Sun. At first you indulge in it. Blazing hot sunny weather every day. But it’s too much, really too much. Sometimes it’s so hot that you can’t even step in the cockpit for burning the soles of your feet or touch anything metal because it’s scorching. And then, when there’s no cloud cover, the sun and heat are utterly oppressive and there is no escape. After a year I’ve seen firsthand what the sun can do - it burns the color out of fabric, metal and fibreglass, and turns wood into gray dust. Imagine what it does to your skin. Smother on 60+ sunscreen, wear a hat, and hide!

Shades of blue. I have never been so aware of the various shades of blue. For sailors, reefs can be your most dangerous enemy. You come to depend on the shades of blue as a real navigation tool to avoid reef, even as much as detailed nautical charts. When we’re about to enter a pass or navigate through coral heads, I know where I’ll be… up at the bow, scouring the landscape for various shades of blue.

Sails. It seems like there are infinite different combinations of sails for every condition of wind and sea. Tweaking the genoa sheet is one thing, but changing sails can feel like so much work, especially when it’s blazing hot outside, the boat is rocking, and you’re in lazy sailing mood. Or when there’s little wind from behind at exactly the wrong angle, the genoa is luffing and banging the rigging, and you’re moving at 1.8 knots. Once the skipper decides it’s spinnaker time though, it’s time to get moving - you dig out the sail, set up the sheets, attach the halyard, and put up the unwieldy spinnaker pole. Within minutes you’ve got your arms around an enormous piece of sail, releasing it into the wind in great puffs. Great memories of playing parachute in kindergarten instantly come to mind! Suddenly you’re flying along at 7 knots on a flat sea with a big full beautiful sail pulling you along. Those are the perfect sailing days that I’ll always remember. I wonder why I ever think it’s such a pain when that’s the reward.

Rhythm of the days. Your life follows the light - I rise with the sun and sleep when it’s dark. You get up at 5am and then get sleepy at 8pm… and so the “vicious” cycle begins. Getting 10 hours of sleep or more a night becomes totally normal, but I guess it makes up for the sleep deprivation on passages.

Weather. Weather become a major force in your life. It’s entirely normal that an hour conversation with other sailors is all about the weather and people spend hours analyzing forecasts, and then sharing the news. You plan your life around what the conditions are like now and will become, learning about highs and lows and depressions and fronts, and you become attune to clouds and ocean swell, and what they mean. Something that never mattered that much in climate-controlled Atlanta makes all the difference in the world out here. Your life could depend on it, and it’s the difference between a glorious time at sea or a week that you wish you could forget. I’d rather sit in an anchorage waiting for the right conditions than fight wind and waves any day! With a little luck from Mother Nature, a satellite phone and a very cool navigation software called Nobeltec that analyzes the weather, Urios has been blessed.

Getting sick. You still get sick at sea, but now you have to deal with it in situations that you never thought of before - self-prescribing from a book, wondering if you have the right drugs, being hundreds of miles from land, or being on an island without medical assistance. You learn to be super careful. A simple cut turns into a bad infection after going into the ocean and cuts can take months to heal. The ocean can be nasty. I was slathering on Papa Joane’s magic Cook Island potion devotedly (made from some special island trees) at the first sign of a cut. Gregory had just had a reef scratch turn into a pretty nasty hole in his leg that oozed pus and made him feel sick with infection. We should have doused it with lemon (stings like mad but kills the live coral) and stayed out of the water, but the infection took over in a flash! There is malaria to watch out for, and even elephantitis, and we’ve heard too many stories of fish poisoning and cinguatera. I can’t even imagine the six months of itching hands and feet and nausea and hot and cold sensitivity that comes from eating just one bad fish that sends your body over the edge. You learn to always ask the locals before you eat anything you catch. In Fiji you avoid any fish that is red, and in the month of October when the palalo reefworms come out of the sand, you don’t eat fish at all. The locals have a festival to catch the worms which are a delicacy to humans but fish the fish that eat them somehow themselves become poisonous and humans can get very sick at the end of that food chain. Who would have known?!

