Marina neighbors...

I don't even know where to begin. Do I start by telling you the story about the liveaboards across from us having what I am pretty sure was a drug-induced meltdown? Or do I save that one for later...

Well, first of all, there is this bizarre pattern with our neighbors' names being the same or similar to one another. Let me explain. Out of the ten men that we have met in our marina, eight of them are named Mike. Eight. Every time we meet a new man, Mike ends up being his name. I don't get it. Next we have Rich. Two of them. There are two different women named Becky. Then we have a JoAnn and a Susanne. And then there's us...Hanan and Allan. Maybe it is some sort of metaphor reflecting how we don't really fit in. We are also the youngest in this marina, by far.

We had JoAnn over for wine one night when we first moved in, because our boat's previous owner John told us she is a good neighbor to have around. JoAnn is probably in her 60s or 70s and lives alone, however was not shy to tell us she likes to prey on younger men. Like, much much younger men. Allan and I sort of shot looks at each other when she told us. She went on to tell us that she only hangs out with 20 and 30 something year olds , because "they make her feel young." No wonder she wanted to come over and hang out with us. We are the only people in the marina under 50 years old.

Once she had her second glass of wine, in came the gossip about the marina neighbors. Here is what we found out (mind you, we don't know anyone yet):

The man who is always walking the two small white dogs is a retired heart surgeon. Claus. She was sure to include her suspicion that something bad happened towards the end of his career causing him to "retire" abruptly and leave with bitterness and anger. She went on to say his two dogs run the show and that Claus lets them shit all over the place and he does not bother to clean it up. We asked about the other guy down the dock who won't ever say hi back when we walk by. She said he was electrocuted two times...interesting. She then went on to tell us about how one couple got into a huge fight last year and the guy took off with the boat while the woman was in the marina bathroom up top. He never told her he was leaving. No word. Just left out of the blue. All her belongings were on the boat with him when he left. She came back from the bathroom to find the slip empty. And of course, he wouldn't answer his phone, so she had to stay with a neighbor until he decided he was ready to come back. That is some serious crazy behavior right there. Thank God Allan would never be that immature. Ed, was a 95 year old man living on his boat with no family or friends, who apparently manipulates all the neighbors into "working for him." When it is sunny (almost always in San Diego), he sits on the top deck of his boat and basks in the heat, keeping guard of the area and waiting for people to pass so he can trap them to talk to him. Once he lures you in, 3 hours will have gone by before you know it, one story after the other. Then we learned that the man who looked like Albert Einstein, hair and all, lived with an older women who he supposedly cheated on with someone else one dock over. JoAnn seemed to love telling us all the juicy details. We kind of were taken back by all the personal things she was sharing about all these strangers. It was a lot to process and perhaps not the most welcoming information to learn about our new neighborhood.

Then we then got on the subject of the neighbors who lived right across from us. Daniella and Clayton. She was an African women from Zimbabwe, while he was a white guy, both probably in their 40s. The first time I saw Daniella, she was walking Clayton down the dock, seeing him off to work. I was walking up the dock to leave for work too and when she saw me walking behind them, she grabbed Clayton and kissed him really intensely, looking over his shoulder at me with the darkest serpent eyes I have ever seen--as if she was warning me to stay away. She never said hello or anything. Never introduced herself. I would see her around a lot in the summer, because as a teacher, I was off work. She seemed to not have a job and was always aimlessly roaming around the marina. I would see her in the bathroom or laundry room, wearing baggy sweats and oversized t-shirts and slippers. She would shuffle and drag her feet as she roamed, as if walking was too much work for her. She always looked hungover or like she was coming down off of something in the daytime, stumbling and moving extremely slow and lethargically. Even when I would smile and say hi, she barely acknowledged me. There was a deep vacancy in her eyes that gave me the chills. Little did I know what was yet to come.

