Sailing Faith: The Long Way Home

We find, while preparing for our voyage in Hampton, Virginia, a number of folks planning voyages of their own and a few who have actually left the dock. The planners are dreamers, conjuring obstacles to maintain the dream. As soon as the boat is all ready; boats are boats, and will never be all ready. As soon as they have accumulated enough money; there will never be enough. As soon as the kids are older, or the kids have moved out, or …

I recall a man I worked with years earlier who refused a sizeable Christmas bonus. “I always wanted a Cadillac,” he said, “but as soon as I get my Cadillac, the dream is gone. I just think the car can’t be as good as the dream.”

People know when they leave the dock, the dream is gone.

We’re new to this life, and we share apprehension and even fear of the worlds we will come into contact with over the course of our voyage, much of it bred in our American perspective that the world is a scary place.

This becomes a recurring theme: places are special because of the people there. We’re meeting many people in different places, but are yet to find one of the places where they don’t value human life like we do.

Many people around us hold keys to valuable insights, and the only path to those keys is to minimize my arrogance and hope they can overcome their fear of condescending.

//Please feel free to comment.  Today’s post is the  opening chapter to Sailing Faith: The Long Way Home.  I plan on making the book available for purchase in time for Christmas, and need an idea of how many to order.  Please click here to express a nonbinding interest in ordering.

Dodging Doubts and Dodging [...]

//Having worked on a book about our experience during our circumnavigation, I wish to begin sharing that book here.  Please feel free to comment.  Today’s post is the  introduction to Sailing Faith: The Long Way Home.  I plan on making the book available for purchase in time for Christmas, and wish to have an idea [...]

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I’ll make a few remarks on boat design now, the first about the position of the head in relation to the boat.  By the way, the term head, as I understand it, comes from the timber on the old ships called a cat head.  The cat head was a large timber going out both starboard [...]