Learning This One Thing Changed My Work, My Relationships, And How I Live My Life

02.04.2024 - 00:35 / forbes.com

The nausea hits me imperceptibly at first—less like the proverbial “rogue wave” that you read about in sailing books, and more like an invisibly rising tide. But the symptoms are the same: the sweats, racing heart, and finally, the inevitable salivating.

The timing isn’t ideal. I’ve just arrived in the Bahamas last night and I’m about to embark on a week-long, live aboard, learn-to-sail adventure in the remote out-islands of the Exumas. The motion of the ocean, however, isn’t what’s making me feel queasy.

The more pressing problem is the other boat docked in front of us, whose $1.4 million bow looks precariously like it’s about to crash into ours. I’d volunteered to “fend off” as we pulled out of Palm Cay Marina. Now, it looks like I might just sink us all before we even leave the slip.

“Five feet!” I shout from the foredeck, counting down the distance to impact. “Three feet! Two feet . . . !”. Averting my eyes, I wait for the sound of fiberglass crunching.

Then, suddenly, as if obeying some unseen magnetic field, our 40’ Lagoon catamaran, Never Say Never, hard stops, full reverses, and nonchalantly swings to starboard (right), whiffing the other boat by an arm’s length, and heads for open water.

When I turn aft (backwards), our boat captain and instructor, Tim Jenne, gives me a wide-smiled thumbs up from the helm. I’ve just learned rule #1 of operating a sailboat: Don’t hit shit.

I’ve always wanted to take a few years off of life and go “cruising” on a sailboat.

I got close once in my mid 20s. If being a writer was really nothing more than experiencing the world and writing it down, where better to find inspiration than island hopping around the equator mixing with the locals? Living on a boat also turned out to be one of life’s dirty little real estate secrets: notwithstanding the food, fuel, rum, and repairs, it was basically free.

So, after college I moved to Key West, Florida and bought a beat-up 30’ sailboat named No Paine. For the next three years, I fixed her up while living aboard, painstakingly learning how each system worked and how to live on the water so that we could safely cross an ocean together. I also developed a voracious appetite for books with titles like Fatal Forecast and Where There Is No Doctor, filling my head with enough technical jargon that at times it felt like it was gaining weight.

The around-the-world voyage I envisioned in my 20s never happened. I eventually helped crew a 44’ yacht across the Southern Ocean from New Zealand to Argentina in my 30s. But, by the time I arrived in Nassau, I hadn’t done any real sailing in decades.

My girlfriend, Eliza, on the other hand, never got seduced by the urge to cruise. Despite being a former SCUBA instructor, she’d always been