Consider the adventure of a lifetime. Outrageous. Unsafe. Exhilarating. Life Was A Cabaret is such a story – a correct narrative of worry and audaciousness, adventure and arrogance, growth and humility.
It is now pretty much thirty years ago that Tom and Becky Coffield honeymooned at Lake Shasta, California. Having eloped the week just before, they pooled their meager sources to commit a couple of of what would prove to be the most life altering days of their young lives at a compact cabin on this mammoth lake. When there, a thing excellent and mysterious happened to them. A craziness seized them. An obsession took root and grew wildly out of control. Life Was a Cabaret is the story of this passion and of the 25,000 mile, six year odyssey that ensued. www.cruisebooking.com was a miraculous journey of joy, of foolishness, and of terror. It was a journey of innocence and discovery. And often a single wonders if it is not “…a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing at all.” But it is, nonetheless, their tale.
They had been not born into sailing they had been not born into prams and sailing dinghies and the traditions of Cape Cod. Over a pitcher of margaritas an idea to buy a modest sailboat unexpectedly morphed into the dream of owning a live aboard vessel. Not knowing everyone who sailed or lived aboard a boat, they had no idea what such a boat would price – or even exactly where to invest in one. They groped their way from total ignorance to actual ownership of such a vessel more than the course of the subsequent year. They became dock rats, scouring waterfronts from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle, Washington. They enrolled in a self-taught cram course on boat ownership and purchased their sailboat, Cabaret, nine months right after they’d conceived the idea.
Unable to sit idly for seven years until the boat was paid for, the Coffields left their idyllic moorage and life in Portland for the excitement of ocean escapades in Newport on the Oregon Coast. Like a portent of excellent fortune, each secured fantastic jobs when in port and began a year too unbelievably wonderful to be true. But the get in touch with of the sea was now in their blood, so in short order they left their new nest and headed Cabaret north to the archipelago of Southeast Alaska dreaming to strike it wealthy in this land of ice and snow.
Their two years in the north country were sheer poetry – poetry that echoed from the isolated islands to the solitary bays that beckoned them to enter and take their ease. But, having finally “struck it rich” and paid off the boat, their wanderlust could not be contained despite the addiction they had to the vast and silent land they located so enchanting.
Hardly ever out of sight of land, the two traversed the whole length of the North American continent as they harbor hopped from Sitka, Alaska, to Acapulco, Mexico, a voyage of some 3 thousand miles. Their escapades are enthralling as they traverse nautical charts and encounter the false security of a fair wind and a following sea for nine months. From the (then) tiny, dusty, desert town of Cabo San Lucas, perched actually at the end of the Baja Peninsula, to the tropical allure of the mainland, Cabaret glided ever southward, more than waters oily smooth, with fair tropical breezes meticulously poofing out her huge white sails. They became smug and brazen in their watery globe.
A important lesson in humility came on their initial ocean passage, a journey of 3 thousand miles from Acapulco to the Marquesas, a journey largely traveled in terror. The Coffields had a thorough butt-kicking across the vast Pacific Ocean to the steamy island of Nuku Hiva that lay just nine degrees south of the equator. Becky learned very first hand about the violent, tumultuous climate that Coleridge’s ancient mariner skilled. And like the dying males aboard the mariner’s vessel, she located herself praying for survival from the savage ravages of nature.
But they survived, and so started the third leg of their lengthy voyage, as they wound their way by means of the Marquesas from Nuku Hiva to Fatu Hiva, to the Tuomotos where they got lost for three days, and ultimately to the Society Islands and the materialistic comforts of Papeete and the splashy, attractive paintings of Gaugain. For months the Coffields visited exotic sounding islands where they greedily relished the sight and really feel of land, every single of them inwardly recognizing but not outwardly speaking of the two awaiting endurance trials they’d have at sea prior to they’d safely be property again.
Leaving Bora Bora for the long, windward journey to Hawaii and the northern hemisphere made perhaps a single of the loneliest feelings the author says she’s ever had. For twenty-one particular days they spoke tiny and believed significantly. Adrift in their own worlds of worry and uncertainty, they passed each and every other exchanging watches, and their hearts grew weary. A hurricane racing up the coast of Mexico created a false begin at them, but they no longer feared a mere hurricane when a watery grave seemed additional than imminent.