We’ve been on the water, away from the dock since 12/1/2024, and a lot has happened. I’ve been trying to write something down since we set sail, but life on the water tends to take priority.

We ran into some unexpected challenges as we got ready to leave the dock, and quickly adapted to ensure our departure was a success. We hired a captain to help us get a bit more comfortable moving the boat in tight spaces with wind and current, and that time with Captain Paul Gehrke, with Gehrke Yacht Services, was priceless. Our time with Paul was a bit unfair to him, as he helped squeeze in 3 to 4 days worth of learning into 6 hours. Over the next 2 weeks, we were able to successfully handle over night, off shore passages, along with very challenging situations with 2 converging currents, high winds, high flow, and being close to land and other boats. We highly recommend reaching out to Captain Paul, if you want help with your skills or other boat projects.

Since leaving, we have had a lot of firsts checked off for the crew on this new to us boat.

1. Day trip Brunswick Landing Marina to North Cumberland Island, and anchoring
   • 35 miles, anchored in a perfect spot to learn anchoring with no boats
2. Day trip North Cumberland Island to Fernandina FL, and setting anchor in a field of boats
   • 31 miles
3. Ocean passage Fernandina FL to St. Augustine FL, and picked up mooring ball
   • 59 miles, following seas, and trying to time the tidal change to make coming in easier
4. Overnight ocean passage St. Augustine FL to Fort Pierce FL
   • 160 mile off shore passage under sail, 26 hours
   • Challenging inlet with strong currents and waves pushing you around, be careful
5. Anchored and Dragged Anchor for the first and second time
   • Will discuss this a bit more later
6. Received a lot of help from the sailing community, and learned we’re not alone out here

Needless to say, we’re drinking once again from the fire hose of knowledge, and learning the subtle details everyone shares but you don’t quite understand until you’re out here doing it.

Life before

For our family, prior to selling the house and starting our boat life, we had a nice home, with a lot of comfort, cars to quickly get readily available supplies, and an address to have things shipped from Amazon. We had our routines, our hobbies, our activities, our community, our friends and family, and our jobs that created a sense of stability. The term “Practice makes Perfect” comes to mind in that we were living our lives, practicing certain skills that built up confidence, that provided a bit of stability that helps when things get difficult.

Like knowing exactly how many episodes of a pointless show you can watch, before becoming a jerk the next day, because you have 4 more episodes to finish the next night. You practice life so much, you have confidence that you can do something that will stretch you a bit, but you still know that if an emergency comes up, you’ll be able to handle it. This confidence provides guard rails to help you stay on track, and with everything being new to us, I’d lost those guard rails, that confidence.

Following the 3rd passage, I ran into a situation where I couldn’t decide if Task A or Task B was a higher priority. While chatting with friends, I gave this example: do I get the water maker working to avoid going in to fill up, or do I help the kids relax and socialize with friends because we’ve been pushing a bit lately? I just couldn’t turn off my brain to sleep. We were all exhausted, but I sat there going over all that had happened, trying to figure out how to do things differently (communication with the crew), while also needing our crew to work better together in difficult situations.

I knew there was a problem, but I didn’t know what it was and I was struggling to figure it out.

I realized a lot of this while pushing the crew to communicate with me, as we struggled to pick up the mooring ball in St. Augustine. I noticed that the crew was getting more and more frustrated with the task at hand, and me either offering advice or asking for details was making things worse. So I decided to shut up, and let them work the problem. This helped, but I quickly took this new found solution too far.

The mistake I made was to assume giving space would help with other things.

• Good – Giving space in a difficult situation to avoid adding more stress on the crew
• Bad – Bottling stuff up and not discussing what happened, to avoid putting pressure on the crew

Janeane and I did a “debriefing” once we had rested a bit, and it helped a lot. Both of us were struggling with things, and hiding from it was causing more pressure on everyone. We were essentially sitting there, frustrated with ourselves, but not wanting to put our issues on the other. Turns out opening up about it, without pointing blame, took all of 15 minutes to bring peace to both of us. We were starting to build new guard rails that work better out here.

Lesson: Give the crew space to learn, while following up after to debrief

Learning new things

Along with learning new skills like picking up a mooring ball for the first time, and giving the crew space to learn how to do it, we realized a miscommunication or misunderstanding that was going on. We kept saying the phrase, “this is all new, but we’re learning as we go”, but then we weren’t actually doing it.

Let me try to explain. While going through the Blue Water Cruising program, we were presented with a lot of material that challenged and presented new ideas. We diligently worked through the material, assuming that we understood what it meant. In this way, we were using the guard rails in the safety of our home to learn new skills and ideas, without a point of reference to truly understand them. For those of us who are perfectionists or who base our confidence on how we feel about things, this leads to a big challenge when learning.