Food. Food is an obsession on a sailboat. It’s probably because for the first time I have all the time I need to think about it, plan it and cook it. That says a lot for me who has never cooked much before. When we’re at anchor with a bountiful local vegetable and fish market at your disposal, we’ve never eaten so well. It’s a strange balance that makes up for all the crap you eat at sea on a rolling boat - meals of crackers, canned vegetables and Ramen noodles - and that’s if you’re not seasick! Real cruisers learn how to take care of food because mold and rot take over quickly at sea. You can your own fish and meat in a pressure cooker, cover eggs in Vaseline or flip them, wrap fruit and vegetables separately in newspaper, and preserve peppers in oil. As for refrigeration, or lack thereof, there’s butter that comes in cans, Kraft cheese that doesn’t melt but lasts forever, UHT yoghurt, and powdered milk. Amazing inventions for another kind of life. Did you know that you don’t actually need to refrigerate eggs or that growing your own yoghurt is easy?

Boat storage is definitely not your pantry at home. Humid salt air equals rust and that applies to can openers, forks, pans, zippers. Anything and everything succumbs. We were halfway through a can of fruit when we realized that it had rusted on the inside. Ugh! How exactly do you deal with something like botchulism when you’re 700 miles from the nearest village? You also quickly discover that weevils are a fact of life. When you see them for the first time, crawling in that bag of rice that you were so looking forward to cooking for lunch, it’s enough to make you squeal. But I learned quickly to change my perspective and deal… you have to. You get less squeamish and Ziploc bags become your best friends. Salt air is salt air and there’s not much you can do about it.

The VHF. The VHF radio is your communications link in the marine world - for official reasons like calling the Port Authority to get instruction as you enter a harbor and getting the “appelle a tous appelle a tous” announcement for the marine weather report in French Polynesia, or for unofficial reasons like listening to Curly’s net in Savu Savu every morning or calling another boat.

VHF etiquette is a funny thing. There are official rules and protocol for being on the VHF and it’s great flow when people get it right, and quite funny when they don’t. You learn the lingo quickly, and hearing yourself say “over” after every sentence, “back to 16” after every conversation, and “one up” to pick your channel, it can feel rather official at times. You become known to all by the boat name, refer to others as such, and it feels like everyone loses their real name identities altogether sometimes! The VHF is public so everyone that is monitoring Channel 16, the common channel, can hear everything. It’s impossible not to eavesdrop, which is weird in sometimes and like Christmas in others! We were sailing into Suvarov and talking with a boat who was sailing into the pass with us when we heard a different voice calling us on the other end. We hadn’t seen Nahanni in weeks and when they heard us talking, they had to chime in! Or, the reverse tack also works. We were sailing into Wallis, and randomly called Dragonfly on the VHF just to see if they were within the 20-mile radius of us... They left weeks before us and we had no idea whether they were even planning a stop here, but you never know. What a treat when they actually answered back!

Some sailors love the VHF and seem to be always calling each other all the time - it’s not long before you know who’s friends with who. Buddy boating at its finest! We know when we’ve been in one port too long when we start to recognize voices, and have never even seen their faces!

Herbie. Herbie is our dinghy, so appropriately named after a character in the book “The Goal.” Ever since the Maramuu in Moorea, Herbie hasn’t been the same. The old Evinrude outboard engine just won’t start, even with all new parts and all kinds of advice from other yachties. So instead, we row. We’ve become famous in every port, getting ourselves around with paddles that are scuba fins ducktaped to PVC pipe. Ridiculous looking, but they work. It’s a great conversation starter and usually prompts the offer of a tow, which we kindly always take. We’ve met lots of nice people that way! It’s hard work sometimes and it always seems to be windy and upwind no matter when we row and where we are rowing to, but I now have muscles where I’ve never had muscles before!

Herbie has visited the huts and workshops of various one-name local mechanics on almost every island along the way from Jean-Marc in the Caribbean to Jerome in Rangiroa to Donny in Moorea to Antoni in Wallis to John in Savu Savu. Finding the local outboard wizard on an island usually takes just one inquiry, considering how much Polynesians love big outboards and zooming around in their dinghies. It’s always a promising sight to see lots of old engine parts in a yard and we especially love those mechanics that don’t ask for any explanation and just tell you when to come back for your engine - they have no doubts they can fix whatever is wrong. When it works it’s magic, when it doesn’t, there’ll always be another “Jerome” on the next island… While I’d probably have traded Herbie in for a 15 horsepower super dinghy any day, the saga of Herbie has become one of the best memories of the trip.