Do you own the boat or does the boat own you?

As of today, we have been cruising for 894 days, just shy of two and a half years. In all that time Rebecca and I have never left the boat alone for more than a 24 hour period. Yes, Rebecca did have a couple of trips back to North America but I stayed on the boat while she was gone. Last year, when I flew to Trinidad to take the STCW course, Rebecca babysat the boat all on her own. In four days time though, Rebecca and I will be leaving our beloved ZTC in the care and control of… our cat Samantha? Obviously both of us leaving together takes a different amount of planning, and faith!

Knowing that we were going to have to arrange something in order for us to both visit California to see our daughter, we reached out to our friend Alberto here in Sint Maarten and asked him for some suggestions on where to leave our boat. He contacted one of his customers who has a mooring ball here in the lagoon, right beside his boat, and we made arrangements to leave ZTC on it while we are gone. While a year ago that might have been all we needed to do, we now have Samantha to think about. Fortunately, cats are pretty self-reliant. In spite of that, we did want to find someone to check in on her from time to time while we’re gone and last night, our new friends and boat neighbors Larry and Jan agreed to take on that responsibility.

Coincidentally, our neighbors hail from Belleville, the city adjacent to Kingston where Rebecca and I sailed from. We have travelled thousands of miles only to end up anchored right beside a boat owned by people who lived 45 minutes from us in Canada. How’s that for funny?

The wind has continued to BLOW here! As such, we spent most of the day on board yesterday, some of it playing music and singing. Good thing the wind is so loud. It prevented our neighbors from hearing our “singing.”