It was a typical slate grey afternoon at Magnolia's Elliott Bay Marina, where the water looked like wet cement and tethered boats bobbed to the rhythm of the bay. But at slip No. L2, inside the cabin of the angular Don Quixote catamaran, that typical day and the typical diorama of American life meted out by the millions in neighborhoods across the country, had been turned on its head.There are no doorbells on boats and the Don Quixote was no exception. So you have to call out "Ahoy!" or "Avast! or maybe a meek and confused "Hello?" At that, life aboard the boat will stir. The head of a 12-year-old girl popped through a port side porthole then popped back in. Then from the main cabin came the vessel's co-captain Karen "Toast" Conger. She's confident and friendly and gives clear directions on how to safely board the twin-pontooned vessel.A large honey-colored wooden table buffered by a C-shaped booth ("thee" furniture in the main cabin), greets one upon entering. The table is at the absolute center of the boat and is where cards are played, books are read, food is eaten and wine sipped; where thoughts are processed, plans made, homework is finished and where laughs commonly begin. The window sill behind it bears carved driftwood, papers, a goldfish swimming in a bowl and more miscellaneous scraps, the kind that accumulate in kitchen drawers in any household.The other co-captain, Dean Conger, emerges from the "adults" pontoon, and swoops by on a mission. He is testing and replacing all of the boat's battery power. He navigates between the table and small galley opposite then disappears down into the "children's" pontoon. The 12-year-old, Jaime, surfaces from the "children's" pontoon with a friend and the two girls park themselves at the table. Mom puts out some oranges and Nilla wafers. From the laundry facility on shore, 9-year-old Mera and 7-year-old Aeron come trundling down the ramp, through the gate with the secret code, and on down to the boat to join the card game and enjoy wafers and oranges. The table is full of cards and voices.Every inch of the boat is full. Here on this 38- by 21-foot vessel with fewer square feet than a typical Seattle one-bedroom apartment, there is no such thing as room to spare. Each of the four cabins have a stout entryway, some shelving and room for a bed that abuts the hull, and that's it. Jaime's cabin is in the forward port hull and is decorated with posters of boy bands, flattened candy wrappers, stuffed animals and some shelf space for her home school text books. "Cleaning anything is too much of a drag," she said. "So I just leave it dirty with junk lying in every corner. At least I left a path so I can go to bed at night."But in her cabin and in the other girls' cabin, there are no cell phones. There is no TV. Other than the family laptop, there's little on the boat that requires plugging in. Inside the boat it's a decidedly tight fit. But above deck the limitless sea compensates nicely.This is where this family of five has lived for seven months now and where come May 11, they will embark on a months-long trip up then down the Pacific Ocean, culminating by curling around Baja California and into Mexico's intertidal wonderland that is the Sea of Cortez. The American Dream RevisitedThe Congers are both a rare breed and yet quite common. Dean, up until just days ago, was the owner of a thriving Burien-based ophthalmology practice. Karen was a publications and training director for WatchGuard Technologies and has a masters in public administration from the University of Washington and a degree in political economy from the University of California at Berkeley. They owned a home in West Seattle.Their three children, Jaime, Mera and Aeron are energetic and friendly. They're all big readers, outdoorsy and sociable. Everything checked out on paper. They were the perfect family."We had it all," Karen said.But just as they had achieved the proverbial American Dream, they didn't want it anymore. At a bed and breakfast on Whidbey Island, the couple, enjoying some rare time alone, had a long talk about what they wanted to do. After years of training, Dean had established a successful private practice. But the more he thought about doing the same thing for another 30 years, the more he wanted to abandon it. It was, as she said, the "classic midlife crisis."Nonetheless, she was all for it. She too was at the end of her arc at WatchGuard and could feel misery creeping into the edges of her mind. She had always been the daring type, too. In 1992, she had spent more than a month riding her bike across the country, stopping only to dip her front wheel in the Pacific Ocean along the Oregon shore. So, buying a boat and sailing it wherever? Sure.In the summer of 2005, they bought the Lagoon 380 Catamaran. She was seaworthy and they got to know it and all of its little features and idiosyncrasies. The family began to live on the boat half time and Karen quit her job to be a part-time consultant and humorist blogger as well as the instructor for her kids' home schooling. Then, in the fall of 2007 the Congers became full time liveaboards. They support themselves by renting out their house to friends, living off the sale of Dean's practice, and clients from Karen's consultancy.The home schooling began on two fronts: Living on a boat, it just made sense, especially if you're out to sea with no specific date of return written down. But more than that was Karen's disenchantment with public schools. "Home schooling is a market response to a market failure," she said. "Once you've home schooled, you don't go back. Why would I check back into a system that is fundamentally broken?" She does however bring the kids to the Seattle Public Schools HomeSchool Resource Center for special classes that require special supplies like musical instruments or drama costumes.Living on the boat and being home schooled appears to have been a seamless transition for the girls who make their own fun and carry on conversations with the authority of adults. Mera, for example, is a reading maniac, having plowed through a pantheon of English literary notables such as J.K. Rowling, Roald Dahl, J.R.R. Tolkien, Brian Jacques and C.S. Lewis. Ask her if she's excited about going to Mexico and she'll say, "Would you be excited?" ending any doubt about the adult sensibilities inside her young frame.The Congers treat their kids as adults, as boat life requires. The kids are shipmates with assignments: cleaning the dishes, the cabins, scrubbing and washing the boat on a regular basis, to name just a few tasks. They each know how to swim, having been