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by Tamara

We’re heading to Scotland for some cool sailing

Some people like to celebrate a milestone birthday by relaxing on the beach or wining and dining around Europe.

My husband is not like those people. We’ll be celebrating his big (not gonna say-0) by sailing Scotland.

No, we aren’t taking Polaris there. Instead, we have signed up for a 10-day sailing expedition of the Scottish Isles with Mahina Offshore Services, lead by the very experienced and well-regarded sailing instructor John Neal.

The timing is serendipitous. Our kiddos will be with their bio dad, and C’s birthday is in April. We have been looking for opportunities to get more experience with off-shore (bluewater) and heavy weather sailing, especially because we are interested in cruising the higher latitudes someday. When we saw that Mahina had a few berths open for the first leg of their Scotland tour, we jumped.

According to our itinerary, we will stop by Barra and Iona in the Inner Hebrides, then head to St. Kilda, an isolated archipelago that is part of the Outer Hebrides. Chances are good we will be sailing in cool temps, high wind, rainy weather and some swell and waves.

A chart for part of the area we will be sailing.

So, no, it won’t be the most relaxing vacation we’ve ever taken, but it may be one of the most memorable.

Many of these islands are home to some of the largest bird colonies in the world, including puffins. The sea around the Hebrides gets whales, dolphins and basking sharks. Our plans are to hike to a few castles, explore some tiny villages and learn more about this unique ecosystem. I have a sneaking suspicion that we will fall in love with this area and want to come back and cruise it on our own boat.

Since we booked the trip, we’ve been gathering up gear to keep us warm and dry. We already have a lot of cold, rainy weather gear that we use all the time while sailing the Salish Sea, but my cold tolerance is not getting any better as I get older. So I also purchased a few new things—including a new set of heated socks and some heated mittens. I expect to have some updates to my article about sailing in the cold.

I will try to post pictures from our trip on Instagram if I can.

Now, I’m off to finish packing!

Sailor Tamara Miller at the helm on blustery day in Puget Sound.
by Tamara

Welcome to Fouled Up Life, 2.0

Sailor Tami at the helm during a blustery day in Puget Sound.
Learning to sail in mid-life has changed me for the better.

I’ve tinkered with the idea of writing an article titled “All I’ve ever wanted to know, I learned from sailing.” 

Tongue-in-cheek, partly, but also for reals. Learning to sail has changed my life, and not just in the obvious ways. The lessons I have learned since I started to sail have taught me how to live better in all aspects of my life. 

When I started this blog, I simply wanted a place to capture all I was learning about sailing. I’ve learned how to sail, yes, but I’ve also learned a lot about:

What I didn’t expect, though, was that my experiences on S/V Polaris would inform all parts of my life.

The first time I step foot on a sailboat was when I was 38 years old, newly divorced with two kids, and fairly certain about what I was good at and what I wasn’t. Learning to sail in mid-life definitely took me out of my comfort zone and I am so glad for it.

Sailing continues to teach me how to screw up and get back up again. How to be patient. How to be a better teacher and parent to my kids. How to cope when my plans go to shit. How important nature is to me and all living beings (and how, I firmly believe, we would all be better if we spent more time outside). How to dig deep and get a really tears-inducing frustrating job done. How to keep going when I’m tired. How to really, truly rest. 

In short, sailing has taught me how to learn and to be OK with always learning, with not knowing the answer and being totally OK with that, too.

All those other things belong on this blog, too. 

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted here. That’s OK. Life has been crazy for us for the last two years. We bought a house, put our kids back in school, resumed splitting time between boat and land and have had to endure a lot of ups and downs along the way. But I’m ready to share what I’m learning again, and I hope that maybe, you’ll learn something, too. 

If you aren’t interested in that other stuff, you can still find my sailing- and sailboat-only content here. But if you are a curious type, and I bet that you are if you still are reading this post, you can start finding that “other” content over here.

by Tamara

Puget Sound’s awesome marine mammals

I wake early and achy in the back, a common occurrence nowadays. Not sure if my age is to blame. Maybe its the permanent skeletal tweaks two pregnancies have left with my body.

