I came across a journal entry I wrote on this day ten years ago. I was reflecting on the people in my life that made a difference on how things have turned out for me. I realized that many of these people couldn’t possibly know the impact they had on me and the countless others they helped.
I kept thinking about this one community college professor who did more than anyone to inspire me to pursue a college degree. I thought how sad it would be if he never knew the difference he made. So after a quick search on the internet, I found him. I wrote him an email. I introduced myself and told him a few stories about how he had challenged and inspired me, how he had helped me forge a path to the person I am today.
And he wrote back:
I wish I could tell you what a joy it was to receive your message today. I had been to a “Lives of Commitment” breakfast, and - since I’m just about to retire from teaching - I was in my office thinking about how a person ‘makes a difference.’ Then - voila! - your message comes up on my screen. Thank you.
I went to class and told my students to write to their teachers. I told them that a letter like that can really make an impact in a person’s life. I told them about your letter.
If you have someone that’s made a difference in your life, like a special teacher, write them an email. Tell them a story about how they helped you. It doesn’t have to be long. Just say thank you. And then do everything you can to pay that help forward.
I’ve been evaluating Bear 2 to replace Craft for my reading notes and quasi-Zettelkasten for the past few weeks. I’ve used Craft for over three years, but that tool has morphed into a team note-taking and document-sharing platform that doesn’t mesh well with my needs anymore.
My initial impressions of Bear have been quite positive. Here is an app with a calming, minimalist design, yet in many ways, has more power and capabilities than Craft. And best of all, it intuitively works like you’d expect. Like a Mac app.
When Craft first launched, it was only available on Mac, iPad, and iPhone. The developers went on to create Craft for the Web and Windows to reach a larger audience. Somewhere in the process, more features piled up, basic functions became difficult to figure out, and the app lost some of its Mac whimsy and delight.
Before Bear, I tried Obsidian. Here’s an app that has incredible power and can do practically anything with its endless variety of plug-ins. I tried hard to make it work, but I couldn’t accept its interface and design. I kept tinkering with it to try and make it feel like a Mac app. I realized, eventually, that Obsidian was never going to work for me.
When I think about the apps I use and love the most — Day One, Things, Ulysses, and now possibly Bear — they are only available on Mac, iPad, and iPhone.
What is it about Mac-only apps that appeal to me so much? Perhaps they use Macs themselves and have a laser-like focus on how to make the most of the platform. Maybe it’s because the developers who refuse to expand beyond the Mac all share an opinionated sense of aesthetics and whimsy. It’s hard to pin down the particulars, but you know it when you see it.
Take, for example, the icon that Bear automatically assigned to my “Drafts” tag in the app sidebar. Who but a Mac developer would write this into their software?
I tip my hat to those Mac developers out there, the crazy ones who continue to think different.
Grieving the loss of a child is a journey through wastelands you never expected to cross. Unlike every other challenge you’ve ever faced, there is no easy way through a loss like this. You stumble and fall. You curse. You are hobbled and bloody. You are not sure of the way. You might be going in circles.
The truth is everyone suffers in this life. It’s our lot to take the awful with the beautiful. We all must face it. In a perfect world, your mom wouldn’t forget you in the fog of Alzheimer’s Disease. You wouldn’t lose a dear friend to cancer in the prime of her life. Your son wouldn’t die in a motorcycle accident before his twenty-first birthday.
In the months before we lost Connor, we crossed a high wire of reinvention. We retired from our careers. We sold our long-time family home and said goodbye to a lifetime of friends on Vashon Island. We bought a winter home in Arizona with the half-sane plan of living a life split between the summer sea and the winter desert. For half the year, home was where we'd drop the anchor.
Reinvention might come easier for some. I felt like a reluctant hermit crab who knows he must shift to a new shell to survive but dreads the transfer. The plans were years in the making. And just at that vulnerable juncture between one shell and the other, that final letting go of the safety and security of the familiar for the heady promise of a new life, a tsunami upends everything, stranding this naked, scared crab, its tiny claws raised as if to fight the wind and water and waves.
And yet, life continues. We settled into the new house in Arizona. Little bursts of joy came from unexpected sources: the convenience of curbside trash and recycling, reliable high-speed internet, and kind, welcoming neighbors. I unpacked the sixty boxes of books that make up my library, caressing each volume, inhaling its scent, remembering its message as I slowly rebuilt my sanctuary, my illusive shell.
A Sanctuary of Books
Reading has always been a solace. I read a lot of history and philosophy these past months: the marvels of early Egypt and the brutality of Ancient Rome in Will Durant’s grand opus, The Story of Civilization; the millions of years of Earth’s geology poetically taught in Basin and Range by John McPhee; and the insignificance of our human existence in a careening, infinite universe in Probable Impossibilities by Alan Lightman. Taking a dispassionate view can ease the sting of personal loss.
We sold MV Indiscretion this spring, saying goodbye to trawler life and our ties to the Pacific Northwest. I have let go of so many layers of my identity — business professional, islander, sailor, son to my parents, and now father to my son — that it felt right to reach back to utter beginnings, where I might remake myself, like Gandalf after his plunge from the Bridge of Moria.
We bought a small off-road capable RV in April and have taken a few trips to explore the deserts and mountains of the Southwest. In June, we crossed into Mexico to camp on the shores of the Sea of Cortez. These months in the desert were the longest I’ve strayed from the ocean in my entire life. I missed the smell of the sea and the feel of dried salt on my skin. We waded in the warm surf, feeling once again that indescribable joy of shifting sand under our heels and between our toes while flocks of pelicans dove for their dinner a few yards from us.
I sat beside tide pools nestled within the rocky outcrops that lay between long stretches of sand: hermit crabs battling to defend their territories, starfish, sea stars, sea slugs, mussels, sea urchins, and tiny brine shrimp, all pursuing the minutiae of their daily lives. Looking up into the cosmos and down into a tide pool, I noted the parallels: we are all one.
A strong south wind picked up one night, and gusts gently rocked the RV on its suspension. I emerged from a heavy sleep to check the anchor, trying to remember how far we were from the rocks on shore. I drifted back to sleep, still dreaming we were afloat. I know the sea beckons on the far side of this wilderness.
Camping on the Sea of Cortez
After a long period of intentional isolation, I have begun the process of reconnecting with old friends and making new friends here in Arizona. This has been difficult for me. They ask me how I’m doing. Am I OK? I don’t have an answer. “What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step,” said Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Every day, I take a step.
I’m writing this tonight from a small campground in southern Colorado. We’ve been traveling for a few weeks, taking the backroads, stopping often, seeing where the open road takes us. We have no plan, no definite time to return. It feels good to roam.
Driving through western New Mexico, I felt a lightness I didn’t expect. The beauty of the colorful mesas and buttes rising around us filled me with awe. We hiked to La Ventana Natural Arch to find ourselves in an ancient, sacred place — a place of prayer and hope and resilience. It left me wanting to see more, to do more. For the first time in many months, my mind tilted forward, a blessed release from so much focus on the past.
La Ventana Natural Arch in New Mexico
Every day brings a little more joy and a little less sadness. On good days, I see a brightening just over the horizon. A clearing? Yet there are still those days when I sink deep into sorrow and recognize the false dawn. There is no way around this, only forward, across this barren terrain. One step. Then another. When I dare look around, I see so many others walking beside me. Grief is the price we all pay for love. Won’t you take my hand? It won’t be long now. If death has taught me anything, it's that nothing persists, not even grief.
After five years of amazing adventures aboard our Nordhavn trawler MV Indiscretion, we’ve decided it’s time for a change. We are coming off the water.
We didn’t plan on this. We dreamed for decades to be at this very spot in our lives — casting off the bowlines to explore the world under our own keel at the unhurried pace of seven knots. But life doesn’t always work out like you hoped.
On September 27th, 2022, our son Connor was killed in a motorcycle accident in Colorado Springs. A car pulled out in front of him on a busy street a half mile from his apartment. He was just twenty years old.
After Connor’s death, reeling with loss, we took what would be our final cruise aboard Indiscretion. We were in shock and did not know what else to do. If any solace were possible for our crushed family, we thought it must be found in the harbors and bays of our beloved San Juan Islands. Our daughter accompanied us, and her partner joined a week later. We met up with dear friends from MV Fortitude and MV Equinox who helped distract us from our misery with companionship and love. Still, every anchorage, every island hike, every trip ashore in the tender, every sunset and moonrise — all of it reminded us of Connor’s absence. We found peace but agony too, as this new reality sunk in.
Connor and Lisa
We put the boat away in November and headed south to our new winter home here in Arizona. We’ve spent these past months wondering how we move forward after such a tragedy.
Each time we discussed our return in the spring, we both felt despondent. Our plans to cruise to Alaska this summer felt empty and joyless. Despite our love for the pristine cruising grounds of the Salish Sea and our wonderful boat friends we’ve met along the way, we just couldn’t imagine resuming our life afloat.
Connor spent his youth sailing and boating with us, and the reminder of the memories we made together is simply too painful. In this new grief-stricken world, returning to the familiar and comfortable fills us with dread; we need to invent a new life that won’t constantly remind us of our loss. And maybe, in the process, allow us to accept what feels unacceptable.
These precious moments …
Here’s a lesson for us all. Despite our best wishes and plans, life is incredibly uncertain. We don’t know what the future may bring. No one does. We insist on having it all figured out before acting on our dreams. But sometimes, before the plan is perfected, the unthinkable changes everything. If there’s one bit of advice I could offer, it’s this: don’t wait. Go sooner. Better yet, go now. Right now is all we have. You may not get another chance.
The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately. -- Seneca
We aren’t saying goodbye to adventure. That’s the last thing Connor would have wanted. Instead, we’ve decided to pivot in a direction that will honor his memory and allow us the chance to heal without the constant reminder of our loss. In the last two years of his life, he developed a passion for off-roading in his Jeep. He and his friends would take old forest service roads deep into the Colorado mountains, looking for challenging routes that might tax the 4x4’s crawling capabilities. The battered underside of his Jeep proves he pushed that vehicle to its limits. We treasure the selfies he sent us from the summits of his off-road adventures, the vivid blue sky and Rocky Mountain vistas framing his smiling delight.
Connor and his Jeep
In that spirit, we bought an off-road capable RV, more akin to a camper van than a plush motorhome, that we’ll use to explore the deserts and mountains that Connor grew to love in the last years of his life. We’ve never been a fan of crowded RV parks, so we chose a rig that can take us far off the beaten path — boondocking as it’s known in RV vernacular — the boating equivalent of dropping the hook in a secluded anchorage. On some trips, we’ll tow Connor’s old Jeep to seek out the otherwise unreachable places he would have loved to see. It comforts us that we’ll follow a path our son would have taken had he lived.
New adventures.
