The conclusion my last post brings me to is that, as Mabrouka is where my heart is, I need to liberate myself to invest what is necessary to maintain her as a proper yacht. It’s always been a worry that I’m spending more than I can afford of my retirement monies and will end up penniless with years left to live in destitution. On the other hand, it makes it difficult to enjoy life while worrying about whether I can keep myself in beer and beans ten, fifteen, twenty years down the line. I can always count on Social Security, …right?

I am therefore pursuing a main mast replacement to go along with the mizzen mast replacement project that is already in progress. Though I am obliged to go forward on a budget basis, I must still achieve a solid conclusion for these projects. Then, of course, there’s the list of other projects as long as an orangutan’s arm to consider for their impact on my savings. These are all fodder for later posts.

Well, since I’m already making philosophical hay under this tropical sun, I might as well dwell a little bit on the decisions that brought Mabrouka and I to this situation of so much to do with so little resources.

If you look back at my first offerings to the Blogosphere back in 2013 or so, you’ll find evidence of my industry and investment in adding and improving Mabrouka’s systems and outfitting for the Pacific crossing. (https://www.sailblogs.com/member/blessedlady/262373) At that point I had the modest ambition (certainly modest in contrast to round-the-globe visions of many other cruisers I’ve met) of taking a leisurely eight or nine years to make it to Australia where I’d take another leisurely year or two to refurbish Mabrouka and sell her. She was, at that point, to be cashed in for the capital I’d need to reestablish myself among friends and family back in the Pacific Northwest.

While I’d committed to investing in her initial seaworthiness, there were aspects of her maintenance I intended to ignore in favor of enjoying every imagined aspect of Pacific paradise. Her glossy varnished teak rails and trim, in particular, were sacrificed to the gods of sunlight both figuratively and actually. What I didn’t realize at the time was how much else would necessarily suffer on the altar of poverty, isolation, and intentional neglect during a meandering cross-Pacific transit.

Any sailor will vouch for the effect sun will have on their sails. Restitching is a regular maintenance issue for boats that have their Dacron wings continuously spread to the wind and sun on a crossing, but even when long periods of maintenance keep your boat shore-bound, mildew and rot step in to take over and encourage aging. Upholsterers are few and far between in the Pacific isles, so hand sewing with inelegant waxed thread to patch up failing seams begins to populate your main salon with Frankencushions. No matter the boat, there always seems to be a leak or two to drip down a bulkhead, tingeing it various shades of light brown or even bubbling the paint up to peel off in jagged sheets.

A more fastidious yachtsman might have kept on top of these factors better than I, regardless of the paucity of professional services and depth of their wallet. While I would like to argue that such a sailor could not live “in the moment” as fully as I intended when I set out, there is always the devil to pay for putting off the upkeep. For my own part, I claim a feeling of defeat as a reason, if not an excuse for letting things get ahead of me or at least for blaming poverty as my downfall. Between the occasional disaster at sea and three years of one major setback after another here in Tonga, I admit to it sometimes being a slog to move forward at all.

[DEVIL TO PAY: While this phrase often is taken to describe payment due when making a bad deal with the Devil, Old Nick has nothing to do with this well known phrase often trotted out when faced with seriously bad consequences. The original saying was ‘the devil to pay and no pitch hot’. ‘Pay’ was an old nautical term that meant to seal a ship’s seams with tar. As fans of old-timey nautical terminology may already know, the ‘devil’ was the name of the longest seam of a ship which ran from stem to stern and supported the gun deck. It was also the most difficult seam to reach and, when repairing a ship in dry dock, sailors had to squat in the intolerably hot, humid bilges to pay the devil.]

My friend Paul took a few weeks to go back home to New Zealand this past summer (NZ summer, US winter) and I house/pet/plant sat for him. This is relevant because he has Starlink, ie unlimited YouTube! Couch slouching in front of his thirty-some-odd-inch flat screen TV, I discovered a channel of 200-plus episodes that recounted the reconstruction of the hundred year old cutter, Tally Ho. While I may have been more fascinated than most with the construction details and craftsmanship that went into the project, it slowly sank in for me that my own floating project constituted a big, fat nothing-burger in comparison.

To wrap this up, I refer you to one particular Tally Ho episode that summarizes her story and, in the end, serves as an inspiration for me to keep on pushing through the financial, logistical, and emotional challenges that Mabrouka presents.