Stepping off the dock: A Return to Sailing

“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”
~ Lao Tzu

I’ve found that there is nothing more true to be found in life than nature in its unhindered form. It is one thing to imagine a life aligned with that nature, and another entirely to step off the dock and live it. For years, my desire to return to the water was something I carried quietly. Now, sitting at anchor in a beautiful bay an hour or so before sunset, the shift from imagining to actualization feels in part like a choice, but also like a natural evolution.

I’ve spent a long time imagining and taking practical steps, but I’m finally the proud and happy owner of a sailboat. Her name is Juniper and my partner and I are sailing her in the San Juan Islands of Washington state where we purchased her.

I sailed a lot as a young man with my father, starting at age ten aboard an 18-foot wooden sailboat in Chicago. In my teens and 20s we sailed the Florida keys, and the Caribbean, mostly aboard his 37-foot liveaboard ketch, Karma. Those sailing adventures stuck with me and helped form a yearning to be on the water and living a life more free and of my own determination.

Along the recent path to this moment, I’ve taken online and on-water classes, logged miles walking countless docks looking at and touring boats, read a shelf full of seafaring books, crewed for over 3,000 miles on three different sailboats including a trip from Tahiti to Fiji, and chartered two sailboats in the Pacific Northwest.

And now it’s happening. Although it’s taken a long time to truly find my way back to the water, as we sit here with three otters splashing around nearby, I couldn’t be happier or more satisfied.

In my life, I’ve often sought quiet corners of refuge. For years I’d take solo backpacking trips deep into the Sierra Nevada mountains on foot. Later came my van, Bessie, which helped me access deep desert, mountain and river retreats. And now we get to find that stillness on the water, where the wind and current can guide us to remote coves and bays.

So far, after a couple of weeks in a marina spent provisioning and upgrading the boat, most notably integrating solar panels for extended anchoring without needing to run the motor to keep batteries topped up, we’ve been enjoying beautiful anchorages, spending a week at Cypress Island among seals, otters and eagles, and since then a couple more lovely bays and coves. Spending days almost entirely outdoors is one of the great benefits of this life. It’s a fairly stark contrast to life back home, where my days are largely spent indoors despite regular walks or sports.

I love learning curves and find myself thriving in the challenging environment of having to deeply learn all aspects of sailing, navigation, weather/tides/currents, and numerous boat systems. Today’s learning du jour has been sump pumps since ours seemed to pause in its assigned duty of pumping shower water overboard. All good now.

And so here we sit at anchor in a place called Parks Bay, with sunset’s thousand-faceted ripples on the water, hot honey ginger lemon tea and grey herons moving with a patience I seem to have lost somewhere along the way. I keep finding myself saying to my partner: “We’re doing it!” It’s been so long in coming that the reality in the moment is pleasantly surprising. It feels so satisfying to be beyond the scheming stage and to be actually living it.

A friend wrote to me recently and suggested that “self-actualization must feel pretty damn good.” In truth, it does. It can take an immense amount of effort to steer the ship of one’s life in a different way, and overcoming various internal blockages to taking the helm is more important than I may originally have thought. There can be many reasons that we hold ourselves back, and most if not all of them are truly foolhardy. So far I’m just getting a new taste of life on the water, and the intent this summer is to spend these few cruising months exploring aboard Juniper before putting her on the hard and heading back homeward.

One of the things I love about life’s unfoldment is that when you take a step forward, a whole new set of possibilities emerges from the new place where you find yourself standing – or floating. Take a new job, move to a new town or country, join a new club, serve a new organization, take a class, even just go to a dinner party, and your entire life has no choice but to evolve from a new place.

This evolution feels a bit like magic, and right now the magic appears as a boat named Juniper riding quietly at anchor, a lowering golden sun, and a grey heron moving at its own unhurried pace. Perhaps I am as well.

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