As we close this chapter, we are grateful for the adventures and friendships we enjoyed during our five years of trawler life. Joining the Nordhavn family, even aboard one of the smallest vessels in the fleet, was both a privilege and a joy. I learned so much from the many experienced captains and marine experts who freely shared their wisdom with me time and again. I felt like I was getting to the point where my growing skills and talents could be paid forward to the newest crop of skippers. And oh, will we miss the friends we met along the way. I have to trust that our paths will somehow cross again in the future.
We are incredibly grateful to Devin Zwick of Nordhavn Northwest. In all my years of boating, I’ve rarely encountered a more capable, knowledgeable and compassionate yacht professional. Devin personally skippered the boat from her slip in Seattle to Anacortes, oversaw her annual haul-out, worked with me remotely to iron out the logistics and terms of the sale, and found a terrific new owner for Indiscretion — all in the course of a few short weeks. They say the happiest days in a skipper’s life are when he buys and sells a boat. This is surely not the case with Indiscretion. We dearly love this trawler. But Devin worked extremely hard to make the process as seamless for us as possible. For most people, there’s an “oh shit, what have I done” moment before you sign the papers to buy a boat, particularly one as expensive as a Nordhavn trawler. Our story should lessen the uneasiness for those about to make this plunge. Believe me, that spreadsheet you keep studying won’t help you. Go for it. You only pass this way once.
I kept this blog as a way to share my amazement and good fortune at having the chance to operate and cruise aboard a little ship like Indiscretion. Many nights I sat in the darkened pilothouse when everyone was already asleep, listening to the sounds of the wind, watching the moonlight on the water and the spin of the lights on shore as we circled our anchor, feeling utterly incredulous at my luck. I hope these posts have been informative and inspiring to others who also feel drawn to the wildness and tranquility of the ocean.
And who knows? I’ve skippered a boat for most of my adult life. We might find our way back to the shore one day when the pull of the saltwater in our veins overtakes the grief in our hearts. In a world where nothing is certain, anything is possible.
This is the most difficult thing I've ever written. I’m sharing this partly because I hope that releasing these words will provide some catharsis from the excruciating pain I have carried around these last months. Perhaps the sentiments I’ve conveyed here can be a small comfort to someone who has experienced a similar tragedy. I also know that people are worried about us, about me. Consider this an abbreviated journal of our past one hundred days. Unlike anything else I’ve written, this one contains no epiphany, enlightenment, or happy ending. This one is mired in the messy middle of heartbreak and loss.
On the night of September 27th, our son Connor died in a motorcycle accident in Colorado Springs. A car pulled out in front of him on a busy street a half mile from his apartment. He was killed instantly in the crash. He was riding a motorcycle he had owned for just one day. He was twenty years old.
I mentally replay the call we received from the coroner’s office in the wee hours of September 28th over and over and over again, my mind trying to push this all away, to wake up from the darkest, longest nightmare of my life.
I look back at that person I was on September 26th — that carefree soul with so many blessings — and compare him to the person I am today: darkened, sorrowful, broken. The two of us could be long-separated brothers, but a world apart in life experience. I no longer recognize that other me who swung so happily from the thinnest of threads, not understanding his entire world could crumble in the space of a single heartbeat.
Lisa and I have faced our share of grief together. First her mom, then mine. Her dad, then my dad. With each of these losses, one of us was always the stronger one, there to hold the other, to give comfort, to listen. This was the first time in our marriage that neither of us was strong enough to hold up the other. Thankfully, dear friends joined us on the boat to help us make it through the day, make travel arrangements, encourage us to eat, and simply hold us. I am forever grateful to these friends who also lost a near-family member for their love and help on that hardest day.
When the shock wore off and grim reality set in, we rallied as a family to do what we must. Our daughter Mallory took a leave of absence from work and joined us in Colorado Springs to help with Connor's arrangements. During breaks from our awful tasks, we hiked the hills that he loved. We hungered for stories from his friends about his last days, his last night. We splashed the healing waters of Manitou Springs on our faces, needing their restorative powers to give us the strength to finalize the affairs of such a young life, a life so wholly intertwined with ours that we struggled to find where he ended and we continue.
We returned to Seattle utterly bereft. Unable to face the grief and sorrow of others, we stole away for the San Juan Islands aboard the trawler in an attempt to regain our equilibrium. Connor spent his entire life around saltwater and boats. We knew that if there was any way for us to find peace after something like this, it would be on the water. We could feel his presence in every anchorage, every trip ashore in the tender, every meal around the saloon table, every sunset and moonrise. Visiting these familiar islands over those two weeks was both a comfort and an agony.
Moonrise in Friday Harbor, San Juan Island
We returned to port steadier but still reeling. We held a small gathering of Connor's closest friends to mourn his passing. I was surprised and grateful that so many made the long trip from Colorado to Vashon Island to attend this memorial. It took everything I had to talk with others about my son in the past tense. There were tears but also smiles and laughter as we collectively remembered his life and the impact he had on all those around him. It was the first time since his passing that I remembered him with more love than pain.
In November, Lisa and I drove south to Southern California. We took the coastal route, stopping frequently to gaze at the ocean, to feel the pounding of surf, to take in giant lungfuls of healing sea air. Lisa took this same route in reverse with Connor in 2020, when his university in Colorado Springs closed down because of COVID. She pointed out the places they stopped and the sights they took in together, as if a part of him were still there, waiting for us.
Coquille River Jetty near Bandon on the Oregon coast
We stretched a three-day trip into a week, knowing somehow that it was important for us to linger. We are feeling our way through this. There are no charts, no waypoints to follow, only instinct, love, and shared grief.
I poured my sorrow into a journal each morning and night to help me make sense of what had happened. You can trace the first stages of grief in those early entries: shock and denial, the second guessing and what-ifs, the heartbreak and rage at the universe knowing that Connor would miss the most beautiful aspects of life: falling in love, finding his path, becoming a father himself one day.
On Thanksgiving morning, I forced myself to write what I was most thankful for as Connor's father. I wrote how grateful I was to have had the chance to be his dad, that I took a sabbatical from work to spend more time with him and his sister as teenagers, that he was able to squeeze so much life and adventure into his twenty short years, that he died doing something he loved.
Luckily, we spent Thanksgiving — our first holiday without Connor — surrounded by the comfort of extended family and the welcome chaos only small children can bring to a home.
In December, we moved into our new winter home here in Arizona. The sunshine and change of scenery from our life on the trawler have been a welcome change. Mallory and her partner drove from California to spend Christmas with us. We tried to be festive and honor Connor’s memory on a holiday he dearly loved.
As I write this, It's been one hundred days since he died. I cringe at these words — their harsh reality, their certainty. There are moments, sometimes whole hours, when I forget.
The nights are the worst. I wake most mornings with tears in my eyes. My subconscious won’t accept the truth. It's as if I'm learning, again and again, the facts of this unbearable loss with each new day. My son is gone.
If Lisa rises before me, I approach her quietly, softly, like someone waiting for word in a hospital lounge, anxious for a loved one whose prognosis is not good. "How did you sleep?" I ask her out of kindness, but I already know the answer. I wonder if these splinters that keep stabbing us will ever wear down to mere rough edges.
I looked to the ancient sages who did so much to shape how I live my life: Epictetus, Seneca the Younger, Marcus Aurelius. Their counsel when I was young helped me reconcile our universal longing for permanence in this short life we are given. I tried to apply their teachings to what happened to Connor, to regain my Stoic footing, but Memento Mori feels so hollow and pointless when I consider the death of this young man whose life had only just started.
I've never been religious, but I suddenly ache for the certainty and hope the faithful possess. I have listened to Mozart’s Requiem dozens of times these past months. Though I don’t understand the Latin, there’s something universal in the music that communicates comfort and awe on a spiritual, perhaps even molecular level. Since Connor’s death, my uneasiness with mortality has softened. I look forward to the chance, however slim, of seeing my son again, and if not, to know at least that we'll be together in that vast universal void.
Our plans to cruise the northern reaches of British Columbia and Alaska next summer aboard our trawler feel somehow awful, as if our fairy tale life could possibly continue after such a loss. I feel like making a new start in the desert, to follow the dirt roads and mountain passes where Connor found such happiness in the last year of his life, to cauterize this paralyzing sadness and emerge somehow transformed, reformed, like Phoenix from the ashes.
I remain a proud father to my beautiful daughter Mallory, who inspires me daily with her kindness, intelligence, and generosity. There were days when she was my lifeboat, the one who pulled me to safety from the wreckage. After all those years of holding her hand, she held mine. We need each other more than ever now.
And I have my Lisa, my best friend and soulmate. We may look at the world through different lenses and leverage different strengths, but we never waver on the big things — what’s most important to us and our family. We’re apart for the first time since we lost Connor as she celebrates the birthday of her grand-nephew in Los Angeles. I miss her dearly. We’re two leaning pillars that can only stand upright because of the other’s weight and support. I like to think of myself as mentally and emotionally strong, but I know this: she’s the reason I’ve maintained my sanity through this ordeal. Without her love and support, I don’t know where I’d be.
A family friend who suffered the loss of her 24-year-old son called us shortly after Connor died. Her loss was still very fresh — just three months — but she was strong enough to help us in a way that no one else could. She understood exactly what we were going through.
One stranger who understands your experience exactly will do for you what hundreds of close friends and family who don’t understand cannot. It is the necessary palliative for the pain of stretching into change. It is the cool glass of water in hell.
— Laura Mckowen, We Are the Luckiest
She recommended a book that helped her: Finding Meaning by David Kessler. In his career as a grief counselor, Mr. Kessler helped develop the now-famous five stages of death and dying, and tragically suffered the loss of his 21-year-old son before writing this book.
Reading this book did help me. I began to see that what happened to Connor, though horrible, wasn’t that rare. Many, many parents have gone through this same torture of the loss of a child, some much younger, or through circumstances riddled with regret and even more heartbreak. I learned that the agony of grief is equal to the devotion and love you had. It’s no surprise that I am utterly gutted. I loved that boy so much.
About three months after Kessler’s son died, a colleague sent him this note: “I know you’re drowning. You’ll keep sinking for a while, but there will come a point when you’ll hit bottom. Then you’ll have a decision to make. Do you stay there or push off and start to rise again?”
And that’s where I find myself today: at rock bottom or very near it. I too have a choice to make. Will I stay down here to flounder? Or will I swim for the surface? A part of me knows there are many magical moments yet to be shared with family and friends, to begin again to appreciate the everyday joy of life. Will I ever again choose joy? I hope someday I can.
Thank you for reaching the end of this meandering post. If you made it this far, you must either really care about me and my family, or you’ve been part of a similar tragedy yourself and are looking for some comfort. If it’s the former, I am grateful for your concern during this most difficult time. If it’s the latter, I hope you find peace in your own way, and in your own time.
