Nothing happened

I’ve had several people asking what happened. The answer is, nothing. When asked at the beginning about a timeline I’d say something like “I want at least five years, she wants at most three”. We agreed, from the get-go, to evaluate after each season whether we’d continue one more year; this time we simply did not renew the contract with Poseidon for the next season.

“What happened?”, they asked, with a tone that suggested they expected to hear something tragic, a health event or perhaps a divorce, had interrupted our idyllic adventure, the one everyone wants to have, or at least everyone who has never had to deal with boat maintenance. Nothing tragic happened. No health reasons involved, although, come to think of it, too much sun, too much salt and not enough sleep (and consequently not enough sex) can’t possibly be good for your health, can it? No divorce either; not even much of a reason to think of it. Although, being with your partner—even the lovely partner I’m so lucky to have—no more than 41 feet apart 24/7 can’t be good for your spirits, can it? True, you can make that 47 feet if you get inventive with hypotenuses and consider the engine room a habitable space, but still. I want to miss my wife, alright?! Or at the very least, have the opportunity to miss her once in a while. Isn’t that a fundamental human right, anyway?

There is a list of other things that I also had in excess, other than the wife, but, unlike the wife, I will never miss. First and foremost is the almost constant restlessness, the epitome of which was our first evening in Willemstad, Curaçao’s capital. We were anchored close to the rocks, in a tight spot where we could not give out all the chain I wanted to feel confortable. We rowed ashore and left the dinghy in a place that looked somewhat seedy (in fact, a month later two cruisers where robbed at gunpoint at exactly that spot). We rented a car and drove to Willemstad, but we didn’t have local coins to feed the parking meter. We parked anyway and went to try to get some change, unsuccessfully. At a time when I should have been enjoying the exploration of a beautiful new town in company of my entire adorable family, my mind was instead preoccupied with the likeliness of various potential calamities involving the three means of transportation I was a captain of: the anchor could drag, the dinghy could get stolen, a parking ticket could be waiting. In the end, we didn’t get a ticket, the dinghy was still attached to the dock, and Ñandú didn’t wind up on the rocks, but there was a lot of thinking and introspection that night.

Another thing that made me lose sleep was the noise. All sorts of noises, which you learn to identify out of necessity. Ah, that must be the squeaky shelf under our bed; I thought I had fixed that one… guess the fix wasn’t quite permanent. Ah, we left the swim platform’s ladder down. Damn, I forgot to raise the daggerboards. Oh, that’s the anchor bridal rubbing against the bobstays (I don’t really like it, but there’s nothing I can do; worse is the mooring buoy hitting the hulls, which happens on calm nights at the turn of the tide). And then there was the whining boom, another tough one to find and eliminate. What seemed to be the wind piping through the boom turned out to be the topping lift acting like a gigantic guitar string hammered by the wind, the boom working as an amplifying resonance box. If you tried to design such a musical instrument, I’d bet you couldn’t do better than what we unintendedly had. The solution was to wrap a thin cord a couple of turns around the topping lift to disrupt the air flow. There remained one unsolved mystery, though. More than a sound, it was a shudder, an occasional 4.5 tremor in the Richter scale. The entire boat shivered briefly, as a wet dog shaking water off. Perhaps it comes with my Chilean genes, but I kind of like the gentle vibration of mild earthquakes with the soothing effect of a rocking cradle, and if this had not been my boat I would have enjoyed those shudders too. But it was my boat and it still bothers me not knowing where that odd thing came from.

There are, of course, many things I will miss. Not having to wear anything else than a t-shirt, shorts and sandals. Getting up at dawn to enjoy the sunrise and my coffee at the same time. Having an aquarium under our feet. Rowing the dinghy to explore a new place. Having everything in tune for the boat to placidly slide under sail. Being constantly ten steps away from swimming in tropical waters.

I am thankful also for a valuable lesson I learned. I envisioned this multi-year trip, in part, as a way to shop for a tropical place where to eventually set some roots, perhaps seasonally. But no matter how warm and wonderful any of those countries were, something was amiss, something that I figured I could only find in Northern California, in spite of its painfully frigid seas and lack of those warm nights that I love. This is where I feel my tribe is. Where things like “naked rally for legalization of psychedelic medicine” are posible. Where Burning Man happens (okay, that’s in Nevada, but still, it all started in California). This is the place of ecstatic living and human awareness (“through the willingness to be vulnerable and surrender to the innate wisdom of our hearts we can heal ourselves, each other, and our world”). This is where you may heal your childhood wounds; where you may find a way to unravel your traumas and put everything back together in a more forgiving and compassionate manner, one that at least makes some sense; where you can find yourself, as schmaltzy as that may sound to you.