It was maybe the second week of us living on the boat and while we waited for the new mattress to arrive in our aft cabin (bedroom), Allan and I slept in the V-berth (guest room towards the front of our boat shaped like a V). Ours was facing the dock, closest to Daniella and Clayton's boat, which means the bow of our boat was facing the bow of theirs, with just the dock in between us. We heard shrieking sounds around 11pm over our music, but at the time, we honestly thought it was just kids playing outside. I remember we even said to each other, "why are children even awake at this time? It is way too late for kids to be running around the docks." We continued listening to music and hanging out in the salon (living room)--it was not until we crawled into the V-berth for bed around midnight when we really were able to hear what was going on. It is hard to say if she had been yelling the entire time since those first shrieks and the sounds and if our music drowned her out, or if it just happened to be perfect timing of us hearing their fight as soon as we went into that room, but Daniella was screaming hysterically. Now, listen...I have lived in some shady areas in my time. I moved to another country by myself when I was twenty. I spent about 5 years living in shady neighborhoods of San Francisco since that is what I could afford, which also means I have encountered more crack-heads on the streets that I am comfortable with. I have been stalked on more than one account, I have witnessed homeless people having drug meltdowns before. I've been attacked by a drunk guy on the street who tried to follow me home, pinning me down and assaulting me in a dark stoop. Encounters like this were not that abnormal for the streets of San Francisco at night. Pretty much, it takes a lot to scare me at this point. But Daniella's screaming was by far the most insane I have ever heard. I don't even know how to explain how loud it was in words. You could hardly make out anything she was saying, but it sounded like she was slurring into a megaphone that was held directly up to my ear. And the screaming never stopped. It went on and on and on and on for what seemed like forever, and the strangest part was that there was never a voice on the other end. No one responded to her, no one tried to calm her down, she was just going ape shit crazy. I kept waiting for another voice to reason with her. "Was she alone? We wondered. Then could hear her stomping up and down the docks directly outside of our boat. She was aggressively pacing back and forth now. The only words we could make out were her threatening a man, saying she was going to put him in jail.

THEN we heard a huge splash. She fell into the water. She either fell off her boat or off the dock. I still do not understand how she could have fallen into the water, but then she started screaming "HELP ME OUT OF HERE NOW, GET ME OUT!!!!!" Still no other voice. Because it sounded like she was on some serious drugs, we got paranoid and started to worry if she would see our light on. Would she somehow be mad at us for witnessing her go nuts? I wondered if she would come up to our boat and try to engage with us. We turned the lights off and stayed quiet, listening intently of course. After stomping up and down the docks and screaming for another 15 mins, she finally climaxed. She began screaming "MAMA" over and over over and over and over with her arms up in the air (Allan peaked out of the porthole). I was waiting for other people to come out and try and restrain her. She started stomping out of the marina, all the while still screaming MAMA until her screams were abolished into the distance. I wish this was the end, but it is not. Until tomorrow...

Sunsets

Sunsets have always been one of my favorite things in life. They have this ability to calm and ground me. Growing up, I lived out in the country surrounded by acres of land. Our home was at the top of a hill, enclosed by forests below. As a kid, I would spend all my afternoons outside, just connecting with nature. I often would sleep outside, either in a fort I built in the grass or on my balcony upstairs to see the stars. This is where I developed by passion for sunsets.

My brother would be preoccupied playing video games as soon as we got back from school, my dad glued to the tv, either watching news or meticulously following the DOW stock fluctuations, and my mom swirling around, cooking or cleaning and carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders. Being outside was my place. The sky felt like it belonged to me. Nobody else was there looking up at it. It was just me and the outdoors. Because of this, even twenty-something years later, I still feel a strong pull to being outside. It has this instant way of making me feel safe, as if reminding me that everything is going to be okay. Living with land was something I always wanted as an adult, so moving onto a boat sort of went against that. However, I have experienced some of the most glorious of sunsets, which has, for now, been enough for me. I know when I have kids one day, I will want land for them to roam on and trees for the to climb, but at this point, sitting on the back deck has been my haven for the last 8 months.

