It was fifteen years ago that we moved
off our boat, HDML 1001, aka Float Street. She was a warship and a
lovely, but decaying boat home. Before living on her, we lived on a
junk, called Gambic, in Hong Kong. We loved boat life, but for a
number of reasons that were true enough back then, when we left Float
Street behind, we thought we were through with sailing.
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| Float Street in Venezuela |
Life changes. We (I, in particular)
aren't good at routine. When we sink into routines, we feel ourselves
ossify. We don't like feeling ossification as it diminishes us. I, in
particular, don't thrive well in an existence of routine. I've never
tolerated an office-hour life well. I've done it, and found it
painful. That doesn't mean I'm good at avoiding routine, just that I
suffer considerably from falling into them.
We moved back to Silver City from
Cambodia about three years ago with the idea that we had finally
settled on a place. We wouldn't move again. We'd travel, but not
uproot ourselves. After all, we knew why we'd come back. We knew the
place well. We knew both its limits and its benefits to us. And we
were right. About the place. Not about settling.
But life changes. Goals change. Four
days ago, over breakfast, Dagny looked at me with a somewhat puzzled
expression and told me she'd ben thinking about living on a boat. We
talked about the change of heart, her motivations and such, but
mostly we talked about the possibilities (and difficulties) of living
on a boat. During the next three days we tried to find good reasons
to write that off as a bad, impractical idea. Well, boats are
impractical, and we are pragmatic people. But our lives are not
practical things to be managed and desire is a power of its own. As a
result, the more we worked to convince ourselves what a bad idea it
was, the more excited we became about doing it. We discovered that we
had suppressed our love of living on a boat, but that the love for
the life, the lust for the feeling of living at anchor (we were
seldom in marinas) hadn't been quenched. We found ourselves
physically craving it.
Over the next three days following
Dagny's epiphany, we formed a strategy and an intention. In the
process, the specifics of reaching our goal changed several times but
the rather simple, and somewhat open-ended intention of moving from a
fixed abode on shore to living full time on a boat sharpened into a
workable, or at least an exciting, strategy. First, we are going to
sell our house. This morning I'll call a broker or two and have them
give us an estimate of what we can get for it as is. We don't intend
to fix it up or do much to it. That's for the buyer to do. It's an
old adobe, nearly 100 years old, and it has character. That will have
to do. We will price it to sell.
We have our white Nissan van that Dagny
christened Moby, and fixed up for camping. While we sell the house,
she'll finish off Moby's cabinetry. When the house sells we will head
off to visit family and friends, and then turn south, driving to
Central America, where we will buy a boat, fix it up, move aboard and
sell the van.
Simple, right?
Of course, intentions and reality often
collide. The veneer of simplicity will crumble as it always does. We
can't afford a fancy boat, but we have skills. We also have time,
because hunting for the right boat will be part two of the adventure.
Once we are on board, a new adventure begins.
This time our moving will be
irreversible. For our last moves we had a property manager rent out
our house, and it was there, welcoming, when we wanted to return from
an adventure. Now we are cutting that tie and moving on to...
something else.
So the inexorable change officially begins now. I intend to chronicle the adventures, posting as things happen, as we move from one phase to the next. Like many of the best things in life, the outcome is uncertain; like all good quests, only the intention can be controlled. It should prove interesting.
