Envision the adventure of a lifetime. Outrageous. Hazardous. Exhilarating. Life Was A Cabaret is such a story – a true narrative of worry and audaciousness, adventure and arrogance, growth and humility.
It is now almost thirty years ago that Tom and Becky Coffield honeymooned at Lake Shasta, California. Obtaining eloped the week ahead of, they pooled their meager resources to spend a handful of of what would prove to be the most life altering days of their young lives at a little cabin on this mammoth lake. Although there, one thing amazing and mysterious occurred 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. It was a miraculous journey of joy, of foolishness, and of terror. It was a journey of innocence and discovery. And occasionally one wonders if it is not “…a tale told by an idiot, complete of sound and fury, signifying nothing at all.” But it is, nonetheless, their tale.
They were 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 notion to acquire a small sailboat unexpectedly morphed into the dream of owning a live aboard vessel. Not realizing anybody who sailed or lived aboard a boat, they had no thought what such a boat would cost – or even exactly where to get one. They groped their way from total ignorance to actual ownership of such a vessel more than the course of the next 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 bought their sailboat, Cabaret, nine months after they’d conceived the notion.
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 excellent jobs as soon as in port and began a year too unbelievably superb to be correct. 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 rich in this land of ice and snow.
Their two years in the north country had been sheer poetry – poetry that echoed from the isolated islands to the solitary bays that beckoned them to enter and take their ease. But, possessing finally “struck it rich” and paid off the boat, their wanderlust could not be contained in spite of the addiction they had to the vast and silent land they found so enchanting.
Seldom 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 practical experience the false safety 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 finish of the Baja Peninsula, to the tropical allure of the mainland, Cabaret glided ever southward, over waters oily smooth, with fair tropical breezes carefully poofing out her massive white sails. booking a cruise became smug and brazen in their watery world.
A big lesson in humility came on their first ocean passage, a journey of three 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 discovered very first hand about the violent, tumultuous weather that Coleridge’s ancient mariner seasoned. And like the dying guys aboard the mariner’s vessel, she found 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, beautiful paintings of Gaugain. For months the Coffields visited exotic sounding islands exactly where they greedily relished the sight and feel of land, every of them inwardly realizing but not outwardly speaking of the two awaiting endurance trials they’d have at sea just before they’d safely be household once again.
Leaving Bora Bora for the extended, windward journey to Hawaii and the northern hemisphere made probably a single of the loneliest feelings the author says she’s ever had. For twenty-a single days they spoke small and thought a great deal. Adrift in their own worlds of be concerned and uncertainty, they passed each other exchanging watches, and their hearts grew weary. A hurricane racing up the coast of Mexico produced a false commence at them, but they no longer feared a mere hurricane when a watery grave seemed more than imminent.