Connor Dennis Alfred Breen (January 29, 2002 - September 27, 2022)
Kicking back in the cockpit of Indiscretion on this fine May evening, I've been thinking about how life has a way of circling back on itself in strange, unexpected ways.
We've been settled in our new slip at Shilshole Marina in Seattle for a month now as we finalize the sale of our Vashon Island home. After all the frenetic activity involved in readying a house to sell, it feels good just to be still and observe the hustle and bustle that surrounds us here, in what surely must be the very center of the trawler universe.
Walking the dogs from our slip on J dock.
Shilshole Marina is home to nearly 1,500 slips and one of the world's largest communities of liveaboard boaters. Every marine service imaginable can be found within a five-minute drive to nearby Ballard. What once was a five-hour trip to have the boat hauled out at Seaview Boatyard can now be accomplished without even leaving the breakwater.
And then there's the community. We find ourselves surrounded by kindred spirits who have gravitated to a seafaring lifestyle that most can't begin to understand. I have this feeling that we've slipped through a portal to an alternate universe where it's perfectly normal to sell your house and move on a boat, to laugh maybe a little too much, to enjoy a dockside bagpipe concert while you're sipping your morning coffee on the flybridge, and to fall into new friendships with people you just met but feel like you've known your whole life. We have found our tribe.
This spirit of community has even infected the marina staff, who, by decree, are charged with throwing up obstacles and rules and prohibitions.
Last week, I changed the oil on all three engines on Indiscretion as part of our preparation for summer cruising. The marina offers on-site oil recycling, but a large red sign near the tank proclaims a limit of five gallons of oil. I had close to nine gallons. Here we go, I thought.
The oil tank was padlocked, so I went to ask for the key at the office. They would have someone meet me at the tank shortly. I pushed my dock cart with its two waste oil containers the 200 yards to the north-end of the marina. By the time I arrived, the tank was already unlocked, and the marina staff person was getting back into her Port of Seattle truck. I thanked her and told her I would lock up when I finished. She smiled, welcomed me to the marina, and drove off.
As I carried the first five gallon container to the tank, I watched the truck slowly reverse course out of the corner of my eye. The truck stopped next to me and the window rolled down. Here it comes.
"I forgot to mention," she said. "There's a separate area on the south end of the marina that you can safely dispose of coolant, bilge water, old fuel, and batteries in case you ever need that." She smiled, waved and drove off.
We've definitely entered the multiverse.
Penguin, a beautiful Nordhavn 46, entering the northern breakwater.
Selling the house, moving aboard the boat, and arriving here at Shilshole marks an exciting new chapter for us, but it's also a return to our beginning.
Lisa and I met playing pool in a dive bar not five miles from here. Seattle has has changed a lot in thirty years, but that bar on Stone Way — The Pacific Inn Pub — still looks the same.
Looking south through the forest of masts, I can make out the very apartment that Lisa and I shared when we were first married 25 years ago. Neither of us were boaters then, but an extra allotment of saltwater in our veins must have drawn us here to the shore.
I recall watching boat traffic on the ship canal over beers at the long gone Bait Shop Cafe. A glorious wooden trawler glided by, and though we didn’t know stem from stern, the possibilities of far flung adventure did not escape our rapt attention.
Across the fairway from us lies a small fleet of Seattle Sailing Club sailboats. I enjoy watching the crews of new sailors take to sea each evening. I'll admit my heart races a little when a novice skipper backs a J-105 into the fairway, coming out hot, sometimes uncomfortably close to a collision without casting a single backwards glance.
Crews getting ready for an evening sail.
I went sailing for the first time at that very club in 1997. I learned the parts of the rig and how to tie a bowline in the cockpit of a 26-foot Capri sloop tied up less than 100 feet away from where I now sit. It took just one afternoon on Shilshole Bay to ignite a lifelong passion for sailing. I can still remember the exhilaration I felt as the sound of the engine faded away and the boat heeled and shot forward, my grip fastened to the tiller as if by electric shock, my whole being immersed in the connection between wind, sail and rudder.
That afternoon sail, which soon resulted in the purchase of our own Ericson 35 sailboat, also marked the end of our time at Shilshole. We moved to Vashon Island to start a family and a new life in the country.
The Ericson made way for a succession of boats over two decades that taught me the rules of the road, the ways of the sea, the art of sail trim to gain an extra half knot through the water, the fickleness of marine engines, the dangers of singlehanded sailing.
Truth be told, my life should have ended twenty years ago. Alone in a remote anchorage, I fell overboard into a fast running current in 42 degree water. No life jacket. No one else on board to assist. Through sheer luck, a keen-eyed boater plucked me out of the water as I drifted out to sea and certain death. A guardian angel took pity on me that fateful morning, and I got a second chance at life.
Over the many years of sailing out of Vashon, we made a few stops here at Shilshole, but never longer than a day or two. It feels decadent to call this our home, like we've taken a permanent suite at a luxury hotel.
Shilshole on a calm night.
The fact is, we don't truly live here. With the closing of the sale of our house a few days away, we are anxious to put some nautical miles under our keel without worrying about how high the grass is or what home repair project might be waiting.
Keeping this slip at Shilshole gives us the perfect home base for expeditions through these beautiful Pacific Northwest waters, and yet still have a place to rest up, lick our wounds, and draw upon the finest trawler marine services in the world as the need arises.
But first, let me take in this quiet moment of reflection to simply enjoy the warmth of the setting sun and give thanks for all the many tacks and gybes that carried us to this special place, here and now.
[caption id="attachment_1129" align="alignleft" width="800"] Red Sky at Night ...[/caption]
If the first half of life is about growing and accumulating, then the second half must see us disbursing, letting go. Life is full of cycles — like the seasons, or perhaps more dear to me, the flooding and ebbing of tides.
In the past few years, I’ve let go of my aging parents, my career and a lifetime of associates and colleagues, a dear friend, and this past year I watched my two kids leave home to start their own lives of growth and accumulation.
At its best, letting go brings an emotional release, a lightness, a feeling of immense relief, like putting down a heavy weight you’ve been carrying around for too long. At its worst, it brings a paralyzing sense of irretrievable loss. I’ve been thinking about these two very different outcomes as we navigate our next phase of letting go.
I’m told your house never looks as good as the day you sell, and after twenty-three years here on Vashon Island, we’re close to reaching that particular zenith. White paint has stained my fingers and forearm, and a big smear tattoos my right cheek. The list of projects has dwindled over the past weeks, and we’re down to just a few beauty marks.
After each section of trim I painted today, I found myself looking out at the water on this sunny Spring day. You’d think after all these years I’d take this view of Puget Sound for granted, but I don’t. For a spell, I watched a container ship make its way southbound to offload in Tacoma, its wake stretching out for miles in the flat water.
On clear days you can see Whidbey Island from our front porch. Such a wide, unencumbered expanse of water provides a theatrical experience for watching weather systems roll through, especially the northern gales in deep winter. Dark gray squalls march across the water, relentless in their intensity, unstoppable in their progress. Bald eagles float just fifty yards off the porch, contorting their wings in tiny increments to remain utterly still as they study the whipped up sea for a meal. The Firs and the big Japanese Maple tree groan and shudder in the gusts. The biting sting of the wind on your cheek makes you appreciate the warmth inside the house as you take all this in.
They say it takes a special kind of person to live on an island like Vashon. Betty MacDonald wrote her memoir Onions in the Stew while living here in the 1940s. Most of her humorous observations about the eccentricities and shortcomings of island life still ring true.
Anyone contemplating island dwelling must be physically strong and it is an added advantage if you aren’t too bright.
Vashon is nestled in southern Puget Sound halfway between Seattle and Tacoma. The island population of roughly ten thousand hasn’t budged much in thirty years. There are no bridges that connect us to the mainland. Ferries on the north and sound ends of the island are the gateways to visit or leave.
Unlike more tourist-minded destinations, Vashon grooves with its own unique personality. Some say that driving off the ferry boat and winding your way through its rural roads is like going back in time. “Keep Vashon Weird” bumper stickers adorn VW buses and BMWs alike. Eco-friendly farmers, artists, hippies, celebrities, weekenders, old families, newcomers, commuters, eccentrics, musicians, professionals … a hodgepodge brought together by a love of saltwater, an unconventional lifestyle, and geographic seclusion.
I’ve lived here far longer than any other place. I’ve put down deep roots. In 35 years of life before Vashon, I moved some twenty times, from one house or apartment to the next, every year or two, which at the time seemed perfectly normal. Growing up, my parents had this ache in them to roam. We moved every year in my four years of high school. I was a shy kid. By the time I made any friends, we were packing up for the next town.
Lisa, my partner these many years, also led a wandering life as a child. Instead of traipsing through small Washington coastal towns, she lived abroad, calling places like Singapore, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand her home. Her father worked in construction, and when the job ended, they moved on. Again and again.
From the early days of our relationship, we kindled a dream of running off together. A ranch in Montana, a seaside villa in Mexico, a flat in Madrid. Six months into our courtship, we spent three weeks touring Greece and decided, after perhaps a bit too much Ouzo, to get married there and then on the island of Skiathos. Neither of us had met the other’s parents, and our stunned friends were sure the marriage would not last out the year. But when you know, you know.
When our daughter was born, we vowed to give her something we never had: a consistent, unchanging childhood home. We moved to Vashon just shy of her first birthday, and she and her younger brother grew up in the same house, in the same little town, with the same friends from pre-school tots to angsty high school seniors. When the time for college rolled around, both were desperate to get away from a place so small and remote. Yet, later in life, I wonder if the deep-rooted memories of sandy beaches, quiet forests, and a one-block town without traffic lights become a subconscious yardstick for the ideal life?
The house, built in 1917, turned one hundred during our time here. At one point or another, we’ve remodeled just about every inch of her, but we always stayed true to her spirit. She’s an old soul, sitting atop this hill looking out over the water. I realize we’ve just been her caretakers for a time.
I left the island every morning by ferry for twenty years and suffered through my fair share of business travel. Returning home, breathing seemed easier, the sea air and open vista perhaps working together to inflate my lungs more completely than anywhere else. The sound of the gentle surf through the open skylight lulled me quickly to sleep when I fell into my own bed at last. This island home has always been my sanctuary.
Every so often, a grandchild of the former owners stops by to see the house. Fully grown now, they look around, starstruck. “I spent every summer here when I was little,” a lady in her mid-twenties tells me, close to tears. They will have brought their partner along as witness to a living piece of their childhood.
I learned to sail on Vashon, and the connection between boating and island life is inexorably linked. I’ve sailed along her forty-five miles of coastline countless times, and my family knows to spread my ashes in Quartermaster Harbor should the sudden need arise. For years, we kept a mooring buoy in the deep water in front the house. It became a summer tradition to sail the boat around from the marina for crabbing and sailing and floating picnics.
