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posted: *feb 27 2022*
I've been playing too much Sea of Thieves lately. And seeing the "Busy Doing
Nothing" book from some of the merveilles.town members floating around isn't
helping the small seed in my brain garden that is currently pitching to grow
up into a full-sized "Man I really want a boat" dream.
Speaking of.. I need to buy that book. It actually looks really, really
interesting to read a modern travel log of people sailing across the Pacific
Ocean. Spoiler alert, they didn't die! They -lived-! I guess the ocean isn't
all that bad to a bone-dry landlubber like me, who still considers the ocean a
recreational space and not a travel medium.
Finding lakes, rivers, and even oceans somewhere in the vicinity of where I'm
at in the US is.. less trivial than it could be. That accessibility doesn't
help matters in regards to me reasoning my way out of this dumb idea. "All you
have to do is tow it up to a lake, Donut... it'll be easy..."
I figure I could start small. Take a little dinghy or a 5-meter boat out on
a local lake or reservoir, float around and get the feel of how such a machine
is meant to function, and then either decide "Well that was a waste of 2 grand"
or realize "Yeah. I need to move closer to bigger bodies of water".
That's one thing that attracts me to sailing. They're still -way- cheaper than
their equivalent in airplanes.
We tend to think that cars - modern ones, anyway - only last a few years before
they start getting groggy, problematic and continually more expensive to
maintain; an axiom that results in many people (at least here in the US) to get
comfy with the idea of buying a car, driving it for 100,000 miles or less, and
then selling it to somebody further down the totem pole and buying a new one.
Which is crazy for all sorts of reasons, but that's not what this post is
about.
Airplanes and boats seem to handle quite differently than cars, in the sense
that we have millennia of experience, rules, and inherited convention around
boats: how they work, what you do with them, and what must be done to maintain
the seaworthiness of a given vessel is something that many people, for untold
years, have been working on and figuring out. By no means are we -done- with
such an art (for I'd say it is) but sailing on the rivers and oceans of the
world is not a new idea. But we are definitely relying on the methods and means
that people have used for centuries, if not longer, to navigate the water. We
have new tools and new toys, but by-and-by we seem to stick with a structure
and culture that works. Nobody likes floating out in the ocean after capsizing
their sailboat. So there are rules on what to do and when, and how to maintain
and fix a boat.
For crying out loud, I'm seeing ads for boats that are a century old! Never you
mind the Ship of Theseus issue (how "original" are these 100-year-old rigs?);
it's the concept that if somebody tried to sell me a 100-year-old automobile
I'd probably sign a last will and testament before I took it out on the
interstate.
Given the proper effort and paperwork, a century-old boat is just as seaworthy
now as it was on its maiden voyage. Perhaps even more so, given the new
materials and processes and tools we have available to make the effort safer
and more reliable.
Airplanes, on the other hand: barely a century and some old by this point. But
they're also insanely more complex and dangerous in terms of their design,
maintenance and usage. Which means that from almost the beginning (except
for the flying circus people) flying was generally an agreement between the
acceptable risk of falling out of the sky, and being careful and skilled
enough in a very new kind of machine, in a very new kind of operating area,
to do what few over mankind's history have ever done.
And now it's regulated to hell so damn bad that if you wind up crashing,
statistically it was probably your fault. That's not to be insensitive to
the concept of people who die while flying planes, it's just a statement on
how much research and development and policymaking has gone into making the
airways a much safer place (per capita) than driving on the road is at a much
slower speed (comparatively) for much smaller distances.
Both of these digressions meaning that I could get ahold of a Cessna Skyhawk
made in the 1970's, and given the airframe was in decent condition and properly
maintained, I could probably fly it with little or no additional work. I could
get a boat made in that same year for a fraction of the price, sometimes as
much as 50% from what I've seen (a Cessna could go for 10-15K, and a 10-meter
sloop could go for about half that, depending).
Try and getting a car from the 1970's that's A: functional, B: capable of
passing an emissions test, and C: will last you more than a few years without
comparatively expensive maintenance.
I dunno about you Euros, but here in the United States, playing around with
old cars and actually -using- them is something ideally done by the well-off,
because they can make it work; the average teenager trying to "restore" a
Firebird from his dad's high school graduation year is foolhardy at worst
and probably a few thousand dollars deep in parts and repairs at best.
I don't think I'm inherently capable of doing things small when I know that I
can do the big version, given enough time and resources. So this wouldn't be a
simple case of getting a small boat to play puddle pirate in at local lakes;
I'd eventually want to take my craft (or a bigger, more seaworthy one) out on
the big water, coastal at first and then maybe beyond.
I might do it as a way to go fishing and spend more time outside. Granted, it
would be a wildly inconsistent hobby; not to mention the fact I've not even
begun to consider how on earth I'd haul such a thing to and from the marina,
assuming I don't want to just permanently moor it somewhere and pay out the
nose for a berth at some way-too-over-my-pay-grade yacht club.
So until I went for the big time and either moved closer to the sea, or
otherwise got some of my logistics sorted out in a heretofore unknown way,
I'm basically stuck with a hard line at the process of taking Donut's Boat
from Point A, of Donut's Dwelling, to Point B, which is the Water Where the
Boat is Supposed to Be. The WWTBISTB, as it were. (pronounced wuhw-tuh-bist
buh)
The joy of all of this is the fact that within a few years I could likely snag
a pretty decent remote job of some sort, meaning that I'd be able to take this
terrible, rotten, hardly-a-fit-for-me idea for a spin in earnest.
But it's not all sunshine and roses, unfortunately. Real life is a thing.
I'm happy where I am in terms of salary, but it also does mean that I come into
the office as a general rule. Kinda hard to play puddle pirate in a sailboat if
I have that Teams call at 1:30 and then an in-person meeting at 3. So I'd have
to figure out some way to either become independently wealthy (extremely
unlikely, without dirty money and things I'd probably have to stomach doing)
-- I'm being hypothetical, dear Enn Ess Ayy agent, it's hypothetical --
which therefore leaves me to the other option, which is be a normal human being,
a plebian among the patricians, and grind out a living somewhere in the tech
industry like I've been struggling (and finally succeeding in the last few
months) to do for the last nearly half-decade.
So somewhere among the ocean of half-baked ideas, companies with little or no
true stake in making meaningful use of technical talent, and other "bullshit
jobs" that the market is currently overflowing with, I'd have to find one that
would be okay with putting me out to pasture doing a project or something,
reporting in textually or over video every few days (at most), and otherwise
leave me alone to go float in my boat.
Last time I went out on the water was a whale-watching trip a few years ago.
I was barely maintaining my lunch by the end., I was coked out on SO much
Dramamine. I kept it down because I'm no chump of a pastry, but I am
certain were the seas any choppier that day (bad waters in the harbor and
along most of the coast) I would have kindly donated whatever I ate back
to the floor of the galley.
Not to mention the fact that I'm just gonna be labeled (rightfully so) a crazy
hippie for trying to figure out how to sail a boat as a person who has no
history doing so, no lineage indicating such, and no abject -reason- to do so.
This is such a bad idea. I can't wait to experiment with it in a few years. :D
Comments? Questions? They go here.
wholesomedonut at tuta dot io