Finding Balance

We’ve now been on the boat since late October 2024, with the entire family being on the boat together since mid November 2024.

These are some of the things we’ve accomplished so far:

Sell everything, and left our previous life behind
Moved on the boat
Major construction / boat projects started
Leave the dock
Navigating, Running Aground, and Anchoring
Night time Passage
Getting the sails up
Dragging anchor in a storm at night in major wind / currents
Navigating busy waterways
Completed major construction / boat projects (finally)
Crossing the Gulf Stream
Navigating shallow water and cuts
Provisioning and managing resupply in remote areas
1,000 nm under our keels
Starting to learn what this life is really like
Struggling to find our way

Our biggest struggle so far has been with the relationships on the boat, due to the speed at which we made the transition to boat life. The boat projects and major systems needing to be fixed were a huge part of this. It made it so everything felt like an emergency, and that took time away from finding balance during the transition period. It led to several challenges that we’re now facing.

The challenge for us today is with how the perspective you had yesterday is used to filter your experiences today along with the coping mechanisms we developed on land no longer working for us.

For those still on land thinking about boat life, you’ll see this a lot on YouTube where people on their couches criticizing creators for saying living in paradise is hard. You can’t fault them for this, because they have no way of understanding what others are going through, which says a lot about our world today. We’re struggling with this now, as we find ourselves in beautiful locations, yet we’re struggling with the challenges this life presents along with the loss of our former lives.

The reality is, no matter what phase of life you’re in or what phase is yet to come, life is just life. Life has never been categorized as easy, and just because the view around you is what other’s call paradise, it’s still just your life.

Perspective

Your current perspective has a lot to do with how you start the transition to boat life.

Before getting out here, a lot of us will read books, get magazine subscriptions, watch YouTube, join sailing communities, read blogs, and consume any other material we can find to prepare for this life. We even went a step further by joining Bluewater Cruising to get coaching, work with their team to buy our boat, join a community of sailors, and learn the skills we needed to make this life change successful.

On one of our first passages, I ran into a bit of cognitive dissonance or maybe a slap in the face as I took all that material I had consumed on weather and route planning, and tried to apply it in the real world. It led to us thinking the conditions would be comfortable and easy for our boat based on what our boat could handle, only to find that yes our boat could handle it, but we were really uncomfortable. The thing we missed was the time in seconds between waves vs the wave height in feet. That night the waves were 4 seconds apart at 8′ high for a 0.5:1 ratio. Things are a lot more comfortable when the ratio is 3:1 or even 2:1. We had seen the data, but we didn’t have the right perspective or experience to understand what the data was telling us.

Another example of this is how you ask questions and process the answers. Often times you’ll ask a question about a fix to a boat system, and another sailor will share what worked for them. When on land, we often approach fixing appliances or vehicles or whatever from the perspective that if it worked for someone else, it will work for us, and often enough, that works on land. The challenge is that in the beginning, you don’t have a point of reference to know why that solution worked for the other sailors. What’s their timeline for being out here? What’s their budget? What’s important to them?Do they perform all the maintenance, especially the smelly or messy maintenance, do they prefer to just replace things as they break, or do they avoid maintenance because they just need their boat to last 1 to 2 years before they sell?

This isn’t the fault of the other sailor either. We all want to help each other, yet we all come from our own perspectives. There’s nothing bad or dishonest about this, its just us sharing what worked for us while hoping our solution will help others. This can lead to long, unhelpful conversations, providing solutions the person has already tried or not listening close enough to see the differences in how their systems work or why they chose a different path.

These scenarios apply to every aspect of your life when you make big life changes, not just boat life. You pull yourself out of your current situation, make a huge change in your life, and then you expect it to be more comfortable because you’re using your old perspective on life to filter your current situation.

When things go badly, this can lead to really negative thoughts running through your head:

My family is going to die if I can’t fix <enter boat system here>
Why is this so hard?
I can’t do this, and keep failing
I’m making everyone’s life miserable because I can’t get past <enter last major emergency>
I’m in paradise, but I’m so exhausted and depressed from all the systems breaking, I can’t enjoy it

They say the first year is the hardest because you have sooooooo much to learn. Everything is new, and the list of things to learn is impossible to comprehend at first. We’re at a point where our major systems are working, the boat floats / engines work / we can make water or electricity, and yet we’re still a bit shell shocked and waiting for the next barrage of failures to hit us. We’ve accomplished a lot, and if we take the time to look at our accomplishments, we’d realize that so many things that were scary 4 months ago, are simple and easy to do today. The challenge is we still have a lot to learn, so there’s always this feeling of sliding backwards into the struggles we’ve already overcome.

You need to show yourself some grace during this transition, which is easier said than done. The perspective you have in the first year will make things harder for you, if you don’t give yourself time to learn, grow, and develop a new perspective.