On clear nights, I would sometimes sneak down the long flight of beach stairs to sail alone under the stars. Lying back in the cockpit, steering with my leg over the tiller, trimming the sails in the darkness by the feel of wind on my cheek. Sailing at night feels so magical: the lift and fall of the gentle swell, the hiss of the waves against the hull, the green glow of phosphor trailing astern, and that dizzying feeling of falling and merging into the galaxy of stars splayed above you. I’ve never felt so utterly connected to the cosmos as on small boat under the stars on a summer night.
Selling the house and moving off island has been our plan for years, so why do I feel so pensive as our time here draws near? My glances around the house and the water are slower, more considered, like Ahab gazing at the sea before his final showdown with the white whale. I strain to hear the tolling of an iron bell, for it’s possible the end of this chapter of island life is followed by mere epilogue. A little voice inside me tells me to stop, to reconsider. The house looks so good; why not stay, the voice implores. I am sorely tempted.
But no. What haunts us late in life are the things we didn’t do. In letting go our island home and life, we step into a new life of two distinct halves: from May through October we’ll live and cruise aboard Indiscretion, our expedition trawler, with Shilshole Marina as our new home port. Near enough to see our friends on Vashon and the perfect launching off spot for exploring the Salish Sea during the best weather the Northwest offers. In October, we’ll drive south to our new home in a 55+ community 40 minutes west of Phoenix, AZ called Victory at Verrado. Six months of warm winter weather, desert hikes, Seattle Mariners spring training, and poorly played golf is just enough time to begin pining for the greens and blues of the beautiful Northwest. We’ll lock up the house in early May and make our way back to Indiscretion for another season.
Lately, I’ve been having this recurring dream of riding in a hot air balloon. The gondola is staked to the beach in front of our house with anchors that seem much too small for such a large craft. An offshore wind buffets the big balloon and I know those anchors can’t hold much longer. The two of us pile in the gondola, which, once aboard, looks weirdly like the pilothouse of a trawler. We release the mooring lines and float up and up into the sky. We clear the tree line and watch our house and the island grow small, insignificant. We keep rising, our view expanding in all directions. I point out the rugged west coast of Vancouver Island and the Sunshine Coast. We float over Desolation Sound, Princess Louisa Inlet, the Broughton Archipelago, and the wide expanse of Queen Charlotte Sound. Ahead, just over the curved horizon lies Alaska. The dream always ends when we toss out the sandbags of ballast at our feet. Maybe we simply fly upwards into the stars. Or, perhaps we set down in Greece to renew our marriage vows, but this time, we stay the whole summer, traveling light.
A sea change is underway for Indiscretion and her crew. In the span of three cold, dark and rainy months here in the Pacific Northwest, we have decided to shake things up in four significant ways.
First, we are selling our waterfront home here on Vashon Island. We’ve lived in this sprawling farmhouse for twenty-three years and raised our family here on this beautiful island. We’ve made lifelong friends and put down roots that run very deep. But keeping an older home on acreage no longer fits our vagabond plans of exploring distant ports by boat. The children that made this house a wonderful family home have grown up and moved thousands of miles away. We have retired from our professional careers, and nothing but familiarity and habit hold us to any particular place. For everything, there is a season, and we think it’s time to cast off the bowlines to chase the next chapter in our lives.
[caption id=“attachment_1118” align=“alignleft” width=“800”] The Family Home[/caption]
Second, we have moved aboard Indiscretion. Shifting from a 4,000 square feet home to a 43-foot trawler requires an adjustment, but the changes are welcome and comforting as we look back on our three weeks of life aboard. Everything on a boat has at least one vital purpose, which appeals to the side of me that craves tidiness and compactness. While waterfront living is nice, living on the water is even better. When your driveway is a dock, and your neighbors are boaters, you can’t help but smile.
[caption id=“attachment_1116” align=“alignleft” width=“800”] Boat neighbors are the best.[/caption]
Third, we are relocating Indiscretion from Vashon Island to Seattle as our official home port. After years of waiting, our number came up for a permanent slip at Shilshole Marina, which boasts of one of the largest liveaboard communities in the world. We’re excited to return to Ballard, where the two of us started our life together so many years ago.
Fourth, we’re building a winter home in Arizona in a 55+ community called Victory at Verrado, which is about 30 minutes west of Phoenix. This was the missing puzzle piece in creating our new hybrid lifestyle, and perhaps the biggest surprise, since the last time I checked, there definitely isn’t any oceanfront property in Arizona.
Summers on the boat, winters in Arizona
We originally planned to take the boat down the coast to Mexico for the winter season and reverse course each spring to the Pacific Northwest. However, we struggled with the idea of leaving our house empty over the damp and cold winters as we weren’t ready to call Indiscretion our permanent home. We briefly considered moving up to a larger Nordhavn for more creature comforts and space — I have a fondness for the beautiful Nordhavn 60 — but it simply wasn’t practical. Everything grows exponentially more complicated and expensive as you move up in size. As an expedition trawler, the Nordhavn 43 is perfect for us.
We also fretted over the uncertainties and discomfort of open-ocean voyaging, particularly the trip back north along the Pacific Coast, aptly named the Baja Bash. The boat could handle it; the weak link is most assuredly the crew.
One early idea was moving south. Lisa grew up in Southern California. She has family in Costa Mesa, and now our daughter lives in Los Angeles. “Let’s sell the house and buy a condo in Newport Beach,” she suggested about a year ago. “We can keep Indiscretion at Dana Point.”
My gut reaction was immediate and emphatic. No. I love Southern California weather, and it would be good to live closer to family, but the cruising opportunities there are too limited. Even after twenty years of boating, I realized that we haven’t even scratched the surface of the destinations available to us right here in the Northwest. A near-endless array of pristine waterways and protected anchorages from the south end of Puget Sound to the northern reaches of the inside passage to Alaska would take a lifetime to explore. This little ship can take us safely and comfortably to destinations that few get a chance to visit: the West Coast of Vancouver Island, the Sunshine Coast, Desolation Sound, Princess Louisa Inlet, the Broughton Archipelago, Prince William Sound … No, we have more to see here.
[caption id=“attachment_1121” align=“aligncenter” width=“525”] So many cruising opportunities (Source: Salish Sea Pilot).[/caption]
So, a new plan has emerged that checks all our boxes: we spend half the year living aboard Indiscretion and the other half in Arizona.
We’ll cruise on Indiscretion full-time from May through October during the most beautiful weather the Pacific Northwest offers. Six months is ample time to see our friends on Vashon and still explore British Columbia and the far reaches of Southeast Alaska. In keeping with an expedition mindset, six months also seems like the perfect amount of time to squeeze the best part of living within the confined spaces of a boat without feeling burned out.
When the weather begins to turn in October, we’ll either winterize the boat at Shilshole with a vessel watch service or sublease the slip and haul out in Anacortes (we’re still deciding that part) and make the three-day drive to Arizona.
Why Arizona? We love the glorious winter weather. A lower cost of living and tax burden also helps. And importantly, we’ll be within driving distance of our kids in Los Angeles and Colorado Springs.
Our new home requires little maintenance and is in a community with plenty of leisure activities. I am looking forward to wearing flip-flops and short sleeves in January while I plot and scheme our cruising itinerary for the coming year.
Six months of warm weather, desert hikes, flushing the toilet without worrying about the current level of the black water tank, pickleball, bad golf, Seattle Mariners baseball spring training, and exploring the town of Verrado in our golf cart is just enough time to begin pining once again for the greens and blues of Northwest boat life. We’ll lock up the house in early May and make our way back to Indiscretion for another season.
As new snowbirds, I know we’re following the same well-trodden path as many like-minded Washingtonians grown tired of the winter rain and gloom. Yet, I can’t help but feel we’ve found a way to follow the sun with our summers aboard Indiscretion that still breaks a little from tradition.
How long can we keep up this hybrid trawler-desert lifestyle? I don’t know, but I’d sure like to find out.
[caption id=“attachment_1115” align=“alignleft” width=“800”] The new back porch.[/caption]
I’ve kept a journal for most of my adult life. I got started in my early twenties filling dozens of blank journal books. Ten years ago, I went digital with an app called Day One, and I have been using an iPad to journal since then. My journal holds thousands of entries — over a million words — spanning more than thirty years of private thoughts and memories.
Day One is my most consistently used app for the past decade. The app provides a calming, distraction-free writing interface and an end-to-end encrypted syncing service that keeps my writing secure but available on all my devices. It handles photos beautifully, accepts audio and video entries, automatically captures metadata about your writing environment like location and weather, and links automatically with Instagram. Journal templates, writing prompts, and the “On This Day” personal history review round out an incredible journaling experience. I enjoyed it so much that I even took the time a few years ago to type in my old paper journals to have a complete digital record of my life’s musings.
And yet, I’ve had this nagging idea that I should give up on Day One and start using Craft as my daily journal software.
Why would I leave Day One?
On the surface, I’ve wondered if I needed anything more than a basic writing app for my journal. After all, I wrote for years and years with just pen and paper. Did I need a dedicated app with another paid subscription?
Yet, my true interest is more profound than saving money or mere simplification. It’s widely known that to write well; you have to read. There’s no better on-the-job training for an aspiring author than to read the works of other writers. It’s less commonly understood how many writers keep a private journal and, more importantly, how they leverage their private missives as inspiration for their published works. Henry David Thoreau, Joan Didion, and Susan Sontag were avid journalers who attributed at least part of their success to keeping a diary. David Sedaris and Joyce Carol Oates both consider their private journals to be critical parts of their writing process. Ralph Waldo Emerson filled nearly two hundred journal volumes over his lifetime, which he frequently consulted as source material for his essays and speeches. He spent months cataloging his journals to make access easier.
A reason I’ve maintained a journal for so many years stems from a deeply-held desire to become a published author. My earliest journal entries make this point again and again. When I root out the source of my few published pieces, each can be traced back to its origin in my journal.
As much as I love Day One, Craft has stolen my heart as an innovative note-taking and writing app that I’ve used for a little over a year as my knowledge management system. Modeled after Professor Luhmann’s Zettelkasten system, I use Craft to house about a thousand interconnected notes and insights from books I’ve read. The power of connecting reading notes through a system of links and backlinks is truly astonishing once you open your mind to the possibilities. I’ve shared how I use Craft to leverage what I read, and it’s this versatile linking capability that has drawn me to use it for my private journal.
What if, like Emerson, I took steps to make my journals easier to access when I’m writing for others? What if I brought together my journal writing and reading notes into the same cross-linked system? Would the organic connections I’ve discovered from my reading grow deeper through close association with thirty years of journals? Could swirling together my journal writing and book notes in a system like Craft make me a better, more productive writer?
