Quick Update

Ahoy, faithful readers. We’re just off the July 4th holiday still in port here in New Orleans. We’ve not been good about posting here – but for good reason. See, the idea of this blog was originally to share boat work progress. It turns out, that’s not as simple as it sounds since boat progress is inconsistent. We’re not sitting on a pirate’s chest of money to do this refit so sometimes there’s money to do work, and other times we struggle to meet our more terrestrial obligations. When boat work stalls, morale drops considerably amongst the crew. Without obvious progress it can all just feel pointless. All this is to say sometimes there’s no boat progress to report so I don’t post out of embarrassment.

Going Forward

So I’m going another route that I hope will be interesting and more consistent. I’m going to share more of the challenges that this plucky band of would-be sailors work around to maintain our happiness and fortitude. I’d been resistant to this approach until recently because it could easily be seen as whining, despite my best efforts to keep things upbeat. We never expected this to be easy: we expected it to be an adventure and adventures aren’t always pretty. We knew that going in. The Sea Shanti wasn’t a seaworthy boat. At the same time, we didn’t spend the next 20 years saving up for a seaworthy boat as so many do. Life’s too short and absent of guarantees for that kind of optimism.

This brings me to what’s changed and how I can be sure this won’t be seen as whining? The fact is nothing changed and I can’t be sure of anything. Most of my friends and all of my family still live more traditional lives on land and I’ve noticed some interesting things about what they think life on the Sea Shanti is like. Some worry, some are vaguely envious, and all of them are inaccurate to some degree. The idea of living on a boat is alien enough, but rebuilding a boat you’re living on makes it almost unimaginable. That is not to say you and I don’t share some of the same hardships and concerns. I suspect they just show themselves differently to you and I. Maybe seeing what we have in common can calm some of the worry and temper the envy.

If there’s one thing to remember about all of this its that, yeah, maybe things aren’t great all the time, but when they are great you get to feed a duck by hand. That, along with a whole host of other little things, make it all worthwhile.