Previous Entry: Let the Fun and Games Begin
November and December of 2021 were a blur. Dean was still working in New Mexico, home on weekends.
Half the month of November and the first week of December, I prepared for a three day estate sale which began on December 10th. Every item in my home was reduced to a bar coded price tag. The day of the sale, I watched strangers roam the rooms of my “forever” home like vultures looking for tidbits to tear off a carcass, picking over every item I had painstakingly selected and loved over many years and snatching them away for pennies on the dollar. Dean was finally able to come home from New Mexico on December 12th to help, along with two of our boys, John and Nick. The last thing we let go was our bed so we would have a place to sleep in the near empty house until escrow closed. What was left was then donated or packed, with our winter clothes and a few other personal items shipped off to Florida to be put in storage. I had spent almost the entire month of December sorting, packing and arranging 1,000 details to enable us to be……homeless.
We closed escrow on December 15th. It was done and we were exhausted, but we kept telling ourselves it would all be worth it. Going forward, nearly everything in our world would be defined as and by Eclipse. I felt numb; we had just sold my life - every physical thing tied to my most precious memories. We had practically given away thirty years of accumulated possessions, except for clothing and a select few precious items which I wanted to hand down to our kids. Looking back, I actually have no idea how I did it - except that I trusted that God had a plan. I trusted God, and I trusted my husband. That trust was the strength that I needed to put one foot in front of the other and do what I had to do to make Dean’s sailing dream a reality. Without it, I would have been unable to do anything.
So with what few personal items we needed and heirlooms for the kids, we packed a UHaul and on December 18th, we drove to California to begin our exciting new life on Eclipse. Or so we thought.
I wish it could have been that simple.
By the time we arrived in Newport Beach, I was disconnected from the world, as if I were floating above the scenery but not part of it. Everything was surreal. Christmas music played on the radio and everywhere I looked there were beautiful decorations and lights. Fittingly, I noticed that “new” Christmas lights were all LED - cold and uninviting - the warmth of incandescent bulbs of Christmases past having been replaced by the bluish, sterile glare of the light emitting diode. To me, the cold of that light symbolizes the warmth that has gone out of the world, and out of people. I hate them; the lights, not the people. However, the chill of the those lights was fitting to both my situation, my heart and my mood.
We drove down the Newport Peninsula at sundown, the streets crowded with cars and merrymakers finding their way to shops or holiday parties. Good for them. For me, the “Christmas Spirit” was a foreign concept. The work, trauma and strain of the last four weeks had taken everything out of me, but the “fun and games” were not over yet. We had our car, little Boo, suitcases and not much else except each other and our dream. Everyone knew we were crazy and the sense of isolation was palpable.
Now we had a possible disaster on our hands.
We were both agitated and upset. Between the time we closed on the house and our arrival in Newport Beach, everything was poised to fall apart. A day after we closed escrow, we had received communication that because of the holidays and some other technicalities that we had no control of, our closing funds might be delayed getting to the seller. Our broker, Michael, contacted the seller’s broker, “Bozo”, to request a few days extension. Being so close to Christmas, and with the COVID “work from home” delays in all things business, we thought it would be no big deal.
Again, as we have been over and over, we were wrong.
Through other parties, including the lawyer we were using, (whom we found out later had not disclosed that he had represented the seller when he structured the entity that owned Eclipse, MP Sailing LLC, and then charged us a small fortune for “researching” that same entity), we learned that “Bozo” was threatening us with cancelling the deal, keeping our hefty deposit, raising the purchase price and requiring all cash if we did not close on time. Bozo claimed he had an all cash buyer in the wings and that if we did not come through, we would be out and this “mystery buyer” would own Eclipse instead of us.
And of course, he put none of this in writing.
This is what we were grappling with as we headed for an AirBnB, on the boardwalk, that we had rented for a month for the paltry sum of $3,400.00. That amount secured us a “cozy” small room with a bath and kitchen on the Balboa Peninsula, minutes from Eclipse so we could easily assist the delivery crew as they readied her for her trip down the Central American coast, through the Panama Canal, and on to Florida. The goal was to leave Newport at the end of January/mid-February time frame and arrive at Rybovich Yachts in Riviera Beach sometime in mid-March or early April, where we would begin refits and renovations.
