Boat Break

Rusticating in West Cork, and thoughts on living aboard.

Home Improvements

Laughing Gull is on the hard in Annapolis, getting tended to and spiffed up. I am spending a month with a roof over my head, enjoying plenty of hot water, and feeling no stress about weather…or whether the anchor will hold. The PTSD inflicted by the tyranny of the lobster pots is fading fast. Land-breaks, especially in West Cork, are the best. I’ll be ready to go back aboard in October.

I have been doing this alternative (floating) lifestyle thing long enough to have developed some preliminary thoughts. The first is that I really do like living on a sailboat. You never really know whether the thing you think you want to do, or the thing you think you need to do, will be what you expect. I wasn’t at all sure how trading suburban life for a very different life on the ocean would turn out. Lots of people set out to live on boats and lots of people quickly decide it is not for them. But I know enough now to know that my instincts were good. I am happy to trade occasional physical discomfort for wide horizons, and an immensely interesting, intimate, and rewarding relationship with the natural world. I feel calmer, happier, more thoughtful.

West Cork sunset. Blue bottom paint; blue house paint.

Second, I can endure, and even enjoy, extended periods of time on my own. I love the challenge and freedom of solo sailing. It is a constant game of managing risk and reward, and eminently satisfying when risks are successfully navigated and minimized (and appropriately adrenalizing when they are not—which is its own form of reward IF you escape without disaster).

I sailed Laughing Gull more than 2000 miles solo in the past year (around 3000 miles total), and learned something subtle: one of the key benefits of being on your own is that it is way easier to NOT sail to a schedule. Sailing to a schedule or with deadlines can lead to trouble because you are sometimes forced into sketchy, or just plain adverse, weather windows. That means a lot more risk, and it is also hard on the boat and crew. When solo, I can be as patient as I like and let weather be the primary consideration of when and where I go. I can also stay longer if I love a place. Or leave earlier if I don’t. All decision-making is much more fluid and ad hoc. That is a kind of autonomy which I didn’t really anticipate, but which I now treasure.

In West Cork, fresh fruit is super-local.

Of course, the danger of becoming a mumbling recluse is always clattering around in the back of my head. So it is crucial to balance time alone with time with people. Sometimes friends or family join me on LG. And sometimes, especially if I am sick of my own company, I seek out other sailors wherever I happen to be. Meeting other sailors and developing a community of friends who you happen across in different ports takes some time. But the sailing community is pretty friendly and open, and the number of boats I know and follow is slowly growing. It helps that I have joined some cruising associations, like the Salty Dawgs and the Ocean Cruising Club. Most of them have member maps, and I also use NoForeignLand to see who is around (you can track Laughing Gull, and see where I have been, on NFL here).

Maine is nothing if not moody

What else? Oh, living mostly on a sailboat imposes a kind of minimalism that comes to me naturally. You don’t have a lot of space so you have to dramatically prune all the stuff in your life. You become much more intentional about what you buy, and why. And you discover that most of what you have you don’t really need.

Some cruisers avoid this dilemma by renting storage space. This is the classic American solution to too much stuff. But it is a cop out, an expensive one at that. I disdain the idea of a storage locker. It is far more rewarding to unburden yourself, piece by piece, item by item, until you have only what you really need.

You can never see enough beautiful sunrises.

There is also an excellent and unanticipated kind of freedom that comes with minimalism. Modern consumer culture is powered by marketing. But when you have little interest in buying more stuff, all the pitches and ads a human being encounters relentlessly through a day fade into meaningless white noise. You can ignore it all, and save all that attention, all that mindshare, for more interesting and worthwhile mental meanderings.

Equally important, the less stuff you have, the less plugged in you are to endless services and consumer relationships, the less admin you have. There is no point in immersing yourself in the natural world, or seeking an alternative way to live, if you spend untold hours dealing with emails and other admin. That is the old, conventional, way of being. The new way of being, another path of minimalism, is to mercilessly fight a war against admin in all its forms. Unsubscribe to everything you don’t really care about. Set any accounts you have to have (bank, credit card, insurance, whatever) to paperless and autopay. Untether yourself in every way you can.

This is how every boat shed should look.

It is a hard war, and I am only slowly gaining ground. But once you see admin as an epic stealer of time, and start to oppose it, you open up a crucial front in the battle for personal freedom. Every minute you save feels like two minutes gained, because the actual experience of engaging with admin is so thoroughly mindless and soul-withering. Maybe it is just me. But I place my Anti Admin campaign alongside my Slow Dinghy campaign high in the category of Unexpected But Worthy Causes.

Since I am celebrating minimalism, I will stop here, before I descend into full ramble. I do have some other thoughts and conclusions. But I will put those in my mental storage locker and save them for another time.

Enjoy September, and I’ll be back on LG mid-October. And, in the meantime, take your time and do it right.

thequalifiedcaptain

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