around the boat, let her feel so many things, but the sail part of the “sailboat” we were on we missed entirely.   Sometimes we don’t even realize what it is that we’re missing when it comes to helping her understand the world around her.  We’re blind to her blindness in a way.  We’re learning more and more as time goes on though, becoming more aware of how she sees (or doesn’t see) the world.

I went back to the cabin and got her Draftsman out.   Using the special paper and mat, you can draw raised pictures easily.   I drew a top-down view of the boat and a side view drawing, both simplistic, but enough to give her a better idea of where the sails were and how very large and tall they were as she was only able to touch the bottom foot of the sail when we encountered it on our way to the trampoline.

We wanted to go to a restaurant for late lunch/early dinner yesterday.   Our neighbors had coincidentally been in St. John the week before and told us about Lime Out, a floating taco and craft beverage restaurant.   As we headed into the cove where Lime Out was, Richard saw a small rainstorm we could sail through.   It would be fun and cooling but more importantly, it would wash the boat.    It was fun and it did cool the boat.   It cooled us down pretty quickly too, my daughter being the first one to head inside.   She doesn’t hold back when she has feelings about something; as she was heading inside she said, “Richard, you ruined my whole day!”

We made it to where Lime Out was floating, moored up on a mooring ball and headed over, some swimming, some in the dinghy.   Here’s my daughter as we’re coming in, with the back side of the green taco bar visible in the bay.

My daughter does what she always does: made fast friends with the people beside us.   This time it was two girls just out of college named Kendall and Emily.   I told them to send her back any time they needed a break, but no, they wanted to hand out with my daughter the entire time.   One of the two came over to me and told me one of her closest friends growing up had been blind.   She also had gotten a degree in special needs education in college.  I never said my daughter was blind, they figured it out and treated her like she was just another normal child.

As we left, my daughter wanted me to get their phone number so we could keep in touch.   We had nothing to write on and our phones were back on the boat, which was sad to my daughter so we waved as we went our separate ways and said we’d look our for their boat in case we ran into each other again.

You know that saying, “you can’t get there from here”?   In a sailboat that phrase is actually true, or as Richard says, “you can’t get there from here, but you can get there from there, and we’re heading there now.”   In a sailboat you have to use the wind and that means taking a zig zag path into a location sometimes instead of going straight in like you would if you were driving with the engine and props.   We’re not in a hurry though, and the tacking and coming about parts of sailing are where the action is for my children.

When we’re underway one of the favorite locations for the children—all four—are these little seats at the very front of the boat.   They bob up and down more than any location on the boat.   My children have started arguing over who gets to have the seats.   Yesterday I told them, “we have six days left and two seats.  That’s twelve sailing days total seat time.  you will have plenty of time to sit there.”

Here’s my son on one of the seats.   No panicking when you look at it.   They hold on and we don’t let them go up there if it’s too choppy.   They always have their life vests on and know what to do in the case of a man overboard.   I’m going to write about man overboard procedure when I get a chance.

This boat is densely packed.  All boats are.   Every bit of useable space is taken up with something or has storage built in it or underneath it.   Boats are a marvel of organization.   Which is why I was equally amazed when I went underneath the boat yesterday while out swimming.   The bottom of a boat is smoothly simple.   It has to be because to glide through the water, you want only the most streamlined, literally, design.  

Clothespins.   All of my life I’ve known what they are but have never had a use for them save for some holiday craft in which you use them to make a nutcracker ornament type of thing.  We use them all the time on the boat though.   There is a wire hand railing up and down the port and starboard sides of the boat.   In addition to being helpful steading devices for walking around a sailboat underway, they are perfect for hanging and drying clothes and towels, affixed with clothespins.

The Big Boy Update: My son loves to be up on the bow when the boat is underway.   When the waves are particularly high, he and Andrew like to stand with their knees partially bent.   When the boat goes up on a high wave they jump up just as the boat drops down.   They’re getting some good air time with the waves we’ve had so far.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter loves the clothespins.   She’s been making figured out various ways to hook them together.   She wanted to know if we could get some when we got home.   I told her we already had some and they were all hers when we got back.