As an aside, there is truly only one thing that really matters to me in a rental - a comfortable bed. I am a light and fitful sleeper, essentially the “Princess and the Pea”. If I sleep on a hard bed, I wake every twenty minutes in physical pain; my back, hips and shoulders become bruised and by morning I am somewhat crippled as well as having had little actual sleep. In addition to quiet, I need my bed luxurious and soft; an indulgence, yes, but one all but guaranteed to give a good night’s sleep to a girl who finds it difficult to get one. As I said to Dean and believe with all my heart, we spend one third of our lives in bed; we need to make it very comfortable. Our bed at home reflected that philosophy. I knew that there was a good chance that over the next month, sleeping could become a challenge for me.
On top of everything else, a “challenge” would have been welcome.
We located the building we were looking for and pulled up the car to unload our things. Shockingly, the pictures on AirBnB of our new “home” did not exactly match what was represented. In truth, if I had dreamed up the quintessential nightmare for us to live in for a month, I could not have done a better job.
Dingy, worn and cheap, it had the strong essence of eau’d mildew. While everyone pictures Southern California as the warm land of eternal sunshine, in the winter the night temperatures can dip into the 30’s; lucky us - the building had no heat. The structure itself was at least sixty five years old and in need of serious maintenance and repairs. We appeared to be the only occupants, so at night, with the entrance lit by one light triggered by a motion sensor, the building had the atmosphere of a haunted house. And this being the Balboa Peninsula meant parking was not included - we had to, at times, walk for blocks, feed a meter, move daily or get a ticket.
Inside was even worse. I wish I could say I was embellishing, but I’m not. When we came through the front doors and headed to our room, the hallway carpet, which did not extend to our actual room, (thank God), was threadbare and full of sand. Years of neglect and salt air had left the paint in the entry hall peeling off the walls. All things metal were covered in rust. Upon entering our room, we found that they had torn out the carpet and left the unpainted cement floors bare. Thankfully, they had removed the carpet tacks, sparing us the agony of bare-footed bloody puncture wounds.
Our “cozy” room, about 160 square feet, had one window with a lovely view of the stucco wall of the building next door, four feet away. Consequently, the room received no sunlight and very little ambient light. Thankfully, we had ample fluorescent lights, giving everything and especially our complexions that lovely pale, grayish green tint of dead alien.
I inquired - by message of course as the owners were nowhere to be seen - about doing laundry, asking the location of the advertised laundry facilities, only to be told that they were suddenly “unavailable due to COVID”. Our “fully equipped kitchen”, about six square feet, which is a guess as there was no obviously defined area in our spacious 160 square feet, was beyond luxurious. It held a “refrigerator” that was barely bigger than a cooler, a sink, and an electric four coil “stove” with oven, constituting about one third of the kitchen area. However, the oven could double as a heater, so we had that going for us, which was nice. We had two plates, two bowls, two spoons, and two forks. No cutting knives and no glasses, only a few plastic cups.
And please forgive me for adding a few more details about that “fully equipped kitchen”, but I feel I must. We had a four cup coffee maker, but no coffee mugs. The cookware they supplied - dented and made of tin - looked like it came from an Easy-Bake-Oven. I have copper cookware; it is heavy. All of my upper body strength comes from lifting heavy cookware. The first time I picked up one of those pans, it was so light I nearly inadvertently threw it across the room. Anyway, it turned out that the only things we could actually cook, (cooking being something we had counted on doing as we did not want to eat take out for a month), were things we could boil. In other words, the only thing the cookware could handle, without destroying the contents, was water.
Now, you might be tempted to think all that was pretty bad, at least for civilized adults. Believe it or not, it got even worse. The owner was also doing non-permitted improvements to the building in the dead of night. The stairs the workers climbed at 11:00 p.m. creaked and groaned loudly, the sound reverberating through our room directly underneath them. The drills, saws and hammers went on until 2:00 a.m.
But despite ALL of that, because we had few options, I could have tolerated it for that month, except for this one…..last……detail.
The bed.
Hard as a cement slab, pillows made of lumpy, smelly foam and bedding like sandpaper. It was, very literally,
The. Absolute. Last. Straw.
I could take everything else, but with the stress we were going through, the thought of (not) sleeping like that for a month was the deal breaker. No way. Uh uh.