It is funny how it happened out this way, because when we bought the boat, we were set on moving it over to a different marina. Kona Kai was where the younger crowd was. The marina we were already docked at was older and had less amenities. Because our friends lived at Kona Kai, we have seen what it has to offer: a whole spa and resort, including a gym, pool, bars and restaurants. Everything was set for us to move to our boat over there too--I even put my 30 day notice in at the current marina... but the last week before I was supposed to move, something whispered in my ear. "Stay here. Don't go." The universe has a way of showing you what you need, before you even understand it. And it is our job to try our best to listen.

So listen is what I did, although at first I still felt conflicted. I thought I knew what was best for me, even though my intuition was telling me otherwise. I would tell myself, I can always still move the boat in a month if it doesn't work out here. Not even a few weeks later I was able to understand why I was meant to stay. The slip the boat was already docked in when I bought was parked with the back deck facing the sunsets. Most of my life, I have tried to rearrange my days around in order to be facing west as the sun goes down. Always trying my best to position myself to get the best view possible, which sometimes meant driving far distances to be up on a mountain to remind me of my childhood sunsets. And here on the back deck, in the old marina, without having to rearrange myself, I had the perfect view every single night.

One day weeks later, I found all the paperwork I had filled out to move into Kona Kai Marina. For the first time, I studied the map of the marina, showing which slip our boat would live in. Their docks were facing a different way altogether, which meant our back deck would have been facing a parking lot if we moved there! LOL. It is so funny how things work out. As an old soul and an introvert, I have found a lot of comfort in living in a quieter, older community. In retrospect, I honestly don't know what I was thinking to move in the first place at all--being around young party people would have driven me insane!

Staying reminded me to find peace in my surroundings. To make those connections with the outdoors every day. And! A perk about having older neighbors is that they stay inside a lot. I love that when I walk to the grassy park across the street that overlooks the bay, on most days, I can enjoy the skyline all to myself. It is those moments where it feels like it's just me and the sky, just like the good old days.

Mini oceans under each window.

When buying my boat, everyone told me that B.O.A.T. stands for Break Out Another Thousand. I laughed and brushed it off though, because I assumed most people who said this were buying frivolous things for their boat. I wouldn't do that, I thought. I'll just make-do with what I have. I assumed that because most of the people giving me advice were way older than me, that I had some time to save up first before I needed to buy pricey accessories for my boat. How naive I was... I am seven months in now and I have realized the acronym has nothing to do with buying extra things. I have learned rather, that very few weeks something BREAKS, so you HAVE to fork over heaps of money to just keep the boat functioning properly.

When one agrees to purchase a boat, a marine survey by a professional surveyor is usually recommended or required. Since I was a first time buyer, I wanted to have the survey done to see what I was getting myself into. However, certain things are not necessarily revealed during a marine survey. A leak on the starboard side of the aft cabin was one of those...

The excitement of being so close to actually buying my own boat allowed me to overlook the dark, softened wood below the windows and doors. However, a heavy rain over that first winter disclosed the existence of an ongoing issue. Some time later, a more serious leak appeared to present itself on the port side of the same cabin, and also on the starboard side below the decks. The leaking was becoming serious. At one point, we noticed water seeping out of the walls in the main salon, only to discover a large drip in one of the compartments below the deck. The same issue was happening behind the refrigerator and we were collecting mini oceans under each window as well.

The first few rainstorms, we had bowls below each window to collect pools of water, which we would have to empty out every few hours. The walls of the boat are tilted in at a 45* angle so the rain is really good at pooling at the bottom window corner, then seeping into the cracks.

We began researching how to solve the window issue and discovered port visors, which claim to solve our window leaking issues. They were a little pricey for us at about $40 each, so we had to fork over a few hundred for all 10 of the windows. But in the end, they were well worth the price to keep the my sanity and the rain from pooling under the windows.

The decks are still leaking and the issue is unresolved, so more on that later...