Girlfriend on the Boat -- A Short Story

After owning my 1973 Gulfstar 44 ketch for 7 months,
I went cruising from Marathon FL to Miami,
with hopes of going to the Bahamas.  On board
with me was my girlfriend, her two cats,
and her 78-year-old father.

By the way, her dad's a great guy.  Sailed on
Liberty ships, freighters in West Africa,
dredges in Canada, officer on Queen Mary and
Queen Elizabeth, shipping accident investigator.
Lots of fun on a boat.

Earlier, my girlfriend had spent an 8-day vacation
on the boat, mostly in marinas.  But this was our
first cruise.

We started with 2 weeks in a marina, then one
week anchored in the harbor (going ashore every day),
then started cruising.  After about 14 days of
cruising she had had enough
of living on a boat, and she'd had it with
me, too.  So we headed back to Marathon,
taking about 2 days.  By then,
she liked me again, mostly.

We made it up to Biscayne Bay and Miami, and had some nice
times.  We saw a
number of dolphins one day in the Keys, including some
that came over to the boat to check it out.
Saw some great sunsets, lots of nice scenery, etc.
Ate well.  Dinghied through some nice canal-front neighborhoods.
Had fun in the boutiques of Coconut Grove.
Did a slight bit of fishing.
The weather generally cooperated.
No major breakdowns, accidents, etc.  A pretty
good first cruise, I thought.

But my girlfriend found a number of boat
things to be very irritating:
- dampness,
- biting insects,
- lack of hot water for showers and coffee and cleaning,
- dirt,
- a slightly balky pressure-water system,
- soft foam mattresses (replaced by latex during the cruise;
	we became experts at transporting mattresses by dinghy),
- noises in the middle of the night,
- fears that her cats would fall overboard,
- a few rough-weather anchoring experiences that
	lessened her confidence in the skipper,
- hard to get to things ashore.

Some of these are fixable, but some are just intrinsic
to boats and cruising.  And my boat is big and
stable and has a genset and microwave and so on;
if she can't handle life on it ...

We noticed that the biting insects feasted on the
crew of English descent, and tended to leave the
German/Slavic/American skipper alone.

She didn't like the way I would sometime snap an
order (although I think I did it only for
important things in serious situations).  She
didn't like me reminding them to turn off lights,
use less water, etc. Once or twice I growled
at a cat which had gotten underfoot.
She hated it when I tried moving
the cat litter-box from the head to the deck one night,
because she feared that a cat would fall overboard.
(The second night on the boat, in the marina, one cat turned
up soaking wet.  No other cat incidents. Putting cat PFDs
on them was pretty comical; they wriggled free in 2 minutes.)

In fairness, there was a lot of other stress in her
life during this cruise.  She and I were jobless and she still
had a mortgage payment to meet, her dad had sold his
condo and was looking for a new place to live, etc.

Now she's talking about maybe me sailing the boat to
the Bahamas, and she'll fly over and stay on the boat for a week.
Maybe we'll do that. [P.S. We did 2 months in Bahamas.]

I think she got a fair taste of boat life.  A few times
I thought she was over-reacting to the inconveniences,
but other times I could see it from her point of view:
life is too short to put up with some of this stuff.

Her dad's reaction was: I enjoyed it, but I'm too old to go
back to sea.  And he had problems with a malfunctioning
forward head, which made him remember how nice it was
when outhouses were replaced by toilets.

The cats survived the boat but were ecstatic to get back onto
dry land.