Milestones
A wise man once said, “Experience is what you get right after you needed it.” Nowhere is this truer than in cruising.
How audacious would it be for a couple who have never owned a boat to dream of exploring the world in a recreational trawler? My close friends John and Kathy Youngblood recently completed 13 years of full-time cruising, covering 62,000 miles around the Ring of Fire, Central America and the Caribbean on their first boat, Mystic Moon, a Selene 53.
The Youngbloods’ boating story actually begins years earlier. Neither John nor Kathy grew up in boating families. They were introduced to the cruising lifestyle by experienced boating friends when they chartered a sailboat together. During the next eight years, the hook was set as this group of friends chartered a variety of monohull and multihull sailboats in the Caribbean.
As the Youngbloods’ retirement neared, the possibility of full-time cruising started to seem more real. However, their early chartering experience also raised questions about whether they wanted to spend their retirement cruising a sailboat. That’s when John found Robert Beebe’s book Voyaging Under Power and the whole picture came into focus. They looked at the usual suspects for a comfortable, full-displacement, passagemaking powerboat and eventually settled on the Selene 53.
I met John and Kathy at the 2004 Northwest Selene Owners Rendezvous in Washington’s San Juan Islands. We were both eagerly awaiting the delivery of our new Selene trawlers. For Roseanne, my wife, and I, the Selene was “a transition to the dark side” after more than 25 years of competitive sailing, including dozens of trips up and down the West Coast, as well as a couple of Pacific Cup sailboat races from San Francisco to Hawaii. For John and Kathy, it was the beginning of a great adventure, and we became fast friends.
Even though John and Kathy were newbies in those first few years, they learned remarkably quickly with few mistakes. They were wise and humble enough to ask for help as they built their base of experience.
Their first full cruising season was spent with a small group of Selene owners, including us, circumnavigating Vancouver Island. It was great way to start, with the support of experienced boaters, a mix of protected inside waters, and a few brief open-ocean passages between the five large sounds on Vancouver Island’s west coast. That summer also cemented a lifelong friendship among us.
By 2006, John and Kathy’s horizons had expanded to include the roughly 800-mile Inside Passage to southeast Alaska. It was another milestone on their path. As of spring 2007, the boat and crew were ready to tackle their first extended open-ocean passage. The plan was to take Mystic Moon down the West Coast from the San Juan Islands, first to their home base near San Francisco, and then on to San Diego for the start of what was known as the Fleet Underway to Baja Rally, or FUBAR.
We were fortunate enough to be invited to join John and Kathy for the trip down the coast. I’d done this transit several times, so I went along as crew and coach. I also managed to talk my wife into joining us. We left from the Selene rendezvous in Roche Harbor at the end of April and headed west out the Strait of Juan de Fuca, turning south at Cape Flattery. Our first stop was Astoria, Ore., a little more than 24 hours and 200 miles later, just inside the infamous Columbia River Bar. That was also John and Kathy’s first overnight ocean passage—another milestone.
From the Columbia River, we headed south another 700 nautical miles to San Francisco Bay, with a couple of stops along the way to visit family and take in a few sights. As we passed under the Golden Gate Bridge, John and Kathy played Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic,” Mystic Moon’s namesake, as they toasted with champagne on the foredeck. It was another milestone on their grand adventure.
In the fall of that same year, we rejoined them in San Diego for the start of the 2007 FUBAR, along with five other Selenes. This rally was the brainchild of late film director, race car driver and circumnavigator Bruce Kessler. There were a total of 50 boats on this rally covering 900 miles down the Baja Peninsula from San Diego to La Paz, Mexico, with a handful of stops along the way. It became a jumping-off point for John and Kathy to begin their full-time cruising.
After the FUBAR, John and Kathy spent a year in the Sea of Cortez before working their way down the west coast of Mexico through Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and, finally, Panama. They checked off another experience box as they transited the Panama Canal the first time in June 2009, and headed into the more familiar waters of the Caribbean.
John and Kathy have always loved the Caribbean, so they spent about three years making a big loop, up into Florida and then as far south and east as Grenada before turning west again toward the Panama Canal. Roseanne and I had the privilege of being aboard as Mystic Moon made her second transit of the Panama Canal, back toward the Pacific in January 2013.
