Greetings from Sonora, Mexico. These past months have been an excercise in keeping the world small (full disclosure: smaller than I’d prefer). I’ve been mining Large comforts from little routines in my best impression of a mindfulness guru. I’m not too bad at the observational part, but I’m piss poor at the lack-of-judgment part. (Ostensibly) Getting better though.

January and into February whittled away in repetition and reflection. On the docket: soak in every sunrise, sail a litle bit, practice the guitar, study for the US Coast Guard Master Licence exam, tinker with the boat, pleasure read, go for a walk if the winds permitted me to dinghy ashore, cook/eat simple and unispired fare, sprinkle in some mindless streaming and call it a day. Rinse, reapeat. I had hoped to endeavor all the way north in the Gulf but opposing the winter weather grew increasingly irksome. Still, I nibbled up the very familiar inside coast of Baja Sur and then crossed over to mainland Mexico and scooted around a little more before settling into San Carlos Sonora. I wouldn’t call the regimen particularly fulfilling but I did consciously reap satisfaction from the quiet simplicity of it all, especially in light of the tenor of the previous 12+ months and as I flounder a little bit at defining what exactly the future is that I’m working towards. Is the antidote for lethal ambiguity as simple as liberally-applied tedium? Bit of a cure-all, perhaps, except–as one Roosevelt or another might remind us–for tedium itself.

So for a time I was compensating for my lack of clarity on larger goals with a litany of smaller, quotidien objectives. Read, i.e. try and stem the receeding tide of language from my overly-porous brain. Work towards getting my Master Captain’s License for commercial vessels i.e. codify my skippering skills through external validation as well as open up future avenues for gainful employment…and health insurance. Practice the guitar an hour daily i.e. well I don’t think this one demands much explanation. I finally want to get over the hump, to comfortably strum and sing forlorn country songs at the edges of the earth. Work on the sailboat, both out of neccesity to enable future voyages and as a manner of finding a fresh interface with the notion of sailboating. Yes, working on the boat has been a reality since day one but I’m pushing it further than ever before and, frankly, am feeling very gratified by the endeavor.

San Carlos itself has failed to capture my imagination. In spite of the airs it puts on it is not even officially its own town, being an overspill community from of the municipality of Guaymas some 20km away. I won’t slander it here on the page but suffice it to say it does not inspire me. Hot dang if the Sonoran red desert and the peaks that rise from it aren’t beautiful though.

In San Carlos I hauled Shearwater out of the water, put to bed my schedule of eclectic pursuits, and doggedly set to tearing her apart. She never seemed small to me until I have been living aboard in a dry, dirt lot while every area of the boat is a work zone. Truly, no square inch is safe. And do I know what I’m doing in these projects? Maybe not entirely, but neither am I intimidated by them and over confidence is not my traditional sin so I suspect there’s a kernel of competence at center. As I mused in my last post, I no longer feel kowtowed by the yachtsman mystique: I am not the most skillful or accomplished sailor but I get by and the same can be said for my hand at contstuction (or destruction as it often feels). Maybe my technique isn’t optimal but I’m generally thoughtful and thorough and this is my own damn floating tub of fiberglass so I’m not concerned with armchair critics, be they flesh and blood or figmented. That’s perhaps not ideal news for ol’ Shearwater but for ol’ Zach it’s a pretty empowering experience. Sure, I still feel self-doubt but by this stage in life even I can’t muster to care what I think. If twisted tea is a thing so must be twisted triumphs.

So, I’ve contorted and pretzled myself in every cranny, cut/grinded/coaxed several hundred rusted through bolts, stripped all the wood from the exterior, as well as most of the hardware. Anything that was bedded through the deck, really. I then drilled out all those remaining holes larger, filled with thickened epoxy, re-drilled out the epoxy that didn’t cure properly, re-epoxied the holes, and rebed the teak toe rail and hardware with new stainless bolts and washers and nuts and a whole lot of Dowsil 791 and 795, sometimes in conjunction with butyl tape and the dream is that I’ll have a sailboat that’s all put together again but doesn’t leak rain and/or high seas through many of the hundreds of deck hardware bolts, and whose various components can be relied upon to not be spoilsports, summarily speaking. Oh, you don’t also measure your dreams in meters of butyl tape? How quaint. Luckily I’m quite sure we all know what it is to aspire to a world blissfully free of nagging spoilsports. Thank goodness for universalities.