Might the convenience of having all my writing in one place, fueled by the connecting power of links and backlinks, outweigh the benefits of a dedicated journaling app?
To answer these questions, I launched an experiment: I kept my daily journal in Craft for an entire month to see whether or not these private musings would infuse greater insights into my Zettelkasten system and, ultimately, better writing.
As part of the experiment, I imported 3,200 journal entries into Craft to test its search and linking capabilities (see the end of this post if you’re interested in learning how to export Day One to Craft). I initially expected to use Craft’s Daily Notes function but soon decided against that. The implementation of daily notes in Craft felt half-baked and disconnected from the central note-taking system. Instead, I created a “Journal” folder in the main Craft notes area, alongside my reading and permanent notes.
A Month of Journaling in Craft
Here’s what I learned after thirty consecutive days of journal writing in Craft:
Performance
I was concerned that Craft might lose its pep with several thousand journal entries spanning more than a million words added to its data banks, yet performance remained snappy. Search results were near-instantaneous, and syncing updates between the Mac and iPad were as fast as ever.
Security
Craft’s syncing system does not provide end-to-end encryption like Day One. I wasn’t very concerned about security or encryption for my reading notes. But my private journal? That’s a different story. In the end, I decided to accept the security risk for the promise of new insights and writing productivity garnered by a connected journal.
Writing Experience
I found the writing experience in Craft to be mostly pleasing. I hid the navigation sidebar with a keyboard command (CMD-) to provide a clean, distraction-free writing environment. Numbered lists, bullet lists, pictures, and even Apple Pencil drawings were easy to add. I enjoyed moving entire paragraphs around in my entry with just my index finger. But, there were some annoyances. Craft doesn’t permit a change to its default font or font size. I usually write in my journal before bed. In Day One, I scale up the font to make it easier on my tired eyes. In Craft, I found myself straining a bit when I wrote at the end of the day, wishing I could make that font a little easier to see. And while I generally don’t spend too much time editing my journal writing, I found Craft’s Undo capability tedious. While Day One will quickly erase an entire sentence with just a couple of CTL-Z commands, Craft insists on undoing each character, one by one, even to the point of redoing and undoing typos. It’s a small thing, but enough to pull me out of the writing trance when it happened, and something that more mature writing apps handle better. But, these are minor complaints. The overall writing experience in Craft was positive.
Search
With my journal now part of Craft, I could finally sift through decades of personal writing for insights to link to my knowledge system. Yet, I soon discovered that searching Craft with all those journal entries had limitations. Before this, a CMD-O search in Craft usually produced interesting and relevant results. Now with thousands of rambling journal entries thrown in, a search wasn’t as reliable or valuable. For instance, a CMD-O search in Craft for the word fatherhood produced a list of 30 randomly ordered documents. The same search in Day One found 65 entries, ordered properly by date. I learned Craft enforces a hard limit of 30 documents using this on-the-fly search method, though it’s unclear how it decides which to present. Craft’s dedicated search pane found all 65 fatherhood journal entries, but reviewing the search results was cumbersome. The journal entries were again presented in a random order, and the scroll bar persistently leaped back to the top of the list when I clicked on an entry, losing my place. This made a review of a long list of search results very challenging.
Further, Craft’s search functionality is ham-stringed by its reliance on text blocks. For example, If you search for a journal entry with the words fatherhood and marriage, Craft will only find documents where the words appear in the same paragraph. If the search words appear in different paragraphs of the same document, Craft won’t find it. Day One had no such limitation.
Dates
Dates are the universal building blocks of every journal. Since Craft is primarily a note-taking app, it doesn’t provide much context on the date something is added to the system. This can make finding entries for a particular day, week, or month more challenging. I partially solved this by appending the date to the journal entry’s title, so I can at least view the date as I scroll through a list of entries. But, there’s no easy way to zoom to a particular time period in Craft like you can with Day One.
Linking Struggles
Connecting thoughts through the power of two-way links was one of the main reasons I wanted to try Craft as a journaling tool. Surprisingly, I struggled to apply links when I journaled, and when I did, they served as a work-around to apply a tag vs. a legitimate link. This troubled me since creating these links comes so easily when I’m writing and curating reading notes. It seems my mental mode when I write in my journal doesn’t lend itself to self-editing or analytical reasoning. I must journal from a whole different side of my brain, favoring feelings, vague intuitions and dreams over links and connections and knowledge building. The writing fizzled any time I stopped to scan for potential links as I journaled. This happened again and again.
The Return to Day One
After a month of journal writing in Craft, I realized the truth. My journal isn’t meant to be poked or prodded, linked, or back-linked. For me, the act of writing every day in a journal is therapy; writing how I feel in the moment keeps me healthy and balanced. My attempt to elevate the process in Craft only diminished the meditative value of the journal writing, while producing little in the way of new connected insights. Not only that, but my system of carefully curated wisdom in Craft felt swamped by a tidal wave of mostly unremarkable and repeated personal observations, which obscured much more than it uncovered.
Before importing my journals, everything in Craft had been vetted and polished to contribute to my understanding of the world and what it means to be human. The source of these insights was gleaned from other writers’ books, but each note was carefully distilled and refined in a personal way that is meaningful to me. While my journals are comprised of all my own words and heart-felt reflections, they’re raw and meandering and filled with empty calories, which simply aren’t suitable for the wisdom I collect inside Craft.
So, my journaling experiment ended with a return to Day One, keeping Craft apart and sanctified as my knowledge system.
Back in Day One, I felt a new appreciation for the soft, cozy feeling the app offers the constant journaler: the writing prompt that stirs your imagination as you open the app; the time travel of reading your past “On This Day” entries that transports you back ten, twenty, even thirty years ago; the comfort and security of end to end encryption of my most private thoughts; the easy swiping through the past week’s entries to connect you to the story arc of your life; and maybe most important: that precious altered state you enter as you write for just yourself without any expectations or demands … but honesty.
This experiment may not have resulted in any new Emersonian journal insights, but it did ultimately lead me to a better way to leverage my journal writing in Craft. As part of my weekly review, I now take some quiet time with the analytical side of my brain to reread the previous week’s journal entries for insights and ideas that add something meaningful to my knowledge system in Craft. It’s the perfect way to maintain the therapy of my journal process while leveraging the best of my thinking in Craft. And since my lifetime of journal writing resides digitally in Day One, I’m just a couple clicks away from discovering those lost insights lurking inside this vault of my life’s experiences and musings.
Afterward: How to Export Day One to Craft
Here are the steps I took to export over 3,200 Day One journal entries and 700 embedded photos to Craft. I used the Bear and Hazel apps to help me in the process.
In Day One, I used the “Export … JSON” function to export all journal entries.
In Bear, I deleted any notes in the library, emptied the trash, and restarted the app.
I imported the Day One JSON file into Bear.
In Bear, I used the “Export as Markdown” function with “export attachments” checked. Craft limits each import of markdown notes to 2,000. To get the linked images to come across, you need to make sure your Bear export falls below this limit. In Bear, I selected about 1,500 entries and saved the export into an empty folder on the desktop. I called it Bear 1.
I repeated the process for the next 1,500 entries and again for the remaining entries. Folders Bear 1, Bear 2, and Bear 3 were now populated with markdown text files and folders of images and PDFs.
If my original Day One entry didn’t have a title, it used the first paragraph of the entry as its title in Craft, which was too long. I wanted to shorten that to a consistently formatted date. If it did have a title, I wanted to append a consistently formatted date to that title. I created a few simple rules in the excellent Hazel app to remedy this.
In Craft, I imported the contents of the Bear 1 folder using the “Markdown files” option. This added the first batch of journal entries to a newly created folder called Bear 1 inside another newly created folder called Imported Notes. This is important: I waited until the process concluded, and Craft was done syncing. In my case, this took about 15 minutes with my slow internet connection. If you move the entries out of the import folder before the sync is completed, many of the images in your entries won’t sync.
I repeated step #7 for Bear 2 and Bear 3 folders (this only applies if you have more than 2,000 entries in Day One). Again, I waited for each to fully sync before proceeding. I tested the sync on an iPad to see all the entries (and images) to confirm everything was working.
I moved the entries out of the Bear 1-2-3 folders into a Journal folder at the highest level in Craft. To do this, I had to select all the entries and keep scrolling down to the bottom of the window repeatedly to make sure I got them all.
For new entries written in Craft, I used the “/Date Today” keyboard command to append the current date to the end of the title to match the format used in the above Hazel rules.
Have you ever run across a book you know you’ve read but can’t recall much about it? Or, come across a passage in a book while you were reading that seemed important — something you knew you could use at some point in the future — but didn’t know where or how to save it so you could find it again?
Too often, I’ll pick up a book I’ve read just a few years back and feel a familiar sense of despair. I may have spent hours of study at the time, but it’s already become a blur. And how many hours of my life have I spent searching for something I read but can’t find?
For someone who invests a thousand hours a year reading, this kind of poor knowledge return always bothered me. I needed a simple system to make better use of the time I spent reading, but didn’t distract or pull me away from the flow of reading itself.
I’m pleased to share that two innovative apps — Craft and Readwise — have finally become that system for me. Both require a paid subscription, and one works only with Apple devices, so they aren’t for everyone. Yet, using these two apps has improved my reading retention, and perhaps more importantly, unlocked a way for me to consistently integrate what I read into a broader system of curated thought and wisdom.
What follows are the methods I employ in the reading system across three key activities:
(1) Capturing notes and quotes from my reading;
(2) Curating what I’ve captured inside my note-taking system; and
(3) Compounding the knowledge and insights I’ve gleaned with daily reviews and Zettelkasten-style linking.
There are a few caveats I’ll share before diving in. First, these workflows only apply to books I actively read with an alert mind and a notebook and pen nearby. The books I read for pleasure at night before bed don’t see much action in this system. Second, we’re in the early innings of a golden era of note-taking and reading technologies. The tools and techniques I’m using in early 2022 will continue to evolve as new capabilities and services emerge. And finally, I have no financial incentives or affiliations with Readwise, Craft or any other service or product mentioned in this post.
Phase I — Capturing
Capturing insights from my reading is the first phase of my system. I’ve learned that to remember and learn from what I read, I need to take notes. This part of the system is decidedly old school. If I’m reading an actual book, I almost always have a pen in my hand to mark passages or scribble notes in the margins. If I’m reading on Kindle, I highlight passages with my finger, but jot notes down on paper, usually in a Field Notes notebook. I’ve gotten in the habit of summarizing the main points of what I’ve just read to help forge a mental lock on the material. Often, in the process of putting something in my own words, I stumble upon some new insight I hadn’t comprehended at first blush. I also occasionally reflect on what I’m reading in my journal.