Coping Mechanisms

I find that people, myself included, focus on things they can fix or succeed at, and when transitioning to boat life, this is often used as a coping mechanism that leads to problems down the road. We also try to avoid pain. Anything that hurts us, we’ll do whatever we can to avoid, even if it’s unhealthy for us to avoid the pain. An example would be in focusing on work after the loss of a family member or friend to avoid processing the grief and going through the healing process.

Even if you don’t lose someone close to you, leaving your friends and family to do this life is a loss that you’ll have to process. You need time to grieve the loss of friends, family, community, and memories, but what we’ve seen so far is a desire to ignore all of this by focusing on boat projects.

It’s a natural thing to do, as it’s likely what you did on land. As challenges come up, we tend to fall back on our routine as a distraction from our problems. We definitely did this when we moved on the boat. Our kids were struggling with the loss of their friends, and with boat systems not working, life wasn’t comfortable after we left the dock. We lost family and friends in 2024, and we used the boat as our way of not processing those losses.

Unfortunately, when boat projects started to slow down and we were able to start relaxing a bit, we had to process this loss all at once. It felt like a wrecking ball had smashed through our lives, and we were left in shock trying to figure out how to process it all without putting it on the rest of the crew.

Hiding your struggles from those that can help and want to help is another coping mechanism. We bottle things up by hiding our struggles from others, so that we can pretend everything is good. Unfortunately, those working systems often fail at the worst time possible, and if you’re bottling those things up inside, they have a way of coming out in the middle of an emergency you can’t escape.

In the same way not giving yourself time to change your perspective can make life harder, relying on outdated coping mechanisms will also make life harder. Bluewater Cruising has a series of modules focused on fear and relationships, and Janeane and I spent a lot of time on these modules. We thought we had things figured out, but we realized we were focusing more on the dream in order to hide from the challenges in our relationship(s) that we were ignoring.

You’re also in a tight space on the boat. If on land you’d have a set schedule that would give you time to get away, you may not have that on the boat, unless you make it a priority. Also, things take more effort when you’re on the water. Today we have 20+ knot winds, with white caps in the George Town anchorage. If you want to get off the boat, you’d have to deploy the dinghy without waves smashing it into the catamaran, and then bash through the waves to get to land. You’ll be soaked with salt water by the time you get there, and won’t have the option of changing clothes in public to make things more comfortable. It’s just part of this life that isn’t always recognized.

You also can’t put all of your struggles on your partner or family. Yes, they want to help you, but they’re going through their own things. Having someone not on the boat to talk to, a friend / therapist / parent / community, can really help when you do start to have those negative thoughts.

What can we as a family learn from this and share in a way that may help others?

One of the reasons I wanted to be out here was to be able to reconnect with Janeane and our kids. Working took a lot of time and effort away from our family, and I struggled to be present when not working. It led me to use guard rails as a coping mechanism. I’d put effort into my family, but maybe not as much as they deserved. Now that the boat is working well and our major systems are dependable, I’ve had more time to focus on our relationships, and I’m hopeful we’ll be able to figure this out, as I’m learning a lot as I make up for lost time.

There’s a lot of freedom that comes with boat life. It can be a bit scary at first, because you have to decide on what’s next, and when you’re still recovering from being exhausted, the last thing you want to do is make another decision. Embracing Island Time, where we slow down and take things as they come has been our solution so far, and it seems to be working for us.

We ran into a situation yesterday where we went out to a restaurant for happy hour, meeting up with several friends to relax and chat. I’m pretty sure it took an hour or more to get our food, and I noticed myself getting frustrated and also not really caring. It turns out they had some large orders come through, they had ran out of food, and were waiting for someone to bring more to the restaurant. Instead of overreacting or getting mad, I relaxed, focused on the conversations, and watched the sun go down.

The other side of making decisions is that you run the risk of making the wrong decision. Being on a fixed income, not having the experience yet to know what’s right for us, and having to make big decisions based on weather / hurricanes / boat maintenance puts a lot of weight on your shoulders. Embracing the fact that mistakes will be made and looking at this time as a learning opportunity helps. Also spending more time with the family or taking a bit of alone time needs to be put in the mix, because the boat projects will always be there. Those important decisions feel like they need to be answered ASAP, but in reality, they can often wait.

None of this is specific to boat life. Be slow to anger, listen more, be supportive of each other, be kind to yourself, and asking for help are lessons all of us can benefit from. It’s not obvious when you’re in the middle of an emergency, but that’s the time it’s most needed to help calm the situation. We haven’t quite figured it out yet, but as we start to find balance between boat projects and living, I’m hopeful we’ll be able to improve our relationships as we move forward.