While I’m at it other projects abound–every day the list truly gets longer rather than shorter. Part of this is the natural progression of work: work begets work begets work. But also at play (as I’ve had countless hours to reflect upon) is my everlasting tendency to single-mindedly gorge myself with a thing. For a period I’ll live that one thing gluttinously to the exclusion of almost all others. Right now it’s the sailboat; sometimes (too infrequently) it is a paying job; sometimes my little Vallejo cottage; sometimes pecking words on page after page; sometimes relaxation and social pursuits. Ect and so on. I honestly marvel at people who can juggle all these disparate elements of life at the same time without a fundamental structural reset. I can’t. Since hauling out my brain flipped a switch and I work on the boat 7 days a week, sunrise to sunset, not because I strictly need to for any reason but because it is the only thing that feels right. So I shut everything else out; by now I’m tired and a little worn down, nearly ready to put the boat away and pivot into a different fixation. This pattern reflects either taking the easy way out or adapting to my own reality but at this point I’m neither sure how to tell the difference nor whether it actually matters which. What’s undebatable is that I find tolerating a more traditional structure unwieldingly difficult. 43 years in and I’m making no progress in this regard so here I am, embracing it. The question, then, that I inevitably seem to come back to is how might I weave a throughline of meaning (any semblance would do) across all these distinct exhibitions?

One plausible answer is to build off of similarities between seemingly disparate pursuits, honing skills to make deeper and more meaningful immersions each time. I didn’t consciously buy a sailboat (or a house for that matter) to have an arena in which to exercise my humble (truly rudimentary) building skills but here we are. I feel a better “sailor” for it and in this way framing a cabin the Oregon woods is maybe not so wildly dissimilar from sailing into the sunset. That thread of continuity feels nice–refreshing, even. I envision a similar stealthy resonance between my years spent managing winery harvest teams and crewing/captaining a commercial ship for multi-month voyages. Perhaps I’m just projecting ignorance, but the dynamics seem remarkably similar, and that excites me. Frankly, in all but the obvious ways, running a ship also strikes me a whole lot like running a farm; either you are of a sufficient size to have a variety of specialists in your employ or you yourself must become proficient in wide variety of trades, and, lord knows weather is a frequent topic of conversation to both! A few short years ago I pondered on this very blog if This is Middle Age; now there is little doubt. My Peter Pan youth feels clearly and firmly in the rear view, and more than ever I feel motivated to live new stories for this new era but it’d be nice not to start from zero every time. So I spend a lot of time thinking about pursuits that are both new and not-new, if that makes any sense. It is also why these days I’m gingerly shying away from the idea of selling this sailboat. Yes, I need to find a way to interface with it so that it doesn’t consume all of my time, energy, and money. But I also suspect that this vessel could be key–perhaps even unwittingly–to bringing together all those different me’s: past, future, playful, and dogged alike. Also possible: this is what happens when a man has too much time to marinate in his own madness. But what better bretheren for that than salty sailors?

If I squint I could dream a future in which as some version of ship’s crew or, eventually, captain where I could reap that classic mariner’s schedule of x-months on, x-months off, with off periods peppered with long stretches down the rabbit hole of sailboating or sometimes spent in the rehabbing and selling of houses. Or, if I wanted to feel really indulgent, I could dream of spending free time building a little off-grid cabin somewhere in the wilds. Varied adventures but with an underpinning of that sweet, sweet healthcare. Oh my, I’m swooning! But, then again, a lack of squinting and dreaming was never really my problem. Sue me: I have impressionable enthusiasms. Daydreaming is just a version of whistling while I work…which to be fair I’m also guilty of, much to the chagrin of others in this boat yard. My hope is that these are less empty daydreams and more premonitions of a malleable future. But, for now, I’m trying to chew the bone in front of me rather than hunt the whole animal. In time these small, daily goals might bring the larger purposes into focus, ripe for some wizened, future Zach to swoop in and direct. Where is that guy, anyway? Feels nigh time he shows up. Maybe he’s prepping the campfire for the solo singalong. Hope he brought the s’mores.