Sailing Tranquility

“I hate storms, but calms undermine my spirit.”  

Bernard Moitessier, The Long Way

Sometime during long night hours of boat porn on the internet, I feel my interest leaning toward very small craft and crazy long trips. The closer to the water and the narrower the boat, the better. Light displacement, few control lines, and just the ocean. During daydreaming the discomfort of cramped quarters and little equipment it’s not a real thing, I can just focus on the fun part. It’s such a strong dream that I don’t think about anything else and sometimes I find myself spaced out trying to understand what I was trying to do. No, unfortunately it doesn’t happen only when I am sanding.

Right now I feel like I am in a big calm ocean, but I am actually on land. Duties and bureacratic burdens are forcing me to a prolonged stop from sailing, and they call back my focus to proper life challenges, instead of ocean dreamin’. The calm undermine my spirit but calms give people the opportunity to fix things and get their shit together. There’s no time for that in a gale, when you have to run and fight and stay afloat and hope that things don’t fall apart. How to navigate in calms is probably a work of art: better stay calm in a calm but it’s better stay calm in a storm too. That’s why Tranquility is a perfect name for our boat even if Kate and I think about changing it sometimes as she went through too many plastic and structural surgery.

Well, she still is a tranquil old lady, she knows the ocean and what it takes to cross perilous time. In fact according to the legend in 1991 she survived Hurrican Hugo in St.Croix, she was beached, holed but she came back to life. I am somehow beached (luckily not holed) and I am looking forward to a similar destiny of redemption. Chop wood, carry water.