This morning was magic. The mainsail popped into fullness halfway up the mast and all 42 feet of this vessel sprang forward like a steed wound tight for the hunt. The wind is perfect, freshening from the east.
I unloaded my passenger at Basse Terre (Guadeloupe) who treated me to breakfast at a nice little workingman’s restaurant at the docks while my water supply was replenished and the fuel tank was topped off. I raised my mainsail for Martinique. I’ll sail about 30 miles SE to Dominica, and ride along her steep, rocky coastline south to for the next day or so. I should arrive at Chateau Dubuc about late Sunday, depending on the weather. There is a broker there who needs a vessel taken to a sailing school at Kingstown, St. Vincent. It’s a big, beamy Morgan, easy to sail, but hell in deep rolling seas. It will be a matter of threading the needle between the links of that endless chain of tropical storms thundering toward us from the African coast.
For months now I’ve fought going back home to work . I usually stay out until the start of hurricane season in June, but this year I’ve been out almost nine months with no plans for return. On December 4th, it will be a year. So, this week I hit a milestone—I decided to not go home. I’m staying down here and taking my chances and have begun spending the nest egg I usually keep stateside: my re-start fund.
So, I’m burning the bridge. I realized the other night that if I can make enough money to stay afloat for the next eighteen months I can take early retirement—those few pennies I will get every month for 43 years of paying anywhere from 9% to 12% of every paycheck into the Social Security retirement insurance fund . The same fund that these days is being called an “entitlement” by American politicians—the same politicians who will get full federal retirement and free lifetime healthcare for only 4 year’s work as the elected representatives of the people who they work so libidinously to screw.
The return on my 43 year’s investment won’t be much, but it spends a lot better down here. In the meantime, I’m learning how to make a living with this boat. Anyway, I can’t go back. One look at the newspapers online and I realize I’d have to be crazy to subject myself to that society again. I’ve worked among the unnecessary carnage in the ER, with the homeless in the tent camps, read of the horrible crimes in the paper every morning, felt the sick yet understandable paranoia among the middle classes and the anger from all classes combined, and I don’t want to be part of it anymore. Honestly, I would rather be dead than stand there and hold my finger in that crumbling dike. This is what it feels like to be old and tired, I guess.
I especially don’t like what has happened to my profession, in that wasteful patchwork they call a healthcare system where the focus has been taken off the patient and onto the bottom line, where whole regional hospital systems have been bought by insurance companies and for a long time now the elephant in the room has been the resultant conflict of interest. Fuck that. I’d rather take my chances out here with real sharks. I downloaded the film Crash the other night. It reminded me of home. I can’t go back to that shit.
Funny. I’ve found that boats are like money and tatoos. At a certain point, you can’t get enough. This 42-footer was enough for only one season before I saw a 66-foot Pearson motorsailer glide by with two jet skis dangling off her transom davits where the dinghy was supposed to be. Love at first sight. But I would have to sell my soul for it. I would be captain of a magnificent vessel, but I would no longer be my own captain (and before long I’d find myself working stateside to pay for it and have no time to sail her). Like so many fine yachts, she would sit idle in a marina while her owner slaves away to pay her mortgage, slip rent and insurance and, like a mistress, only visit her surreptitiously at night or on the weekends. This vessel is paid for and she is a good one that handles well solo in a storm. She is a fine craft that repeatedly reminds me through her ownership papers the danger of coveting others.
I figure by the time she becomes unseaworthy, so will I. The kidneys aren’t what they used to be and they found an aortic aneurism last winter. I’m not sure if I want to be laid out like a lobster to have it fixed. That’s a lot of muscle they have to go through and a long recovery. So, this is probably my last sailboat and I will keep patching her until the end, whether it come by storm or senility.
The wind is up, blowing hard from the east, and I’m riding on my starboard gunnels like a Hobiecat. I have to get out there, reef the mainsail and get her further out to the east so I won’t find myself on Dominican rocks tonight. It is time to get offline and pay attention to what is really happening.
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