The beginning

My utter infatuation with sailing and all things sailing-related began 6 years ago. I can’t precisely pinpoint the catalyst for my eventual obsession, what I do know is that I was nearing the end of graduate school. I was also teaching part-time and moonlighting as a carpenter’s helper-- I’ve always been interested in building things. The pay from these jobs was barely enough to get by on so I was perpetually broke. Besides the expense of groceries and rent, I was yoked by a pile of student loan debt, most of which I incurred when I was still too young and easily influenced know any better. Yet for all my schooling I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I had vague notions of wanted to be writer, but my reasons were only partly creative, the rest were pure ego. I wanted to do something, felt I had to do something in order to make meaning in my life—but what to do? Added to this, I was in an unhappy relationship with a girl who I had been living with since college so that in sum, I had already begun, even at such a relatively young age, to feel the invisible cords of inertia beginning to wind and tighten a snare around me.. I felt poised on the brink of an existential crisis, and I latched onto the idea of sailing like a life ring, for the same reasons so many before me have. A boat represented to me, and still does, everything needed to slough of the weight of mundane, predictable, mindless existence. A sailboat meant freedom, a home, an adventure, a project and a goal, and most of all it meant vast expanse of water stretching to the open air in which I might learn to breathe again, learn to live again and learn to just be again.

At that time, I had been day sailing, once, maybe twice in my entire life. Worse still, I didn’t know anybody who sailed or owned a boat and might oblige me in furthering my sailing aspirations. Broke as I was I ruled out expensive sailing lessons never mind actually buying a boat. However, like every person susceptible to a bite by the sailing bug, I had the inexhaustible capacity to dream.

In retrospect, the fact that I didn’t have any money was, in a way, a blessing. Because I couldn’t actually go sailing, I immersed myself in the next best thing to sailing, which for me, was reading about boats and sailing. I devoured books on sailing technique, sailboat building and cruising. On weekends, when my classmates were at local watering holes, I sat in front of my computer, scouring the internet for sailing websites. I researched boats, dreaming about the perfect seaworthy minimalist cruiser for me. I ordered books by John Vigor and Larry and Lynn Pardy from my library and kept them well past their due dates. I read the basic keelboat sailing manuals put out by the American Sailing Association and US sailing: tack, jibe, heave-to, man overboard... When I found myself exhausted by the technical side of sailing, I lost myself in sailing narratives. My favorites were the works of Bernard Moitissier. I read all of Tamata and the Alliance: A Memoir.

This research turned out to be invaluable for stripping away some of the cumbersome misconceptions about what, as a land lubber, I thought a boat should be, and more profoundly, what I thought life should be. Six years later I have a much clearer and slightly more realistic vision about what boat ownership is, and what it is not. The first rule of sailing could easily be haste makes waste. I've already learned a lot about patience. You want to learn how to sail? Patience. You want to buy a boat? Patience. Your boat needs work… a lot of work… patience. You are not there yet… be patient.