Honeymoon at Sea

“Soon, Watchfire was struggling up each oncoming wave and plunging down the other side, only to head up again, moving forward but seemingly going nowhere. It was as if something unseen was pushing us backwards, like the house in the horror movie that says, ‘get out!'”

Two months into their honeymoon at sea as newlyweds, Jennifer Redmond and her husband, Russel, round Cabo, the cape at the south end of Mexico’s Baja California, in their 26-foot, live-aboard sailboat and promptly head straight into one of the Sea of Cortez’s famous winter norteñas, winds that howl the length of the sea from the north, raising huge waves and creating havoc. It is Jennifer’s first long sailing trip.

“My stomach flipped and flopped as Watchfire battled her way over the waves. . . . Every drop down a wave made my stomach lurch and fall like I was dropping a few floors in a broken elevator. Each time was worse than the last. Eventually, the nausea caught up with me and I was forced to surrender and go below. Wedged into the settee, a bench-like couch, lying completely still with my eyes closed. . . I couldn’t fall asleep, but I could maintain.”

Hours later, the couple and Watchfire finally motor around a sheltering point into their planned anchorage—in total darkness.

“When we finally made it around the final punta (point) in the small bahia (bay), it was as if the weather had been switched off by some giant hand. Starlight shone down on flat black water, almost completely ringed by stone walls with sand beaches. . . . I stepped down into the cockpit and sighed. . . . ‘Sailing is like life. For every punta, there’s a bahia.’”

Part-travelogue and part love story, Honeymoon at Sea traces the couple’s first year of that sailing journey, which began six months after they married when they set out to sail the thousand miles from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas, and then to explore “paradise” in the Sea of Cortez.

Their sailing adventures are interspersed with flashbacks of the pairs’ initial meeting, their breakup after an unplanned pregnancy, and Jennifer’s unconventional childhood with her two older brothers and her free-spirited mother, moving from place to place in 1960s and 1970s California, singing Beatles anthems and show tunes, reading voraciously, and cobbling together a life without much money but with a lot of creativity.

Honeymoon at Sea is a captivating read, propelled by the danger and beauty of the couple’s sailing journey and the joys and conflicts in living in the confined space of a 26-foot sailboat. Jennifer and Russel are young, in love, and don’t know each other as well as they think. But they stick and grow, and with some land-bound interruptions, have shared the tight confines of a sailboat ever since, for another three decades.

Redmond is an excellent writer, charming, wryly self-deprecating, descriptive, and poignant. Which makes it puzzling when Honeymoon at Sea misses opportunities to go deeper. Some flashback chapters, for instance, feel if they were inserted into the sailing journey in a pro forma way, without reflection to connect them to the narrative arc. And the Afterword breezes right over a few major life events, including a miscarriage and a back injury that terminate their plans for a family—“that ship had already sailed”—as if they were simply ripples in a calm sea, not storms that must have shaken the couple to their core. I thoroughly enjoyed this story, but found myself wanting more. Still, Honeymoon at Sea is very much worth the read.