Sailing on the Lean

It wasn’t until I was in my early 40’s that things started to become more of a challenge. When living in Angola I was having difficulties with running. I simply couldn’t will my body to do what I need to do. I assumed it was weakness of mind, so I kept trying to plow through. I signed myself and one of my boys up for a half marathon in the USA while on break. I couldn’t even make it a mile without having to stop. My boy actually turned back to try and find me. Talk about embarrassing. I did finish but it took me just as long as my marathons did. I was frustrated with myself and my lack of “will power”. It was another entire year that I found out that I really had kidney disease and was not well.

The kidney issue made me very dehydrated and this in terms of made my blood like sludge so I started having heart issues. With having a birth defect of the arteries of the heart to add to the mix it was a perfect storm that resulted in a heart attack. I was not well. It took a good six months before I began to get my life on track.

It was five years after that when I bought Ta Fixe I was of the mindset that I was going to live my life to the fullest and…power through my challenges. If I pretended it wasn’t real then I didn’t have to change the way I did things. Spoiler alert this is not the way to go about these things.

The most significant issue I faced was generalized weakness. I believed all I had to do was to jump headlong into the hard physical work on the boat. Life would become butterflies and rainbows and I would be able to sail off into the sunset with hubby and live happily ever after. It is a fantastic dream

I had a huge amount of book knowledge, and wisdom from other peoples struggles of taking a sailboat around the world. Most of them, actually all the one I had read by this time, were by healthy adults. Their issues were due to injuries during the voyage. I had no practical knowledge of how someone like myself would go sailing.

One of the pieces of advice I was working with was that you alone should be able to pull the sail from the cabin to the deck alone in case you are the only one aboard. 40′ was considered, at the time, the limit of having a woman do this. So one of my goals was to be able to make that happen. To this day I have no idea of who thought of that but my body builder son, Selby, is the only one that can do it with either sail… I did try though. It felt like a fail when I couldn’t do it…but neither could hubby and that made me realize that is hogwash. I was working my best to be the complete sailor. Or at least the sailor I had conjured up in my mind. (think tall ships and swinging from the booms). I was setting myself up for failure and frustration when things weren’t “as they should be”

Over my time owning Ta Fixe #1 my physical issues have been steadily worsening. I went from just having trouble with endurance to many more struggles with balance, weakness, clumsiness and ongoing decline.

My “I think I can” was starting to fail me and I was having to change the way I did things on the boat.