Travel matters because it both reveals and shapes character. Travel changes things for a wanderer — as well as for the people and places she encounters along the way. Mark Twain said travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.
And boats? The children’s book character Mr. Toad says, “Believe me, young friend. There is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”
Although I identify more closely with Grahame’s other Wind in the Willows character, Sea Rat, whom I agree with more concerning the nature of travel at sea. Sea Rat waits in port until the right vessel appears. Then, “I shall slip on board, by boat or along hawser; and then one morning I shall wake to the song and tramp of the sailors, the clink of the capstan, and the rattle of the anchor-chain coming merrily in…And then…the sounding slap of great green seas.”
Irish Hurricane is a 1998 Carver 445 aft cabin motor yacht. She has carried my husband Pete and me 20,000 miles, from Lake Superior to Key West, Montreal to St. Louis, through nine canal systems, up and down many rivers and waterways, and across all five Great Lakes. Through hundreds of locks.
Under blue and stormy skies, over calm and rollicking water. We’ve witnessed orange-gold sunsets as they drip into the dark horizon and flash green just as they die; blue moons and starry black nights. We’ve cruised Eastern North America’s unique waterways and learned many things about our continent’s geology, geography, history, and culture. We’ve met many people from many backgrounds with whom we always find common ground.
Mostly we’ve learned about ourselves, the sea, and how little any of us actually knows about anything.
Being underway was not new to me. Like Sea Rat, I have slipped on board a number of vessels in my almost-67 years. I’ve paddled canoes on my native Midwestern rivers and lakes. I’ve run outboards and inboards as a civilian and Coast Guardsman. I’ve stood countless bridge watches on seagoing cutters from Alaska to Hawaii, Boston to Curacao, and Balboa to Bulgaria.
Nothing has taught me more than these past six years aboard the Irish Hurricane.
I hope you come along as I retell the story. It’s a story.
Some of these posts are new and give context to bygone travels. Most are selected from what I posted in real-time on Facebook. Hopefully all of them will soon be cross-posted to Substax and will one day become a book.
Which is a whole other journey, no?
Irish Hurricane 