Land life is one of constant connection, both from an online perspective and also from a stability one. Your neighbors don’t change on a daily basis, for example. You plan outings with long-time friends, when you hit the highway for a road trip in company with others it’s a given that you can stay within sight of one another, as long as you both drive the speed limit or close to it. It’s kind of natural to want the same experience when you’re cruising, especially when you’re looking for some kind of reassurance in this new lifestyle. There’s safety in numbers, right?

Our first time out, we met a pair of cruisers named Steve and Martha, on a boat called Mahalo. They were just . . . there in the morning when we woke up at Cat Cay, in the Bahamas, after a slightly rocky start to our long-dreamed of cruise. We wound up cruising loosely in company all the way to Venezuela, and they even came to visit us in Virginia after our first child was born. “Buddy boats” is such a mild term for what these people were to us.

That said, we very rarely moved to the same place at the same time. They took a weather window to the Dominican Republic while we waited in GeorgeTown, Exumas, for guests to fly in. We sailed from Grenada to Trinidad while they hung out in Carriacou looking for parts. We headed north from Venezuela across the Caribbean as they headed to Bonaire. Each of us had specific reasons for sticking around or moving on, and we couldn’t make group decisions. Cruising is, after all, a life lesson in self-sufficiency.

When we cruised with the kids, our soulmate boat took a bit longer to find. Part of the problem with cruising a second time is that, like childbirth, you expect sort of the same things to happen. News flash - nope. Each is unique. End PSA.

I digress a bit. That second cruise, with a crew that included 2 children, was a lonely affair in terms of long-term buddies until we met up with Osprey in Cambridge Cay, Exumas. In February. We left in October. With kids? That’s a heck of a long time without a buddy boat. Once met, though, the connection was long-lasting - and again rarely in lockstep. From different anchorage needs to different timelines, there was a lot of moving on/catching up that happened. These amazing human beings are still in our lives, though they’ve moved back ashore and we’ve moved back aboard.

And now, on this cruise? We’ve finally met “our peeps”, though our recently-figured-out schedule has us heading the polar opposite direction. Sigh. Fine. When we sailed past Follow Me this morning, Ron yelled out “Hey, we’re leaving Martinique on Saturday” so now we’re busy figuring out how to spend at least one more night with them. We’ll take all the time together we can get. One of the hardest parts of cruising is indeed saying “goodbye” to people you are fond of.

We’ve met a couple of boats lately whose definition of “buddy boat” is much more of a “connected at the hip” definition than we’re comfortable with. “I wanted to say in xxx anchorage for longer, but our buddies wanted to move so I didn’t get to stay.” A blog reader reached out the other day, asking for some advice on a possible passage they’re thinking of making. “Any resources of where to find other boats going to the same place? I’d feel better with a buddy boat.” I think their definition is more along the lines of “we go every place together.”

I think the idea of having a buddy boat can be comforting. You’re not alone. You always have people to hang out with, to rely on. Making decisions isn’t all on your shoulders. There’s a lot to like about buddy boating, at least in theory. With my knee issue, Jeremy’s lost a hiking companion: being able to go off with Jamie from Enki has been a balm.

To us the term “buddy boat” means a much tighter friendship than just exchanging boat cards and smiling when we see each other on the beach, or even being happy to share sundowners with. It’s people we’ll make an extra effort to share an anchorage with, people we generally keep track of. Sure, if we’re in the same general area, we’ll coordinate for things like rental cars or big hikes, but we don’t move as an amorphous blob. Is this maybe because we sail a smaller boat that might not move as quickly as other, larger boats? Perhaps. But we cruise because we want to explore places that interest us, whether that’s on land or on the water; everyone will have different desires. 

Our friends Behan and Jamie, on Sailing Totem, have a term they use instead of “buddy boating”. They call it “bungee boating”, which I love. No chain-like co-dependency. Just boats moving at their own pace, on their own schedule, but with some attempts to catch up with each other, sometimes more frequently than others. It emphasizes the self-sufficient nature of cruising while acknowledging the lovely aspect of friendship. 

We sometimes refer to it as leapfrogging. Catch up, one boat moves on, the other boat eventually winds up in the same anchorage. This term works more when you’re loosely in the same area for a season: “We’re heading to Trinidad for hurricane season” means you’re apt to share anchorages along the way.

But that bungee boating term also neatly encapsulates the whole cruising life as we’ve experienced it even between (and across) cruises. Some of our very good friends on Merhaba and Little Gidding from the 1995-1997 cruise were serendipitously in the anchorage at Solomon’s, Maryland when we did a 2 week Chesapeake jaunt in 2002 with our small children. Friends we crossed the Atlantic with in 1997 sent a text right before the 2017 Annapolis Boat Show “hey will you be there? So will we!” And the very very first people we ever met cruising, Lee and Sharon on (then) Breakaway, who passed us in the ICW outside of Galveston in 1994? 

They zipped up in their dinghy to help us navigate the bridge issue in St Martin, just a couple of months ago.

That’s a heck of a stretchy bungee cord indeed.