I always knew it would come to this. But like everyone else, I just didn’t think it would come so soon. It’s peak hurricane season, and we’re hiding behind various bug infested rocks and sandbars in the Bahamas. We’re not hiding from hurricanes. We’re waiting for the number of them churning up the Atlantic to diminish. Of course there’s a good chance one of those angry, red, swirling blotches on the weather charts will come for us; then we move! The chance of outrunning a hurricane in this dilapidated, slow boat is close to nil, but the chance of hiding from one and surviving is a big fat zero.
I was doing a little planning with a nifty weather application and several computer models all predicted a hurricane right here! Well, bollocks. I have been so preoccupied with hurricanes raging across the Atlantic about the time we toss our bahookies out there in a reckless attempt to find a place we can call home, in the former East Bloc, that I completely forgot about the possibility of a hurricane right bloody here! It means we may make for the Atlantic before the end of peak hurricane season, whether we like it or not!
Anyone with options, or choices, or a margin of safety and a fallback position would call this crossing suicidal.
This inevitable crossing still doesn’t seem real. Anyone with options, or choices, or a margin of safety and a fallback position would call this crossing suicidal. Looking at an angry red blotch swirling on a forecast chart, where we are blissfully camped at anchor, feeding a trillion mosquitoes, ran it home to me like cold steel through one’s midsection: we are bloody doing this! We have no choice.
If we survive the Atlantic and then the Mediterranean – non-stop (Russians are not allowed ashore in the free world), we may find a place to call home. We may not, but then again, it all comes down to chance. We have no chance here. We might have a chance there… If we make it.
I have also become somewhat fatalistic – hell, call it ‘realistic’ – in the last month. Life and health is finite, and like this old boat, I am falling apart. 4 weeks ago, (see my previouse post) I was felled by what felt like a crazy slow onset migraine from hell. I lurched from the bunk a few hours later, vomiting, unable to walk, stand, sit up or balance, eyes crossed and moving independently and uncontrollably, completely deaf in one ear with horrific auditory hallucinations (tinnitus) crashing about in my head with every sound my remaining ear picked up. Even silence sounds like a jet engine has been strapped to my head.
4 weeks later, to this very hour, I can at least keep food and water down, but I still can’t really walk and the vertigo seems to be getting worse at times. Like when there are any waves, or I move about and I am still totally deaf in one ear. Best description of how this feels: like I am falling down drunk with the dreaded bed-spins. Every-single-fucking-second-of-my-waking-existence feels like I have hoovered down several drams of bathtub gin, without the benefits of debauchery. Cognitively, I’m still all here… wide awake and scared witless.
So, I am deaf and physically impaired. One more loss, and this is a biggie for me: I have lost music. Add that to the losses-pile along with: family, home, safety, savings, friends, hope, a country, rights, protection, support, human connection (anyone to even acknowledge that Elena and I exist), and there sure doesn’t look like there’s much, if anything, to lose by bending what’s left of our sails to the wind and taking on the Atlantic… yet again.