In the meantime, while we were enjoying our luxurious accommodations, we were scrambling to get the wrinkles ironed out of the funds transfer issue. To say we were stressed would be the understatement of the century. If we did not close on Eclipse, we were going to be left homeless, possession-less, aimless, boat-less and plan-less. The emails and phone calls, numbered in the dozens, involved begging, threats and tears. But God heard our prayers and smiled; magically, and I mean magically, (meaning God), on December 29, 2021, the transfer went through at the last possible hour, we closed the deal on Eclipse AND that day, we also got a full refund from AirBnB. Everybody signed, money changed hands. The final domino which needed to fall, fell. She was ours.
Huge sighs of relief. Decision made to move to my dad’s and take care of him.
Now all we had to figure out was how to get her to Florida.
Near the top of that list of 1,000 details I previously mentioned was finding the urgently needed qualified crew. Eclipse’ current South African crew was staying with her previous owner and we had been making inquiries across the United States, trying to find a suitable captain or at the very least, a competent delivery crew. We had identified an old friend; the captain of the boat we had chartered in the Caribbean; as an interim and possible permanent captain and tasked him with finding the rest of the crew to deliver Eclipse, and us, to Florida. He had a special place in our hearts, as our trip on his sailboat was instrumental in our investment in Tesla. His charter boat had been destroyed in the catastrophic hurricanes that hit the Virgin Islands in 2017 and he had been somewhat drifting ever since. His latest “job” had been refurbishing inflatables in Florida. We knew from experience that he was conscientious, organized, careful, and obsessive about maintenance. He was also incredibly mechanically talented; all necessary qualifications of a good captain. We also knew, as did he, that Eclipse was a big jump in both size and complexity from previous boats he had owned and operated. We hoped he would want to step up to be Master of Eclipse. More importantly, both Dean and I trusted him implicitly to look after our best interests.
In the meantime, while she waited for someone to come and love her, Eclipse was being washed once a week so she would look pretty on the docks. Lonely and forlorn, she had no crew, and new owners who had no clue what to do with her. But she looked beautiful and majestic for all the holiday revelers as they ate and drank at the Bay Club Resort. Her previous crew was keeping an eye on her for us daily, while we waited for the cavalry to arrive.
Of course I remember the first time we stepped foot on her after she was ours; December 30th, the night of Michael, our youngest sons’ birthday. He was in the Navy, stationed in San Diego and had some time off for the holidays. We had planned a small celebration on the boat with some of his friends for poker, pizza, and cocktails . It was a great occasion to spend a little time on our new “toy”.
That night, it was raining; a steady but light rain, consistent but not torrential; enough to create a wet and dreary evening. The gloom was offset by Christmas lights and people half-heartedly partying in preparation for……..more partying. The mood at the Resort was a bit quiet. The Christmas hangover just recovered was preparing for the New Year’s hangover; not lifeless but anticipatory, the guests throwing back a few “hair of the dog’s” to help alleviate the symptoms of their body’s unhappiness at its recent and prolonged ill treatment. You could almost detect a sense of relief, everyone knowing they were finally coming to the end of a long period of required revelry, overeating, too much alcohol and not enough sleep. But they weren’t quite finished. One big party left to go.
Eclipse was berthed in the front row, the premier location to be seen from the bar. The Resort is the “it” place to dock a boat and a place to be seen, haunted by the wealthy and celebrity class and a status symbol due to coveted and very expensive private memberships. We valet parked and hurried towards the dock; of course we had no umbrellas. I had secured a deal, thank God, for Eclipse to remain in her berth until the end of February, it being the only slip deep enough for her draft of just over eleven feet in a harbor of several thousand slips. And although rain was not that unusual for December, it was the first rain of the season and I remember being disappointed that of all nights for it to rain, it had to be that night.
We arrived about an hour early, wanting a chance to get a better feel for and explore a bit on our new boat. Our boat. The words echoed in my mind. They were hard to believe or accept and the physical reality of being on her made no difference; she felt completely alien. No lights were on; she sat dark, soggy and quiet in her spot. As I approached, I got a distinct sense of being overwhelmed and out of my league; her length, her mast, her rigging, and not of least importance her prime spot in front of a club that when I was growing up we could never afford to be a part of; all of it rushed at me while a small voice whispered “you don’t belong in this place”. I climbed the deck stairs and stepped over the gunwale, around to the helm and opened a small cabinet to turn the key and unlock the doors. As I pushed the button to open the salon door, I remember that voice still whispering, “you don’t belong in this place”. The feelings of disorientation would not stop, like I was living in the matrix and had been red pilled. Paperwork and attorneys claimed we were her legal owners, but my heart and soul did not.