I use Readwise to import highlights and annotations from Kindle ebooks and online articles using the Pocket read-it-later app. Readwise is a subscription service that gathers and resurfaces highlights and annotations from books and periodicals. Readwise integrates with almost 20 reading sources. Kindle and Pocket highlights sync to Readwise automatically, so I don’t have to think about it while I read.
Capturing quotes from printed books is a Readwise superpower. The OCR engine inside the Readwise app is fantastic. Snap a picture of the page with your iPhone, pick the beginning and end of the highlight with your finger, tap the book (it remembers what you’re reading), and type in an optional page number. If you want to include a note with the highlight, tap the record button and add it with your voice. I batch my capture of highlights in chunks, and each takes about 20 seconds to process. When finished, all those highlights and notes are now magically part of Readwise.
Capturing a highlight from a printed book in Readwise is fast and accurate.
Besides books, I read a lot of online articles and blog posts, but I resist the urge to read these on the fly. Instead, I save them into Pocket and take time on the weekend to read through them all at once. I enjoy the reading experience on Pocket’s iPad app, and it’s a simple thing to add articles, even those behind paywalls. The free version of Pocket allows up to three highlights which is sufficient for most pieces. Highlights I make in Pocket flow automatically into Readwise.
Once a week, I archive the best Pocket articles into DevonThink for future reference. DevonThink is a tremendously powerful document storage app that I use to keep various personal and professional files, including the entire ship maintenance system for our trawler, MV Indiscretion. DevonThink can save Pocket articles as bookmarks, web archives, PDFs, Markdown, or plain text, and I can easily link to them from other apps (like Craft). I love having an established workflow for online articles. Nothing important I read falls through the cracks.
Reading system flow diagram
Phase II — Curating
The process shifts from Readwise to the Craft app in the curation phase. Craft is a markdown note-taking app with powerful linking capabilities that I adopted about a year ago for all my reading notes. You can read more about why I love Craft here.
When I finish a book or article, I create a new literature note in Craft that will ultimately include my notes, favorite highlights, and a personal review of what I’ve read. I keep a folder of reading templates in Craft to bring consistency and completeness to the process. I have templates for fiction, non-fiction, essays, and articles. For example, my fiction template has a section for the plot, characters, key themes, questions I had during my reading, favorite quotes, and my overall review of the book.
With the literature note now created in Craft, I copy in the highlights and annotations from Readwise with its custom markdown export function. Some note-taking apps like Roam or Obsidian can be integrated directly with Readwise, but this really isn’t necessary. I like having control over when I bring in my reading highlights, which isn’t any more complicated than a simple copy and paste.
Next, I copy in my handwritten notes from the margins of the book or Field Notes. I’ll flip through my journal in Day One and copy in relevant passages I wrote during my reading.
At this point in the process, the literature note is quite a jumble of highlights, journal entry excerpts, and note fragments. I sort through it all and try to bring forth order. Luckily, it’s simple to rearrange blocks of text in Craft, so I move things into proper sections and rewrite or expand on my notes. I summarize the main ideas of the book and any takeaways.
Finally, I try to think more broadly about how what I’ve read connects to other books or concepts in my reading system. This is where links come in.
Linking is a Craft mainstay. Type the @ symbol in a note, and you can create links to other notes within Craft. I add links at the block level from inside the book note to related permanent notes (or other book notes). Block-level links are truly a Craft superpower. Many Zettelkasten proponents insist on creating stand-along “atomic notes” to get the true benefit of a linked note system. I think Craft’s block-linking capabilities do a better job of preserving the continuity and context of the literature note, while producing excellent backlink references inside the destination note. Whether you use atomic notes or block-level links from inside your notes, this connection between notes serves as the backbone of a knowledge system that generates an ever-growing convergence of insights.
An example of a permanent note in Craft.
Phase III — Compounding
This brings me to my system’s final and most valuable phase: the compounding of knowledge and wisdom from my reading. I compare this phase to the compounding of interest on your retirement savings. The more you save, the faster it seems to grow, until eventually, the interest outpaces the principal. Midway through this past year, I reached that crossover point in Craft when the connections between books, world views, concepts, themes, and ideas began forming at an accelerating rate.
There are three primary methods I use to promote this knowledge compounding effect: (1) creating or updating permanent notes of ideas or concepts that run through my reading; (2) daily Readwise reviews; and (3) open-ended exploration of the system, which I affectionately call my Craft Time.
Permanent Notes
In my system, permanent notes are concepts, scientific principles, philosophical beliefs, genres, human conditions, cultural practices, etc. — thoughts or ideas that span across the books I read. An eclectic list of examples: Field Theory, Tides, Origins of Religion, Sobriety, Hindsight Bias, and Memoirs. I currently have 130 permanent notes in my system, yet I still frequently encounter new themes or concepts in my reading that don’t exist in Craft. If I think it’s worthwhile, I’ll add the link anyway, which creates a new note in Craft’s Inbox. Later, I’ll open the note and bring it to life as a proper permanent note. This almost always starts with a CMD-O search through my system for any related notes that might deserve a link.
Searching a well-populated Craft database of your reading notes and inner thoughts invites serendipity and wonder. The search results are near instantaneous and displayed in a sensible order — documents with the search term in the title first, blocks next — with a preview of each result.
A CMD-O search in Craft always yields interesting results ...
In the early days of using Craft, these searches were ho-hum. But now, after curating hundreds and hundreds of interconnected notes, searches frequently yield something unexpected, insightful. With a few keystrokes, I discover connections to similar ideas in other books I’ve read in the past; call it my personal Wikipedia, written in partnership with the authors I most admire, just for me. How else would I connect Cheryl Strayed’s appreciation of solitude while hiking the Pacific Coast Trail with Susan Orlean’s happy time in a crowded public library or Maria Popova’s sanctuary within the pages of her private diary?
I usually discover other books or notes that relate directly or indirectly, and I add the appropriate links to these newborn permanent notes. I almost always sigh to myself at this point. How many books have I read over the past three decades that touched on this theme that are now gone forever from my mind because I didn’t have Craft?
Finally, I’ll add the permanent note to my master index, known in PKM circles as as Map of Content. But rarely is this the end of the note’s evolution and growth. Once a note enters Craft — and I suspect also my subconscious — I find myself adding more and more references and links to related content in fits and starts over time.
Daily Readwise Reviews
One of the benefits of being a Readwise subscriber is the daily review of a random selection of your reading highlights. These arrive by email or inside the app itself and follow a pattern of spaced repetition to help you improve retention. You can set how many highlights you want to review each day and create themed reviews that pull from selected books or tags. I was an early adopter of the Kindle e-reader, so I’m able to revisit a veritable treasure trove of highlights I captured years and years ago.
These morning reviews provide an opportunity to think deeply about a handful of highlights from a population of more than a thousand I’ve captured. For each one, I ask myself a series of questions. Why does this highlight resonate with me? Does it support something else in my reading system? Could I write something of my own that stems from this quote?
These review sessions almost always lead me into Craft to edit a particular permanent note, add a new link from that day’s highlight, or record a new writing idea or topic (which I also keep in Craft). It’s a rare day that I don’t add or revise my reading notes after a Readwise review.
Daily Readwise review examples on iPhone
Craft Time
I’ll call out my third way of compounding knowledge as simply Craft Time. More and more, I feel drawn to explore and broaden my reading notes, almost like seeking the dopamine hit from social media apps like Facebook or Twitter. Yet, here, the content is uniquely tailored to me, and in a sense, constantly growing and changing as I add and connect notes and ideas. Instead of refreshing an endless Facebook feed, I am exploring pathways of thought that are at once familiar but also entirely novel to me.
In practice, this involves reviewing and adding links between meaningful passages of books and articles to appropriate themes; developing notes for new themes or ideas; and most recently, breaking apart and propagating notes that have grown too large. Sometimes, my Craft Time is simply open-ended discovery. Scanning the backlinks from my notes on Friendship, Regret, Mortality, Meaning of Life, or Time can transport me mentally — sometimes quite spiritually — to a place I would be hard-pressed to find another way.
I recently read Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I read this twenty years ago, and it was one of those books that had fallen into that blurry category of non-remembering. This second reading mesmerized me with its beautiful observations of the natural world set alongside a backdrop of religion and philosophy. Before long, I was comparing Dillard’s breathtaking assessment of the vastness of the universe with similar musings from Blaise Pascal and Neil deGrasse Tyson. It’s like this reading system of mine has unlocked something in my brain that now permits me — no, implores me — to step outside the single book and see patterns and themes across books, across genres of literature, across vast swaths of science and philosophy.
In Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book, he describes the most advanced and challenging reading level — Syntopical Reading — as reading many books on the same subject and studying the differences and similarities in themes, ideas, arguments, and styles. I can’t say I often live up to Mr. Adler’s standards, but I think this system in Craft approaches his syntopical ideal with its blossoming cross-reference links and aha! insights that emerge from my time with it.
Is It Worth It?
Cost will be an issue for anyone considering a reading system like this. Between Readwise and Craft, I’m shelling out $150 per year in subscription fees. That might seem like a hefty outlay for reading, given there are free or less expensive options. For example, Readwise offers Bookcision, a tool that allows you to download properly formatted Kindle highlights for free. Obsidian, a popular PKM app, offers a capable free tier and supports at least one free community plug-in to download Kindle highlights.
While I could cobble together a free solution, it’s worth it for me to pay for a seamless experience. For me, the benefits accrue in three ways:
More focus, less distraction. Both Readwise and Craft offer an attractive, uncluttered design and user interface that promotes thinking over futzing with software settings. Focus is hard enough to come by these days, and I appreciate the calming interface these apps use in elevating my book highlights and notes. How do you put a price tag on sustained concentration?
Nothing slips through the cracks. No matter what or how I read, Readwise captures my highlights without thinking about it. While Bookcision or an Obsidian plug-in might work fine for Kindle highlights, what about printed books? Or web articles? I could process these manually with an iPhone scanner, copy and paste them into the proper text file, and then return to my reading. But for me, that’s the whole point of having a reading system. I can focus on the text without the worrying distraction of how I’m going to act on what I’m reading.
Higher return on investment. In the course of a year, I’ll read around 60 books and many hundreds of articles and essays. At typical adult reading speeds, this means I spend at least 1,000 hours each year reading. In addition, I spend about $1,000 a year on books and news subscriptions. Between time and money, my investment in reading is considerable. For me, spending a little on tools to ensure I get a great return on that investment is a no-brainer. At 15 cents per reading hour, I assure you that I am getting a good return on Readwise and Craft.
A Wish List
While I am pleased with this system, there are few things that I hope will improve in the future:
Kobo Support in Readwise. I read about half my books on Kindle, but am very interested in switching to the Kobo e-reader to lessen my reliance on Amazon as a company, and enjoy a better reading experience when borrowing books through Libby. Readwise doesn’t yet provide a way to import reading highlights and notes from Kobo, so I’m staying put with Kindle until that functionality exists.
