Paul and I are in our 11 month of living on board. There has been a lot of ups and downs. Literally, because the boat is always moving, but also morale, health, and learning curves. I knew there would be a lot to learn moving onto a boat, but I couldn’t predict exactly what would be required of us as a team. We moved to a new country, a new house, and had to navigate making a huge financial decision between us in a foreign setting. Sometimes we got frustrated at the French government (an easy if not obvious target), and sometimes we got frustrated with each other.
A year ago, I drove to work every morning. I got up before the sun rose and packed a lunch and a gym bag, and ate oatmeal and then drove to another city to work a full day and go to the gym after and the grocery store, and drive home. I had a cat, and my family lived close by, and so did my friends. I knew which way was north based on the roads, the way the weather felt in October, and the traffic patterns.
Our days are formatted so differently than before. Because we live, work, and spend the majority of our time on the Tintas, all that commute time is cut down. We eat at restaurants less, and the galley is a few feet behind the dining table, meaning the person preparing the meal is still within sight and hearing of the other person. I can tell exactly where Paul is based on the sounds of the boat.
Now, Paul wakes up first. He may turn on the starboard bilge pump to help with that pesky leak. He makes the coffee, and puts last night’s dishes away. He sneezes his morning allergies away and starts the crossword. When he lifts a hatch, I know what he’s doing. When he tightens the main to prevent a squeak, or lowers the dinghy partially to drain the rain water out, I know almost exactly where his feet are. I wake up , and my commute is up a few steps to a hot cup of coffee, and a view of the Caribbean Sea. Often, we see rainbows first thing in the morning. There are little fish who school at the back of our boat, and I chide Paul when he pees on them (they really don’t seem to mind). Sometimes when I brush my teeth and look at the window under the stairs, I see Barry the Barracuda hiding in the shade of our boat.
The sun comes up. I do yoga on the back deck. We put on swim clothes and swim laps around the Tintas. (30 minutes, ish. 10-12 laps per side, how I count, or if Paul is counting….5 laps each, leading, makes 10, 10 each side makes 20 then add one or two more based on the Coriolis effect… his is a weird form of math). When we first started swimming, we would frequently stop because we were scared of the ocean, tired, partially drowning, and didn’t have a good rhythm. Now, Paul has rock hard triceps and I pretend like I have Michael Phelps’s reach. We realized that we are butterfly fish, seen in pairs, checking in with each other, taking turns leading laps and always peeking and listening for the splash of the other.
The boat is still called Tintas. We are in the process of renaming her. Like every other project we have undertaken on the boat, it is more complicated, bureaucratic, and time consuming than we predicted. Paul, the ever optimist, usually allots between 2-10 business days, or sometimes one day, if the sun is lighting his endorphins off. I tend to double or triple whatever Paul guesses, because it eases my anxiety to realize that this will not ever run on my time frame, regardless of how badly I want it to, and it feels more pleasant to laugh about the absurdity of it, Kafkaesque paperwork and phone calls and emails, then to try to bend it to our will.
The days are long and hot, but not too hot. We watch planes land at Princess Juliana airport. We have been in Saint Martin since thanksgiving, and will stay through February, fixing what we can, and buying mass amounts of the good Mac N Cheese (for safety reasons). I am job hunting every day, and Paul’s work comes in ebbs and flows. I write in my journal, Paul reads Aubrey Maturin novels for the second or third time, chuckling to himself. We have Starlink now- so we can browse Instagram if we want to, but I try to remind myself that the view is such better right here. We are finding a good groove, and it feels happy and lasting.
❤ Paul and lindsay
PS we had our most important guests, our parents. See below for a few snaps-
TIBURON MARINO 