@ibstubro I’ve spent a lot of this past year here in Toucari Bay, Dominica; a mountainous little island in the East Caribbean between Guadeloupe and Martinique. I don’t live austere at all.. or maybe I do. I don’t know. Most of the time it feels quite good this way: it’s simpler than my old life, for sure. I live on this (scroll down the string to the description with my avatar if the hyperlink doesn’t land you directly on the quip as it is supposed to) sailboat, and the only time it gets extreme is during storms (The weather was very active this past October, but I’ve seen worse).
I dislike GPS because I am proud of my old-school navigational skills and don’t want them to atrophy, so I rarely use it. But I would be a fool to not have it onboard as sailing solo can be risky and disorientation due to combinations of weather, dehydration, long-term nutritional deficits, sudden illness or injury is always a possibility. So I have units above and below but I keep them covered so I don’t have to look at the damn things. (I have sat-comms on the console and the laptop for access to the latest charts and navigational changes and shipping tracker software which tracks commercial shipping worldwide so I usually know when one of these leviathans is in my neighborhood—which is very cool.) Most of what I do is dead reckoning anyway. The washer & dryer outfit is superfluous and only takes up valuable space, but I keep it because it improves the value of the boat in case of resale.
I bounce around the islands a lot between St. Kitts and Grenada doing charters, transporting other boats from point-of-purchase to their new owners—anything legal that can put munny in me parse and keep me out here. I left Key West on December 3rd, 2012, originally out of Tarpon Springs and Cedar Key, Florida. Every once in a while this Caribbean Sea gets too small and I have an urge to just head her west to the Canal and out into the Pacific or even east to the Azores or Africa. But the Caribbean, especially this island, is packed with shellfish, fish, fruits and veggies for the taking. I get along with the local establishment, the med students in Portsmouth, the Kalinago, and the local Peace Corp contingent. Life is easy here and I consider myself lucky—and it is really hard to leave.