I curl my knees up to my chest and spin around out of my spot between my sleeping husband and the side of our berth, tucking my chin so I don’t hit my head on the low ceiling. With my feet facing out, I climb out of bed.

Once off the boat, the cool Seattle morning air douses me fully awake. The packed marina is quiet, the water still. I begin to walk toward the marina showers up on shore when hear a snort.

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by Tamara

Provisioning a sailboat for three months off the grid

There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who will find this blog post interesting, thought-provoking and maybe even useful. The rest of you will find it boring AF.

For those of you in the first group, I would appreciate you reading this and commenting with suggestions and even criticisms. See, aside from the freedom, adventure and beautiful scenery that cruising by sailboat provides, it also provides me with three other things I really enjoy: 1) Planning, 2) problem-solving and 3) organizing.

And provisioning on a sailboat for an extended amount of time requires all three.

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by Tamara

Mystery Bay Marine State Park: A bird-watcher’s paradise

Mystery Bay Marine State Park is a little bay outside Marrowstone Island, just east of Port Townsend. The park and the greater Killisut Harbor between Marrowstone and Indian islands are gems. Mariners willing to navigate the tricky, yet well-marked, shallow entrance to the harbor are rewarded with a protected bay teeming with birds and aquatic life easily explored by dingy or kayak.

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by Tamara

Our plans, they are a-changing

Well, that didn’t take long. 

Our plan to spend the summer cruising the Salish Sea up to Canada may have to be modified now, thanks to the ever-growing threat of coronavirus. 

This pandemic is changing all of our lives. As I write this, the Oregon governor has issued an executive order that all Oregonians need to stay at home unless conducting essential activities, more than 100 people have died in Washington state, more than 1,000 in Italy and chances are high that our kids extended spring break from school will turn into the beginning of a very early summer vacation. 

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by Tamara

Why we got the boat we did

Our Nauticat 39. Finding a pilothouse sailboat became a priority for us because we wanted to be able to sail year-round in the Pacific Northwest even though I have Raynaud’s.

C and I decided three years ago to make our dream of sailing the world a real-world goal. At the time, we had the Aequus Aer, a 28-foot Pearson sloop that we used for family trips to other marinas in Puget Sound.

But to sail beyond the Sound, we needed a bluewater-ready boat. And the Aequus Aer just wasn’t set up to do that. So we started our search focusing primarily on boats over 35 feet to fit our family of growing kids, built to endure rough seas and with enough storage, water-carrying capacity and battery bank to allow us to spend at least a week or more away from shore power.

It was during this time that my lifelong struggle with cold feet and hands started to get tremendously worse. I developed Raynaud’s Phenomenon, a condition where the blood vessels constrict in my fingers and toes in response to cold.

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by Tamara

Our Summer 2020 cruising plan

In June, we got rid of 85% of our stuff and moved out of our house in Southwest Portland to move full-time onto our boat for the summer. We will spend three months sailing the Salish Sea with our kids. Our tentative plan is to explore:

I left my full-time job in April and am transitioning to freelance writing and editing in the fall. My husband will continue his current job, which he can do remote almost 100% of the time.

A view of the Coal Harbour Marina in downtown Vancouver, B.C.
A view of the Coal Harbour Marina in downtown Vancouver, B.C.

Downsizing for the future

My kids are from my first marriage, and they spend 50% of their time with their dad (big thanks to him for agreeing to let us take the kids for the summer!) He is based in Portland, so we aren’t leaving Portland completely. But once we return from our trip in the fall, we plan to split our time between Portland and Seattle. We’ll be in Portland when the kids are with us and in the Puget Sound area on our boat when they are with their dad.

I’m going to miss that kitchen. Thankfully, the cook is coming with me!

Part-time cruising the Salish Sea

Since getting our first boat four years ago, and our current boat, Polaris, just in the past year, we’ve only been able to take it out for a week at a time. Still, we’ve seen so much: Orcas, gray whales, sea lions, otters.

We’re so excited to dedicate the summer to exploring this beautiful and rich body of water. I thought that cruising was something I wouldn’t be able to do until I was much older, certainly without kids in the house anymore, and probably closer to retirement.

This is the beginning of something new. Something, for now, that is only part-time. But something big, indeed.

Thank you so much for following our journey!