I stepped into the salon and turned on the lights. It was cold and damp and we did not yet know how to turn on the heater. It was cold enough that I didn’t take off my coat. I opened the electrical panel, as the previous captain had shown me, and switched on the water pumps and a few other necessary breakers for operating toilets. She was on shore power, so all the electrical systems were working. I took the stairs to the lower salon, turning on more lights before I entered the galley. So many switches. I wondered how long it would take just to understand which ones operated what. Months. As I walked through the door, my sense of disorientation only deepened. I felt like Alice falling through the rabbit hole; the world was getting smaller around me.
That kind of disorientation is rare for me. I have always been a confident person and take charge of my surroundings. Even as a child, I was willing to take calculated risks. When I am faced with new opportunities, my motto tends to be “feel the fear, do it anyway”. I am not easily intimidated by people or situations, but neither am I reckless. When I married Dean, we became a formidable team, as he shares many of the same qualities. He is one of the bravest men I know; a pilot, an explorer; he even took scuba lessons for me even though after his brain tumor, he suffered from claustrophobia from all the MRI’s he was subjected to. However, unlike me, Dean needs to get down into the “weeds” of a challenge. He needs to know all of the details and information that I skim over while I take in the “big picture”. He sees the trees; me, the forest. Between the two of us, we are able to understand and accomplish things most people would be afraid to attempt. And while those abilities have helped us work through some very difficult and fulfilling challenges, at that moment, on Eclipse, as I looked around, it really hit me how little we understood about her and the enormity of what we were proposing to do.
I was also experiencing an unwillingness to acknowledge something else; an uneasy feeling in my gut. We were relying on the expertise and knowledge of people who had decades of boating experience to get her where we needed her to be and to teach us what we needed to know. That was not troubling me. That feeling; one that had been lurking on the edges of my psyche for some time; was telling me that something was off. I had questions; the principal one being how could a boat like her, equipped for world sailing, with all her amazing features and pedigree, have been sold so cheap? Especially compared to other boats in her class, she was at Dollar Store prices. What were we missing? The surveys found nothing, at least nothing that would kill the deal or cost a fortune to repair. Yet all the crumbs were on the trail; the accident in Hawaii in 2016, the loss of propulsion when she came out of the yards, the behavior of the crew and especially “Bozo”, her broker, the day we sailed her and right before closing, the drop in her price, the chat we had with her captain; all of those puzzle pieces swirled around in my Pachinko Machine of a brain, but nothing was dropping in the slots. I had an uneasy sense deep in my gut that there was something important about Eclipse that we did not know; something that would turn out to be very, very bad for us. The extent to which we had no idea what we were really grappling with came crashing over me like a ninety foot tsunami. I was literally frightened.
If I could have heard God at that moment, I think he would have been saying, “Don’t be afraid. This is how I am going to make you more dependent on me than you ever have been in your life, to prove to you how much you can trust me and the depth of my love for you. But it will be painful”. Thankfully, I could not hear him. If I had known ahead of time what our dream would cost, I don’t think I would have had the courage to go through with supporting Dean in his conviction that we needed to buy her. The die, as they say, had been cast.
Looking back, I am sure I was having a God given premonition, because the way that I felt that night was just a tiny precursor of the fear, helplessness, frustration and pain that followed. Later, when I asked Dean if he had any such feeling, he told me he never doubted that Eclipse was the boat God had in mind and never had any such concerns.
The night was December 30th, 2021. We had owned Eclipse for one full day. We were having guests on our gorgeous amazing sailing yacht, celebrating one of our children’s birthdays. And there I was, in the galley of a boat only a tiny percentage of the world’s population could ever afford to buy and in a position in life where I should not have had a care in the world, laughing and enjoying my family and my blessings. But in that moment, all of the talk, dreaming, excitement and anticipation came to a screeching halt with one pure and perfectly defined thought, punctuated by a shiver of fear that penetrated my bones:
“What the hell have we done?”
To be continued.