Waiting on the Band [#16]

I have procrastinated writing this blog post with the same fierce commitment I used to put off washing our floors in Park City. And let me tell you — our floors were never clean. Like, never.

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure why sitting down to type seems so impossible, but I think it’s because we’re a little bit stuck.

Stuck at the marina. Stuck fixing things. Stuck waiting out hurricane season. Just sorta stuck in slow motion.

The kind of slow that doesn’t seem worthy of writing about. It’s offered up some Instagram-worthy snippets, at least: Ruby Vi on the hard, dolphins, a baby maybe-pufferfish, pool and beach time, happy hour after happy hour… But if I chronicled our past three weeks in length, it’d read like a half-hearted (and wholly-lame) diary entry recounting our boat projects du jour.

We hadn’t planned on monotony.

Sailing around the world should be blog-worthy. Literally every day.

But the cold hard truth is that we’re not sailing around the world.

Not yet anyway. Our days are less white sandy beaches and more fixing the fridge and then a head (and then the fridge again); less diving with sea turtles and more trips to West Marine for obscure O-rings and stainless steel screws; less sailing, more repairing sails.

I’m bored already.

At the time, leaving Park City seemed like the main event. But it wasn’t. Selling the house, heading east, even buying the boat — those were warm up bands at best.

Don’t get me wrong, those bands were hot — they played killer tunes: Big Moves, New People, Cool Places, Rad Visitors…

But their set list seems to have ended.

Now we’re chillin’ in the cheap seats (which, as it turns out, are still remarkably expensive), humming along to outdated covers about haul-outs and head repairs, waiting for the headliner to show up.

I’m not the biggest fan of waiting until tomorrow, let alone waiting till fall. It’s easy to be discouraged. Or bored.

My natural resting state is impatience. Get there faster. Go now. Hurry up.

It both helps and is slightly terrifying knowing this month might be our final calm before the storm — both literally (as hurricane season ramps up) and figuratively (as we begin to put departure goals in place).

In a glass-half-full outlook, we might actually be able to get through August completing boat tasks at a rate faster than new ones arise (despite the governing laws of Boat Life which laugh in the face of such lofty goals).

Insomuch as any sailor can actually calendar a departure date, September 6th is ours.

Adios Marina Day. Let’s Start Heading South Day. Time to Actually Sail Everyday Day. Maybe We’ll Catch Our Dinner on the Way Day.

Wyatt returns from his month-long SoCal grandma-visit at the end of August. We have roughly three weeks to get ourselves sorted before he returns and we dive into final preparations to untie our docklines.

(For any of you thinking three weeks seems like more than enough time, I invite you to reference the blog post Boat Time for a quick review of how things like minutes and hours and days work on the water...)

We have a big job ahead of us, but as of yesterday, three of four heads are (mostly) functional and the fridge is holding steady at 40.3. Today, I’m gonna string some more lifeline netting, do 50 20 pushups, wash a set of bedding, and call the day an outrageous success.

Finding the balance between work-for-it and wait-for-it has been a tricky one for us.

There’s a lot more wait-for-it in Boat Life than there ever was in Land Life: wait for a part to come in, wait for a call back from the generator guy, wait on the weather, the tide, slack water.

The key seems to figure out how to work on one task while we wait on missing pieces for another and then transition seamlessly between them until both are complete. (And by both I mean all 347 of them.)

It’s an awkwardly long slow dance to Careless Whisper on a Friday night in a middle school gym.

But we’re swaying along just the same, stepping on each other’s toes most of the time, drinking punch we hope is spiked to distract us from the relative pain.

Eventually, when this B-side burns out, we’ll shove our way back to the front row, lighters in-hand, ready to rock out to the live show. Behind the velvet curtain, a crazy-talented band is gearing up to deliver an epic set of songs about the clearest water and tuna on a trolling line and private anchorages and breeching whales and sailboat magic.

We just have to figure out how to get them on stage.