There was this “award” going round cruising bloggers a few months ago (or maybe still?) which I have to admit I found both weird and fascinating. Weird because it was more like a chain email or pyramid scheme than a real award and fascinating because, let’s face it, I love the idea of interviews*.  I cherry picked a few questions from two interviewers and even though I am making fun of the award I was still very flattered you guys thought of me.

Leah’s questions:

Why are you cruising wherever its is you’re cruising right now? How did that become a destination?

Well, it’s the South Pacific and I think that answers also how it became a destination!  It’s amazing. It’s everything I wanted out of cruising. It’s a dream. I am making memories of a lifetime almost every day. I’m forgetting details of better places than I had ever visited before. It’s overwhelming and awesome. So, yeah, I like it here.

How’d you find your boat? Have you had other boats?

I (Livia) had never had another boat. Carol (my husband and supercruiser) had owned a 26’ Robert Perry design (Mirage). We decided to hire an expert to help us decide what boat to buy because we didn’t feel we knew enough. We knew so little that he encouraged us to visit a few boats while we were in Seattle visiting family over the holidays. The very first boat we stepped on that trip was the boat we bought and went cruising on (!) even though we went and looked at bunches of other boats.

If you weren’t sailing/cruising, what would you be doing?

Working to fund the next vagabonding adventure? Homesteading? Caravaning? More cruising?

What’s your big-picture plan? Where do you hope to be in 5-10 years?

Still alive and healthy and active. Still searching working on keeping the fun-to-suck ratio in the appropriate balance.  Perhaps seasonally working and seasonally traveling?

How do you keep yourself entertained on long night watches?

I do a long night watch from midnight until 5am. After trying a bunch of different standard watches we settled into our own idiosyncratic watch schedule. My usual plan is to make a cup a tea while “safe-ing the route”. This means I do the zoom in and zoom out double check on the electronic charts which we’ve already done prior to leaving on the intended route but is the responsibility of each watch person to double check on the actual route. I take my tea to the cockpit and zone out, absorbing the horizon, the sails, the weather, the windvane, for at least an hour. I then often grab a second tea, and a snack, and repeat that process. Somewhere around 2:30am when I need distraction, I alternate horizon sweeps with email writing. If propagation is good at that time of night I often do a weather download while uploading the emails I wrote. At this point, around 3:30, I go back to the cockpit full time with either: an audio podcast, an ebook, video podcast on the iPad. Once I’ve toughed out that hour until 4:30 or so, I come back down and start alternating horizon sweeps with settling down rituals – face washing, teeth brushing, whatever.

Dos Libras’s questions:

What is the one thing you wish more people knew about you?  Don't be afraid to brag here... this is your chance!

I wish more people knew about the Newly Salted project and volunteered for Newly Salted interviews. Now that I am cruising it can take a while for me to respond to those interviews (which is why I put the Interview With A Cruiser project on intermission) but I really appreciate when people participate. If you are newly off the dock (< 2 years) or know someone who is, the deal is that you self-interview and I publish it. Consider it a donation to the dreamers out there.

What would you say is your partner's greatest contribution to your success (current or future) as sailors/cruisers?

Carol has an amazing attitude and I didn’t realize how critical that is to cruising before we left the dock. Carol is ready to put on his game face and do dirty jobs at almost any time. I’m not saying he loves it, but he is ready to “pay the piper” for all of the good times and he does so with good humor and a good nature.  This leads to some “leadership by example” in the sense that I see him gearing himself up to do something he didn’t necessarily want to do and I “man up” as well because I’m not willing to let him deal with it alone. He brings out the best in me during those situations. He is also really  good with dealing with on the fly information gathering.

When will you/did you REALLY consider yourself to be a Cruiser?  What does the word "Cruiser" mean to you?

I don’t really care what people call themselves. I was a cruiser the day I left the dock to start cruising. I think the main problem is when people who are cruising fail to indicate the limits of their expertise.  If you have been in one region , doing one specific type of cruising, you can’t talk about whether “all cruisers need windvanes”. We have been in the South Pacific for a couple of years and we have only seen a few countries so really we know only a taste of the region. Lots of cruisers go on and on about things they really know nothing about just because they’ve been cruising a long time. Length of time cruising tells you very little about how much someone knows and it doesn’t tell you if what they know will be applicable to your cruise.

What do you think will be the thing that ends your Cruising journey?  Andy why?

Before we started cruising I didn’t know if we would stop when we ran out of money or when we were done with the hard work/discomfort aspects of cruising. I knew we wouldn’t get bored. Now I think we will run out of money before we don’t want to put up with the uncomfortable parts. I think this is because we’ve somehow managed to spend a fair amount of time off the boat every year. Whether it was for good reasons (visiting family, house/resort sitting), or bad reasons (repairing the boat), each time refreshed us. After a break we start missing the boat, missing the travel, and we come back with refreshed emotional reserves to deal with problems.

What size boat do you/will you cruise on?  And if money were no object... would you buy a bigger one?

We cruise on a 30+ year old, 35 foot monohull. In our price range, we wouldn’t change boats. We have a solid boat we can take almost anywhere in the world (ice would make us nervous). 

If money were no object we would be on a performance catamaran (think Atlantic or Outre-mer, not Lagoon or Fountaine Pajot). The additional space would be great and appreciated (particularly for our toy collection – kites etc) but really we would switch for the fun of sailing that fast, between anchorages sailing well in very light air and making fast passages.