We found that without a point of reference in understanding the years of reading / studying we had done on land, we were expecting ourselves to “know” everything, and we weren’t giving ourselves the grace / compassion / time to learn new things. We were saying “this is all new, but we’re learning as we go”, but in reality, we were saying “I don’t know how to do that, and can’t help you”.

To provide a point of reference, let’s say you spent several hours learning about how to anchor a boat, with actual on the water experience in Lake Tahoe or the Sea of Cortez Mexico. You have confidence built on understanding the steps of:

1. Point boat into the wind over the anchor drop piont
2. Have a person point to the direction of the anchor, while a 2nd person drops the anchor
3. Back up the boat until you have dropped the right amount of chain
4. Continue backing up the boat until you feel the boat hold
5. Wait to see how the anchor behaves
6. Turn off engines and relax

When you’re off the coast near La Paz Mexico where there’s no to little current, with a solid bottom to hold on to, and no waves / wind / large tidal flows, it’s an easy place to learn how to anchor.

But when it’s midnight, you start to drag anchor, you have 2 currents merging, high tidal flow, and high winds blowing you around, it’s not about knowing how to do something, but getting it done, even if you don’t know how to do it, is the only path forward. It’s difficult for anyone to learn in those situations and we would all like to say “nah, I’m good, can we do this tomorrow, I’m not feeling it”, but you still have to do it.

There’s a military saying “slow is fast, and fast is deadly”, and slowing down, working the problem, managing gear failures, and working together in a stressful situation is how we allowed ourselves to “learn” something new. We found new ways to support each other, to relieve pressure, and reduce stress that allowed us to find new ways to solve the task at hand.

Lesson: Find ways to support each other, so we can learn new skills in impossible situations

Who do you want to be?

The last part of this has more to do with myself and how I was the problem impacting my crew.

The Blue Water Cruising course asks a similar question while figuring out why you want to live this life. For me, I was working for a Team in Amazon’s AWS organization as a Systems Developer who one day wanted to grow up and be a real Software Developer. I knew that I was missing out in our kid’s lives at a time they needed me more, and I struggled with knowing how to work with them. I’d attempt to apply the lessons learned from my career, and rarely would that succeed. One reason we’re out here is because I want to know and be a part of my kid’s lives, to help them be the people I know they can be.

I’m still working on an answer to the question “who do you want to be?”, but I have a better idea of “who I don’t want to be.” I don’t want to be the bear that lashes out, destroying relationships with an unkind word, and hurting those I love.

In St. Augustine, as we were picking up that mooring ball, I saw the person I don’t want to be, and that led me to learn how to help the crew reduce stress. It was a bit of an out of body experience because I clearly saw myself as the problem, and then made the conscious decision to not be that person. The thing that helped me was to see the people in front of me as the ones I love, and to focus on “how can I help them?” rather than just barking orders. Biting my tongue and replacing what I wanted to say with encouragement instead, felt impossible, but I chose to do it anyway.

I’ve heard this life can be a 1000x better and a 1000x harder. The highs are really high, and the lows are really low. What I realized in that moment was I’m the one that can help make it 1000x better and a 1000x harder.

We’re learning new guard rails to help us navigate difficult situations. We’re giving ourselves grace to learn new things, with new tools to not make things worse. We do not have it figured out and we don’t know how to do all the things, but we’re safe and moving forward together.

Lesson: Do hard things, and become the person you want to be

Wrapping up

As I write this, we’re sitting at anchor after the passage down to Fort Pierce FL, following 72 hours of rough and stressful conditions, and little sleep for the crew. We’re low on water, don’t have a working dinghy, and we need parts to fix multiple systems on the boat. We learned that we didn’t read the wave state correctly, and missed that the wave size and time between waves was the exact wrong sea state to make the trip down. The sea state was the same when we got here, that led to the challenging conditions we ran into here. Mistakes were made, but we’re actually learning now.

Fortunately, the sailing community is amazing, and have reached out to help us get all of this sorted out. Operation water drop was a complete success yesterday, and we have enough to help give more time to fix the water maker. Another family is going above and beyond to pick up supplies and get them to our boat, as rowing a dinghy isn’t safe right now, given the outboard motors not working.

Planning to set sail again on 12/19 to head to Biscayne Bay to spend Christmas in warmer water. We have work scheduled on the boat just after Christmas for a new Bimini and Solar install to help with power, and once that’s done, we’re off to the Bahamas in the new year.

I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year.