Tighter Readwise and Craft Integration. I’m using a custom markdown export tool from Readwise to bring my highlights to Craft, but it requires the use of a web browser and text editor to make the transfer. having a built-in integration with Craft or a way to copy the highlights out of the Readwise app itself would be an improvement.
A Better Solution for Reading Articles. Pocket works for my article reading, but there are some downsides. The free version limits you to just three highlights, and you’re not able to add any notes to what you’ve highlighted. Readwise has announced their own read-it-later app called Reader which I’m told will provide a better overall reading experience. I’ll be very curious to try this out when it’s eventually released.
Smarter Reading
I can’t help but feel both excited and wistful about the state of reading today. As a lifelong bookworm, I am thrilled that technologies have emerged to take reading retention and knowledge assimilation to new levels. I am now more inclined to tackle difficult books because I have a method to mine and refine their gems of wisdom.
But, part of me laments the fact that these technologies didn’t exist when I was younger. I cannot even begin to imagine the level of knowledge a system like this would yield after thirty years of continuous use. While I read mainly for self-improvement and entertainment, can you imagine the power of a reading system like this for a doctoral candidate writing a thesis? Or a writer collecting research for a book?
They say the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The next best time is right now. There’s never been a better time to become smarter in how you read.
Questions about this reading system with Craft and Readwise? Leave me a note in the comment section below.
As I walked through the throng of travelers at LAX recently on my way to a flight that would be canceled the minute I got to the gate, I reflected on how change is the only real constant in life. In less than a week, I found myself hurrying through crowded airports in Seattle, Denver and Los Angeles (fun fact: these three airports accounted for 60% of all holiday flight cancelations). From Denver, I drove 1,200 miles to Los Angeles in a Jeep with Connor and his ten-month-old puppy, listening to baseball podcasts (yes, that's a thing) through Colorado and New Mexico. The music changed to hip hop in Arizona, and I felt nostalgic for the podcasts. I paid nearly $7 per gallon for gas in California and felt nostalgic for Arizona. We survived freeway driving in the rain as we neared Los Angeles with Connor relying on his 19-year-old reflexes -- or the Force -- to weave in and out of 80-mph traffic.
Mallory hosted us at her beautiful apartment near Santa Monica. She's only lived there a few months but showed us around her bustling neighborhood like a native. I can't believe this young lady who grew up on an island of 10,000 is now so at ease in a city of four million. We picked up Lisa at LAX later that night in a downpour. And defying the promise of the song and our much-needed dose of Vitamin D, It really does rain in Southern California. Serious drenching rain, like the kind I used to see in the rain forest near Forks.
With the four of us together, we did the usual holiday stuff, but in a new way: last-minute Christmas shopping at an open-air mall in the pouring rain, Christmas Eve ramen, a marathon Monopoly game made longer by Lisa's insistence on gifting money to her children and thereby violating the very premise of the game (!), a requisite walk through Marina del Rey to gawk at boats, and Christmas Day with extended family in Costa Mesa. Here I got to meet the next generation of little ones -- Jackson, Avery and Effie -- and as I helped them play with their Christmas toys, I couldn't shake the feeling that time had somehow looped back on itself, and I was a new dad, and Mallory and Connor were little again, and that life stood still.
For many years, our holidays repeated a predictable pattern at our island home. The same setting, the same meals, the same corner with the same kind of Christmas tree, the same wintry night on the same porch, looking out at the night sky and sea. Yet, life is forever changing, renewing, and reshaping. As Alan Watts said, "the only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance." Long-standing traditions can be a comfort, but on this family holiday, with its unexpected detours and moments of sheer bliss, I learned a new kind of music. And it's time to dance.
It’s been a year since I adopted Craft as my primary research and note-taking app. I shared my impressions of Craft early on, but I thought I would provide an update on how I’m using the software and why, with all the other choices available in the personal knowledge management (PKM) space, I’m still all-in with Craft.
I use Craft as a Zettelkasten-style note-taking system fed by a healthy reading habit. I take notes on things that interest me so that I might use this knowledge to make better decisions and inform my own writing. Before Craft, these notes were scattered across note cards, journals, and the margins of books — locked away and seldom consulted. I had this uneasy feeling that I was wasting my time taking notes at all. But no longer. Over the year, the notes I created inside Craft have taken on a life of their own, approaching that mythic “second brain” potential. It took a while to reach critical mass, but I find that the time I spend — writing notes, linking notes, and exploring connections — now yields some of my most thoughtful and creative work.
So, yeah: I love Craft. The designers have created and continue to evolve an iPad-first thinking tool that enables me to focus on my ideas and connected thoughts without unnecessary complexity or clutter. It matches my sense of design sensibilities and interface delight; it works the way I think. With the announcement of Craft 2.0 and Craft X, I am more excited than ever about the future of this fantastic app.
In part, my enthusiasm for Craft stems from a short dalliance with Obsidian, another popular PKM app. I spent a few weeks in this alternate note-taking universe when ReadWise released its official plug-in for Obsidian. ReadWise is a service that gathers and resurfaces highlights and annotations from books and periodicals, scratching a particular itch for serious readers. Obsidian has won over many fans with its powerful linking tools on top of plain text files, and this new superpower of syncing ReadWise highlights automatically was too tempting not to try out. I soon learned that Obsidian wouldn’t work for me, and despite the automation with ReadWise, I hurried back to my beloved Craft. But in the process, I learned what matters most to me in using these knowledge and thinking tools that I thought would be useful to share with others who might be thinking about diving into the PKM world.
Six Reasons I Love Craft
1. Design
Craft is beautiful, drawing praise from just about everyone who tries it. The text spacing, the font choice, the intuitive user interface, the colors, and even the app icon options point to a gifted visionary with an intense focus on a near-perfect balance of form and function. Craft reminds me of the best of Apple’s hardware and software designs. But this beauty goes beyond appearance. Dragging a block or a note somewhere in the app (or outside of it) does exactly what you expect it should. Markdown text commands fly from my fingers and transform before my eyes into perfectly formatted text — no arcane symbols or HTML code to disrupt my thinking, no toggle between edit and preview mode to confuse me. My notes appear consistently polished, not janky with placeholder brackets, caret symbols, or exclamation marks. Sync is flawless. Intuitive keyboard shortcuts and slash commands keep my hands on the keyboard and my thoughts flowing without having to think; now, how again do you link to a block in another note? With other apps and Obsidian, in particular, the design and user interface feel like glaring distractions that interrupt flow. With Craft, everything on screen is there for a good purpose, nothing more. The interface fades into the background as I work, precisely what I want in a thinking tool like this.
Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
Since I use an iPad Pro for almost all my work, I need a platform without mobile compromises. Craft was designed for iPad first, and it truly feels that way with no limits in functionality or power. It actually took longer for the Mac app to gain all the iPad features, which is backward from most developed software (Craft’s Mac app just won Apple’s 2021 software of the year award, so I guess it caught up!).
In contrast, Obsidian’s mobile offerings launched late and are still hobbled by functionality gaps and far too many compromises for power use. During my time with Obsidian, I frequently pulled out my old MacBook Pro to do things, which felt jarring in my iPad-centric world.
3. Sharing and collaboration
Craft includes excellent sharing options to other formats: a nicely formatted email, PDF, Microsoft Word, Markdown, and Textbundle, which allows a complete export of your database to other apps like Bear or Obsidian. In addition, notes can be shared between apps like Ulysses, Day One, DevonThink, and Things. Craft allows seamless drag and drop between apps. On the iPad, I often have Ulysses and Craft open in split-screen mode to review my notes and drag over blocks of text to incorporate as I write. Inserting an image into a note from Photos or the web works equally well. It interacts with these other apps in a consistent, predictable way, allowing me to focus on the content. I can share notes with colleagues through a secret link or even publish whole sections of my notes to the web, rendered with all the style and interactivity of the app itself.
4. Innovation
In the past six months, Craft released an astounding 25 updates to the app. New features include a calendar function, integrated daily notes, tables, inline equations, local file storage, expanded app customization preferences, image and PDF annotation, Shortcuts functionality, Markdown export improvements, and significant app performance boosts. Perhaps the most exciting innovation is still to come with Craft X, an open-source plug-in platform that developers can use to create custom functionality within Craft. A ReadWise plug-in is already in testing, and the roadmap suggests we might see features like WordPress publishing, automated templates, and other workflow automation soon. The pace of innovation at Craft is astonishing.
5. Platform confidence
Company stability and sustainability are factors to consider before investing time and money in a product or service. Craft and Obsidian are roughly the same age, so comparing their business strategy for growth is instructive. Craft avoided the freemium model and enforced a subscription fee from the beginning, followed by a sizable round of venture capital to expand the team and fund product development. Between this recurring subscription revenue and the capital raise, cash flow should not be a top concern at Craft. In contrast, Obsidian relies on its two founders for software development and capital. The vast majority of users pay nothing for Obsidian, which puts pressure on the long-term sustainability of the business. Obsidian recently doubled the rates for their optional syncing and publishing services to improve cash flow. Everything else being equal, I would bet on the company with a sustainable business model, capital, and that financial metric that eludes so many startups: positive cash flow.
6. Future proof
One of the raps against Craft is its proprietary database, where it stores your notes. This database structure enables all of the amazing functionality and power of the app, but should Craft go out of business, all your information could technically vanish. In contrast, Obsidian stores your notes locally in plain text, which should always be accessible in the future. I’ve lost access to my share of old word-processing documents due to unsupported file formats, so I had a chance to test Craft’s export capabilities when I moved my notes to Obsidian and back again. The results surprised me.
Craft to Obsidian. The steps to export your Craft data really couldn’t be more straightforward. Select all your notes and use the export to Markdown function. This creates a nested folder of all your notes in Markdown text format alongside images, PDFs, or other files stored in Craft. Next, open the folder as a vault in Obsidian. That’s it. Your folder structure from Craft carries over to Obsidian. The links between documents, even links to specific blocks within a document, come through perfectly. The export of 2,000 notes took under a minute.
Obsidian to Craft. The process of getting my notes back out of Obsidian was surprisingly tricky. While notes in Obsidian are simple Markdown text files, maintaining the critical links between note files, images, and other embedded files is complicated without a proper export function (which Obsidian lacks). Thanks to a tip from Curtis McHale, I used Bear, a competing notes app, to import my notes from Obsidian. Since Bear doesn’t recognize folders, I had to consolidate all my notes from a dozen folders in Obsidian to one catch-all folder to avoid losing links. Bear was able to import all my notes, complete with links between notes, images, and PDFs, and then export them in a format that worked fine for Craft. Once in Craft, I had to refile all my notes back into my folder scheme, which took some time. For software that touts itself as the ultimate in future-proofing, I honestly didn’t expect it would be such a hassle to move my information back to Craft. Bear gets high marks here for serving as the go-between, but it seems like a pretty big gap for Obsidian not to have a proper export function.