The next milestone on John and Kathy’s cruising resumé was their longest nonstop ocean passage to that point, crossing the equator—transitioning them from “pollywogs” who had never crossed the equator to “shellbacks” who had. The 900-mile passage from Panama to the Galapagos took five days.
In their blog from the day they crossed the equator, they wrote: “We donned our pirate and wench outfits, popped open a bottle of very cold Veuve, toasted Neptune, ourselves, to God and then everyone else. … Gee, I guess we gave Neptune more than we thought as the bottle was empty a few hours later.”
The Galapagos are a dream destination, and John and Kathy spent 90 days exploring the islands and wildlife. But the Galapagos were also the launch point and final preparations for their ultimate adventure: the 3,000-mile, 19-day run across the Pacific to the Marquesas.
Crossing the Pacific is not to be taken lightly, even by the most experienced mariners. By this stage in their adventure, John and Kathy were well prepared. They also invited another experienced Selene-owner couple to join them for the crossing. With four people aboard, each person could stand relatively short watches and get plenty of uninterrupted sleep.
The passage would require carrying extra fuel in three bladders—one in each after corner of the cockpit, and one on the Portuguese bridge forward of the pilothouse. That would provide an extra 400 gallons of fuel, in addition to Mystic’s built-in 1,200 gallons of fuel capacity. In the end, they burned about 1,300 gallons, slightly more than they had planned because they sped up for the last two days to arrive at Hiva Oa, French Polynesia, in daylight.
A little more than 19 days and 3,003 miles later, Mystic Moon’s anchor hit the bottom in Hiva Oa on April 4, 2013. The biggest of all cruising milestones checked off.
For the next six months, John and Kathy explored the Marquesas, the Tuamotus, Tahiti, the Cook Islands and Tonga. Then, they made the six-day passage to Marsden Cove on the North Island of New Zealand, where they left Mystic Moon for a few months to spend time at home with family and friends. It was a milestone year, putting more than 1,200 hours on the main engine with 45 nights at sea and 241 nights at anchor, according to John’s meticulous records.
There are roughly 1,400 islands to explore in French Polynesia, Fiji and the Cook Islands, so in 2014, John and Kathy headed back, starting with another six-day passage from New Zealand to Savusavu, Fiji. They spent the next seven months cruising the islands of Fiji before returning to Marsden Cove in New Zealand—another six-and-a-half-day passage.
Open-ocean passages are never routine. John describes the first five days of the passage back to New Zealand as “trawler weenie” weather: light winds and small seas. But the last day and a half made up for it, going down as one of their top-three roughest passages in 11 years of cruising.
Winds were 25 to 30 knots with higher gusts for about seven hours with 10- to 14-foot swells and 5 to 8 feet of wind chop. The seas caused some minor damage, including breaking all three of the dinghy tie-down straps. Fortunately, John was able to replace at least two of them and adequately secure the dinghy before it could do more serious damage.
After two more years of cruising in the South Pacific and a couple of road trips in Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia, the trip home in winter 2016 was the beginning of a change. Following nine years of full-time cruising, the lure of grandchildren and the call of home lead them to a decision.
John wrote in their blog: “Our time back in the USA with family and friends and the time off the boat has convinced us we are ready for a change and to be done with full-time cruising. We look forward to cruising closer to home and doing other travel listed on our ever-expanding bucket list.”
At that point, their focus shifted to completing the Ring of Fire, going up the Asian coast and, eventually, crossing back into U.S. waters via the Aleutian Islands of Alaska.
The plan was to get to Kota Kinabalu in northern Borneo by the end of the 2017 cruising season. They would make one more visit home through November and December 2017 and then return in early 2018 to work their way up through the Philippines and Japan. The northern island of Hokkaido, Japan, would be the launch point for the final leg of the journey back across the North Pacific to the Aleutian Islands and to one of Kathy’s “bucket list” dreams: wintering over in Sitka, Alaska. (For more on this trip, read “Into the Great Beyond” at passagemaker.com.)
On September 4, 2018, John and Kathy arrived in Sitka aboard Mystic Moon, completing a 13-year loop from the last time they’d been in Sitka in summer 2006. In those 13 years, they covered 62,000 nautical miles, visited 42 countries, put a little over 6,400 hours on the main engine, and used 42,200 gallons of fuel.
They also accumulated more experience than most of us will ever have in a lifetime of boating.
