Oh the people you’ll meet!

With a nod to Dr. Seuss, the past year has been one experience after another meeting people with vastly different backgrounds than ours – and these experiences (like the one mentioned below) often leave us thinking about our own histories, families, and identities.

Recently, after successfully tackling the alternator issue on Shearwater, we had the opportunity to visit with a Dutch couple, John and Rosa, who had just begun a circumnavigation – they left the Netherlands this summer, working their way down the European coast, and had an uncomfortable, bumpy ride into Porto, where they had decided to take their time to recharge before heading further south.  The couple had built their 60+ foot steel schooner (John is a naval architect) over the past 14 years – it was definitely a labor of love, as they spent a lot of time mixing traditional touches with modern materials.

We enjoyed a bottle of Portuguese vinho verde with them and talked about sailing, cruising, and living in Europe and the US.  One of the most notable things that we noticed when talking with John and Rosa was that the topic of climate change came up (not by us!) several times – for them it was a given that changes are happening, and that we should expect the world to be a very different place in the future.  Except when we were taking classes in graduate school (Justin’s courses looking at climatology, mine looking at ecological and evolutionary implications), we have not spent too much time discussing the topic previously with strangers – in the US, the topic of climate change, like politics, can be a real hot button issue.  It was a bit refreshing not to be defending science, but actually discussing it.

John and Rosa write a blog (in Dutch) that has a section in English – it’s worth a visit to see the boat they built.  You can even consider joining them for a leg, if you are so inclined!