After a heart attack a few years ago I decided I just wasn’t going to hump it hard anymore. I left my job in medical research and began taking temp nursing jobs in order to have more control of my time. I began to blue-water sail, serious sailing vs. afternoon stuff, for the first time in 30 years. I took navigation and sailing courses to sharpen my skills. I took a course in maritime law as it pertains to yachtsmen. I earned a commercial captain’s license for up to 100 tons. I planned my release into the wild elaborately. I liquidated most of my remaining assets and bought a sailboat and began cruising as much as possible on weekends and between jobs. I am now on Last Chance III and can cruise the Caribbean at least six months of the year if I live on rice, beans and vegetables (and fish that I catch myself.), take buses, live in sub-standard marinas, and pirate broadband from nearby motels while working stateside and saving money for the next voyage. My only entertainment stateside is volunteering at the county historical society and visiting on the internet. I’m usually alone because a 42 foot sailboat may seem large to many, but in reality it is not much more than a cramped motor home when in dock, and this quickly becomes tiresome to girlfriends who find it impossible to nest in.
But I sail. At sea, I live like a king. I head south every year after six months of what has become drudgery – even in a profession I love, but it has changed much to the worse in the ensuing years. I gunkhole – I search out little unpopulated coves around the Caribbean. I fish, I scuba, I write, I meet people of nationalities and cultures which I would never have access to in the US. It is very international down here. Some of these relationships are very close and will last for years. It’s very BIG out here. Endless sky and water. A large, singular cumulus cloud formation often means there is an island nestling underneath. Another island. For the most part, the sea is gentle. There is a comfortable aloneness out here.
At the moment I am on the island of Dominica preparing to sail a yacht from nearby Martinique to Trinidad for expenses and a little extra cash. When the money runs out, I have to return home if I haven’t found a way to make a living down here. I dread going back every year. The sail home is always depressing, broken only by a stop in Yucatan to visit an old friend, a beautifully enlightened English woman, who has found a way to make her home in a small village on Campeche Bay.
Overall, I am very happy. I’m rarely bored or lonely. I’m much happier than I was as a medical researcher fighting traffic every day, obsessed with work and my retirement account, dealing with cynical women and men, and watching way too much TV in a torpor. I fully intend to die at the helm, perhaps among friends, when the next heart attack comes—instead of on the couch with the remote slipping from my hands. I’ve become more sensitive to my surroundings, have stronger feelings about things, and I can be a little melodramatic, as you can see. I often take a ribbing for this. But I’m a better person now. I feel closer to life and reality, instead of feeling like a mere observer. At a certain point in life, perhaps when the kids are gone, I recommend a similar path of risk and independence to everyone.
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