*I loved creating the Interview With A Cruiser Project. Although on intermission, the IWAC still gets a lot of regular traffic and I love the idea that it remains standing as a free and open resource. And, admittedly sporadically, I am still publishing Newly Salted interviews.

I find myself a little more starstruck in sailing than in other domains of my life. Perhaps it is because for a few years it was books about voyages that fed my dream and so I feel more connected to the authors than with other books. I spent a lot of time living vicariously through various sailors circumnavigations, S Pacific voyages or Arctic visits. One of the books that I read early on, was Into the Light by Dave & Jaja Martin. It is a tale about a family cruising in high latitudes - a family of 5, in a 33 foot boat, in the Arctic ice if you can believe that.

I mention this because I recently had the honor of interviewing them for the IWAC project. The interview came out this week and if you haven't seen it, do check it out.

You can take Livia out of academics but you can't take the academic out of Livia. Collecting and sharing data is just plain fun. So...I've created a new interview site.

Do you know anyone who left to go cruising less than 2 years ago or who went on a less than 2 year cruise and returned? Encourage them (or yourself) to self-interview for Newly Salted, a companion site to the Interview With A Cruiser Project.

The first interview went live today. The interviews will be posted sporadically so interested readers should be sure to subscribe somehow (email, feed, twitter - all options at the bottom of the blog) to be notified of new interviews.

Giddy with delight, I would like to give our blog readers a heads up that tomorrow's Interview With A Cruiser is a really fantastic interview (if I may say so myself) with Lin and Larry Pardey.

The boaters on this blog already know why I am excited. Please do pass the link of their interview along to your friends or forums/lists you belong to either directly or by using the snazzy new "share" buttons at the bottom of the interview to blog/tweet/email/etc it.

For the non-boaters who are swing dancers, think of the Pardey's as a Frankie Manning of sailing.

For the non-boaters who are climbers, think of them as a Lynn Hill of sailing.

Everyone else, just know that they are "way cool". They started cruising in 1968 and wrote the book on it...literally. They have circumnavigated both east-about and west-about, both times in boats they built, both boats without engines.

I'm going to pimp these two interview projects on the Interview With A Cruiser site as well but you get it first here.


Finally, in IWAC news, for those that know them, I am delighted to say that an interview with Beth & Evans aboard Hawk will be coming out on May 31.
- L

The Interview With A Cruiser Project is front page news at Three Sheets NW.

Deborah interviewed me over the weekend while we were waiting out the storm and the article is very well done. It is fun to see our story made "news style".

At the same time the project is also today's story on Bob's Boat Bits! (Thanks Bob)

I received two new interviews back today from people in very different parts of the globe and I just find the whole thing so exciting.

- Livia

The second interview for the Interview With A Cruiser project comes out today. It is 10 questions with the famous crew of Bumfuzzle.

If you haven't read the story of Pat & Ali's circumnavigation, boater and non-boater alike, you should.  It's a fascinating travelogue. I haven't read their subsequent travels in their VW van yet but that is on my reading list.

I won't be continuing to announce the IWAC interviews on this blog unless there is something specific that I want to pontificate about. Interviews will come out each Monday and I have three more interviews in hand with Sereia, Esper and Anne Laurie plus 5 other boats that have agreed to participate.

If you wish, you can subscribe to the interviews via that page (email, feed or twitter). If you want to help spread the word about the project on your own blog or site, you can link directly or paste the following html into a blog post or website to create a badge that links back to this page. I'm going to publicize it on cruisersforum.com today and probably sailnet the following week.

<table style="width: auto;"><tbody><tr><td><a href="http://interviewwithacruiser.blogspot.com/"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjalYQOMEp-FSs2_akN3-ak-2GV_CNuhdermg8VW2vR2-vncWbTGHQ4jL35UVDt93vsXEaL19OhiuM4dhVNsmhkB5Kmn4iNHPza0GzFdnMQVU40iP0kJg4F73FCmz54zQj1WMVIwmoonzZA/s144/iwac_small.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td style="font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 8px; text-align: center;"><a href="http://interviewwithacruiser.blogspot.com/">The INTERVIEW WITH A CRUISER Project</a></td></tr></tbody></table>

That html will create a badge that looks like this:

The INTERVIEW WITH A CRUISER Project

Two weeks ago, while failing to sleep at night, I started working on a project I had been wanting to start which is, in essence, 10 questions asked of experienced cruisers.

Nitty gritty: Different question sets asked of each boat but drawn from a single question bank so that, over time, each question is asked of many different cruisers, and the interview bank is easily sortable so that all interviews with a given question can be easily accessed. I defined "experienced cruisers" as people who have been cruising outside of the US & Canada for more than 2 years. I have a way for readers to submit questions for the bank and also to volunteer themselves or suggest others for interviews.

After creating the site and emailing a few people, I have my first two interviews returned and a few more boats who have agreed to the interview and have the questions in hand. People have been generally excited about the idea and interested in participating. The first interview is with Scimitar, next week is with the crew at Bumfuzzle and also in the works are interviews with SVs Third Day and Sereia.

The first interview went live today here:
http://interviewwithacruiser.blogspot.com/

Thanks to those who suggested questions. As the interviews progress, if you feel so inclined, pimp the site on your own outlet for me.