tossed into the water a countless number of times last summer until they got it right. And when they want to go ashore, they go without parents and play in the laundry facility or at their favorite haunt, the marina's burger joint Maggie Bluffs, where they chug hot chocolate, eat ice cream sandwiches and pay with their lean allowance and calculate a 15 percent tip for the waiter."They were in here last weekend," said Maggie Bluffs manager Gregg Cliggott. "They come in by themselves and seem very self sufficient."Plenty of boaters and marina people have heard about the Congers and their upcoming trip, including Doug Hicks, harbor master of Elliott Bay Marina. The girls come up to his office to visit every couple of days and they talk about their day and plans. Hicks is a good guy to bounce nautical notions off of as he has sailed the seas extensively. He had lived aboard his Freedom 30 sailboat for eight years and sailed, often solo, more than 25,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean to faraway oases like Nuku Hiva of the Marquesas Islands. It was while anchored at Nuku Hiva that he met a family of six, cruising aboard their 60-foot sailboat. The four kids were in the moment. They knew all about the different wildlife and plant life on the islands and the islands' histories. They also swam with the fish and other aquatic creatures in the shallow seas. So when he thinks of the Conger children, and their upcoming trip, he's encouraged."It's pretty exciting to watch them in that environment and know that that's what they have to look forward to," he said of the Conger girls. "Once the trip begins, it's a new adventure every day."Getting Ready to LeaveDean Conger is one of those guys who relaxes by fixing things - Don Quixote's built-in handy man. These past few weeks he's been getting the catamaran in ship shape, making sure the diesel engine is running properly, checking batteries, checking the wiring, plumbing and making sure every feature on the boat is operational. This past snow-filled winter (and spring) was beyond difficult. The heaters failed and for several days it was either huddle up together or shiver. Sometimes to get warm, they'd have to leave the boat and grab a hot chocolate at Maggie Bluffs.So there is an understandable element of caution to Dean. There is a lot at stake on this trip and this new life. He and Karen have charted a course to avoid shipping lanes and heavy commercial fishing zones. The family is also finishing some last minute preparations: Getting the Ham Radio licenses, passports, offshore insurance, school materials, food - well not so much food. As Karen said, "people in foreign countries eat." So they'll buy food at different stopping points, and maybe they'll fish for some, too. They have a propane-powered barbecue grill they set in the stern where they can cook their catch.It's been hard for Dean to slow down as the trip nears and as his time as consultant to his former practice comes to a close. One might think relaxing would be easier to manage for a guy who is a religious listener of Led Zepplin and The Beatles. His wife says as the trip commences, watching him "detoxify" from years of 9-to-5 living will be interesting. Like George Harrison, the quiet one, Dean acknowledges his countenance with brevity."It's a lot easier to get entangled in the rat race than get disentangled," he said.Leaving the rat race, Karen said, means embracing boat time. Boat time is when you disregard clocks and calendars. The calendar she said, can become the most dangerous thing to a cruiser. Decisions that are made for the sake of keeping on schedule can be harmful to the boat. All decisions are predicated on whether they're good for the boat. That means accepting sweeping delays in the schedule."So we are trying hard to avoid very specific plans," she said. "At present, we have a plan, and it's a good plan. No plan however, survives the first meeting with the enemy."They also try not to get on each other's nerves - hard to do in such tight quarters. The boat lifestyle means sitting at that honey-colored table to read while the kid next to her is eating a bowl of cereal and the dad next to her is fixing a broken part, and the kid next to him is playing cards and the kid next to her is leafing through a magazine. There is a lot of independent life going on in the same room. It has both brought them together and pulled them apart."Anytime you live in a close, tight space, you learn how to cooperate and learn together. But you also have to learn how to give each other privacy in the same room," Karen said. "We're more together in that we do things together more, interact more at dinner. But we also know how to have all five of us in the same room doing different things. It's a weird paradox, one I hadn't anticipated."On May 11, the family will set sail for Desolation Sound in British Columbia. Getting there will take about two months. Aeron is looking forward to seeing whales then. They'll return briefly to Seattle in the middle of August to refit and recoup. Then they will set sail south for three or more months beyond San Diego, along the jagged arm of Baja California, around El Arco of Cabo San Lucas and into the Sea of Cortez, a place made famous 66 years ago by American marine biologist Ed Ricketts and his friend, literary legend John Steinbeck.Each member of the family has had the opportunity to speak up if they didn't want this. None of them have. Fear of the unknown doesn't seem to enter the equation and thereby obviates the possibility of turning back.Hicks has seen some kids in cruising families elect to go back to boarding school while the rest of the family set sail. It's not for everyone he said, as one has to give up the basic luxuries in life: long showers, plenty of space, electronics, convenience stores. The kids aren't missing any of that."When they get down to Mexico they will be in contact with other families and they will anchor together and that does provide the relief," Hicks said. "The kids, I think they're absolutely ready to go - I think they were ready two months ago."The Congers will have a send off party on the boat with friends and family before departing. Karen is planning to post log entries on the boat's Web site www.svdonquixote.org and encourages readers to reply.The Congers are not sure what comes after Mexico. There is a real chance that they'll just continue cruising, adhering to the rules of boat time. Their adventures have really just begun."A year from now," Dean said, "if we decide to continue to do this, we may go to the South Pacific."[[In-content Ad]]
