Tasha Hacker

When my life took a drastic U-turn a few years ago, I found myself suddenly without a boat, a family, or ownership of this blog, where I’ve been writing about my sailing and travel adventures since 2012. I have created a new site called Tasha’s Turf (www.tashasturf.com), where I write about things much broader than sailing and travel – life changes, my on-going projects (one of which is writing a book) and things that are generally more life-related, rather than just sailing and travel-related. Little by little, over the past two years, I’ve taken baby steps towards becoming the captain of my own ship, both literally and metaphorically. But I thought it would be weird to just pop up here, after two and a half years of silence, telling stories of my sailing exploits as though nothing happened.

What we didn’t know was that Raymarine had come a long way since then, blowing Garmin out of the water with their new 9-axis gyroscopic compass thingy…I’m not really sure what it’s called or how it works; I just know it’s amazingly accurate. We probably couldn’t have known this before we got out on the water and started actually using the systems we installed, but it turns out we don’t run our generator nearly as often as we run our water-maker. Consider this: there is an overwhelming amount of stuff that you can’t even begin to ask your broker because you don’t know all the things you don’t know. A good broker can enlighten you on the “unknown unknowns,” the crucial stuff you may not have even considered because, like most buyers, you don’t know everything about the boat you’re buying or the lifestyle you’re about to plunge yourself into.

I felt sure in that moment that nothing would make me happier than spending a good long chunk of time — a year, perhaps — in the Caribbean, where a mere day sail would drop me in another stunning anchorage off an island covered with trees and hills and roads where I could run and explore to my heart’s content. But, more importantly, I’d heard about St. John’s 8 Tuff Miles, a race that runs every year from Cruz Bay to Coral Bay, along a road that soars up and down hills so brutal that cars struggle to make it to the top. It turns out running every single trail on St. John from one end to the other is not only a great way to see the beauty and diverse geography of the entire island, but it’s the best way to gain an appreciation for just how many well-maintained trails the island has to offer. It’s a runner/hiker’s paradise, which makes it a paradise for Ryan as well, since he can just throw my running shoes at me when I’m getting irritable and send me off the boat to unleash some of my energy on 13.6 miles of trail options.

On the second day of our Atlantic crossing, a bird flew in through the porthole next to our bed in the owner’s cabin. The bird that flew into my bedroom, all the fish we caught, the dolphins that played in our wake, the family of whales that circled our boat, the squid we found in our dinghy and the flying fish that threw themselves at the boat during night watches; those are the things I remember vividly about the crossing. And that’s exactly why I wasn’t at all worried about the idea of crossing the vast Atlantic Ocean on our own boat It’s that I find myself describing an ocean crossing as “mostly boring” with the exception of the animals that punctuate the days, illustrating how far and wide my comfort zone has stretched since the early days of sailing Hideaway.