Despite the time it took to retrieve my files from Obsidian, I discovered how easy it was to export my information from Craft, which isn’t something you usually figure out until it becomes a critical necessity. I now have very little hesitation with trusting my notes to the Craft with its top-notch export capabilities.
Is Craft for You?
I am sold on Craft as my knowledge tool, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect or necessarily suitable for everyone. Obsidian is popular for good reason. It’s free for most users and available on more platforms, like Windows and Android. Secure encryption of your notes is possible with its optional sync service. It provides more powerful back-link capabilities and unlinked mentions, and a graph view of your linked notes that doesn’t exist in Craft. While the Obsidian interface doesn’t appeal to me, direct manipulation of Markdown and HTML code is the preferred way to write and think for many, particularly programmers. And, because it’s so easy to export my Craft data, I’m keeping Obsidian around for times when I want to dig deeper into unlinked mentions or mine insights from the notes graph.
In Atomic Habits, James Clear cautions about confusing motion with action when getting things done. Motion represents all those things we do before getting down to work. Thinking about it, planning, organizing your desk, making lists, selecting tools, etc. Action is doing the work itself. Since the work is often difficult and draining, it’s tempting to slip into the trap of motion, and switching software tools, like my two-week foray with Obsidian, is the very epitome of motion.
So, my advice is to pick a tool that feels right to you and stick with it. After all, the real value of these tools stems from the thoughts and connections you bring to it, which takes time and critical mass to yield any lasting benefits. After my year with Craft, it feels like we’re both just getting started.
Questions about Craft? Leave a note in the comment section below.
Quoted by Ken Kocienda in his book Creative Selection. Page 187. ↩
We’re in the middle of a wet, windy month here in the Pacific Northwest. A weather phenomenon known as a “bomb cyclone” brought sustained winds of 30 knots and gusts up to 50 knots earlier this month. Since then, successive weather systems, aptly called atmospheric rivers, have pummeled Puget Sound, bringing rain and high winds almost every day. Today is no exception: a new storm has knocked out power to our entire island, so we’ve added the steady hum of our noisy generator to the whistling of 40-knot winds and the percussion of rain strafing the windows.
It is said a mariner’s plans are written in sand at low tide. We’ve already canceled two trips because of deteriorating weather this month. A friend of ours, who rode out the cyclone on his boat up in the San Juan Islands, teased me when I mentioned our change of plans.
“You’re in a Nordhavn! That boat can handle anything,” he chuckled.
He’s right. Nordhavn trawlers are built for heavy weather, with many open ocean crossings under their collective keels. I didn’t cancel our plans because of any limitations of the boat. It’s crew discomfort I fret about.
I recall a conversation about this with the skipper of Epoch, a Nordhavn 47. Scott had graciously welcomed us aboard, back when we were first looking at trawlers, and we enjoyed our first glimpse of one of these beautiful yachts. He shared his plans of taking Epoch down the coast to Mexico and beyond (he and Abby are now cruising the Eastern Seaboard aboard Orenda, a Nordhavn 55). We commended Scott on his selection of such a seaworthy vessel, capable of handling just about any sea conditions.
“I hope to never find myself in the really bad stuff,” he said. “If I do, it means I screwed up somewhere in my planning.”
I like Scott’s way of thinking. It’s nice to have the rough weather capabilities of an ocean-going trawler — just in case — along the lines of buying life insurance. I hope not to require that anytime soon either.
Steady As She Goes
While I do my best to avoid heavy weather, I find I enjoy myself when we’re in the thick of it. I like the feeling of a heavy sea, the sounds of various things shifting in the lurch of a wave, stomach muscles tensing from the pitching fore and aft, the fountains of spray and green water that flood the foredeck ahead of the Portuguese Bridge. I feel especially fond of our little ship as she slides through the whipped-up waves and wind, keeping us safe and warm inside the pilothouse.
[caption id="attachment_1083" align="alignleft" width="800"] Indiscretion underway in a fresh gale.[/caption]
I’ve been caught with too much sail up during squalls in our sailboats, and the feeling then was different: a mix of adrenalin-fueled fear and exultation, my feet braced against the coaming as the boat heeled with the gusts to an astonishing angle and the rig groaned under the pressure of the wind. Sailing seven miles an hour in a gale feels like a high speed car chase on the freeway.
Our watery world on the trawler is mostly insulated from the extremes of wind and waves. Without gauges to inform me, it’s hard to tell if the wind is blowing fifteen knots or thirty. Yet, docking this trawler in high winds does bring me squarely into the present moment. I move up to the flybridge for these occasions for better visibility while Lisa takes her position in the cockpit at the far stern of the boat to handle dock lines. We talk through our Eartec headsets, but I feel a world apart from her up here. I’m exposed to the wind and weather, which shakes me from any lethargy I might have felt in the cozy confines of the pilothouse. I scan the basic instruments on the flybridge dash: an electronic chart, water depth, boat speed, and wind speed, but from this elevated perch, I have all the data I need swirling around me: the height and shape of the waves, the boat’s progress through the water toward the approaching marina, the feel of the wind on my cheek.
Any uncertainty I harbored in trip planning or assessing forecasts vanishes. For 99% of my time aboard the trawler, I am as skeptical and doubting as Mr. Spock, always scanning for trouble. But put me at the helm during an approach to a windy dock, and I’m suddenly a brash Captain Kirk piloting the Enterprise through an uncharted nebula. In a life that’s usually ordered and controlled, docking in high wind brings a raw wildness, like driving down a mountain road in snow and ice with shoddy brakes. Anything can happen, often with onlookers. “Steady as she goes, Mr. Sulu,” I sometimes mutter as we close with the solidity of the windswept dock. Lisa laughs when she hears this on the headset, but it’s a nervous laugh.
Luckily, in our three years of trawler ownership, we’ve managed to avoid the docking mishaps my worrisome imagination had envisioned. Indiscretion’s bow and stern thrusters have saved the day a few times. Still, I’d much rather avoid the whole drama if at all possible. Hence our keen interest in weather forecasts.
Windy, the Great Sage of Wind Forecasts
I used to roll my eyes at the comically unreliable weather forecasts of the nightly news. That sure has changed. An explosion of meteorological observation data fed into sophisticated computer models has vastly improved the accuracy of weather predictions, making even long-range forecasts pretty insightful. We rely on the weather app Windy for our forecasting and trip planning and pay extra for its premium features for the more frequent updates and by-the-hour forecast granularity. It’s been well worth it.
As an example, Windy predicted 42 knots of wind would greet us on our planned arrival at a Nordhavn Rendezvous in Poulsbo last May. Yet, the event was still ten days away.
“How can they possibly predict anything that far in advance?” I scoffed when Lisa pointed out the forecast. “Let’s watch it. I’m sure it will change.”
Three days later, with the rendezvous now a week away, a wind advisory remained in effect: 42-44 knot gusts at the time we planned to arrive. The Poulsbo Windy forecast became our morning topic of conversation over coffee.
Windy was still predicting 40+ knot winds as we got within four days of the event, which was enough prognostication for me. I called the marina and changed our reservation to get there a day early to be safe.
We arrived at the lovely Poulsbo Marina in dead calm. We were the first of more than forty Nordhavn trawlers to attend this biggest-ever gathering. Backing a 46-foot trawler into a 30-foot slip can be interesting, so I was glad to perform this docking without dozens of more experienced trawler captains commenting on my technique from the quay.
We woke the next morning to a beautiful sunny day. Zero wind. Could Windy have got it wrong, we wondered?
Not a breath of wind stirred at 10 am. At noon, a little wind began to ripple the fairways of the marina. But by 2 pm, gale force winds out of the south arrived exactly as Windy had predicted. Indiscretion groaned at her dock lines in 40-knot gusts as we hustled from dock to dock, helping arriving boats get safely tied up. Landing a 100,000 pound trawler gives you a new perspective on the sheer weight of these beasts. You can shove all you want, but no amount of muscle is going to fend off a full displacement vessel pinned to a dock in a blow. A few boats in the anchorage drug their anchors that afternoon as gale-force winds tore through Liberty Bay. Only the heroics of the marina crew in a skiff prevented the collision of a dragging sailboat with a very expensive Nordhavn trawler on an end-tie of the dock.
It still astonishes me that a weather app predicted this gale a full ten days ahead of time. So much so that we now think of Windy as an essential member of the crew. We’ve encountered a few false positives when the high predicted gusts failed to materialize, but I can’t recall a time when we had high winds that Windy didn’t anticipate. I’m sure there are other excellent weather forecasting apps (we have friends who swear by PredictWind), and an iPhone app is no replacement for an experienced weather router for ocean passages, but I won’t sail anywhere these days without checking Windy first.
I Think I Got Cabin Fever
I’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest for most of my life, and yet I can’t remember a longer stretch of wet, stormy weather. We manage to get out and walk the dogs along our island trails during breaks in the rain, but it’s been a full month since we’ve gone anywhere by boat — our longest time on land in a long, long while. While we’ve remained in port, boating friends of ours have continued to ply these windswept waters without shipwreck or other calamity. Perhaps they carry on in blissful ignorance of the looming wind and weather. More likely, they know and don’t care. Ships weren’t made for safe harbors after all.
One of the benefits that comes with retirement is a greater sense of patience. We don’t have the same constraints that would otherwise force us into sailing in inclement weather because of rigid schedules, the bane of every mariner. Taking the dogs ashore three times a day in a rain-and-wave-soaked tender makes us both pause and reconsider. Do we really want to go out in this?
But maybe, just maybe, our fortunes are about to change. This morning’s forecast calls for two more days of high winds with a chance that things might settle down after that. The mere prospect of blue skies and calm seas lifts my spirit. With a decent weather window, we could head for the southern reaches of Puget Sound, or turn the bow north to enjoy the San Juan Islands in the off season. Feeling the thrum of that big Lugger engine beneath me and the gentle roll of a boat underway is the perfect antidote for this claustrophobic stretch of land-based life.
As Aristotle once counseled, “patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.” Let that please be true!
I’m a long-time subscriber of Grammarly, the subscription-based grammar checking and proofreading service. I’m the kind of writer that needs grammar and style checking. No matter how many times I review a draft, the round trip through Grammarly finds some sort of error. It’s tough to proofread your own writing, and incorporating this final check in my process has saved me from some otherwise mortifying bloopers. The cost of a premium Grammarly subscription feels low when compared to publishing articles with these dumb writing errors.
I use the writing app Ulysses for all my published writing. I love its distraction-free environment and its ability to publish directly to WordPress. Last year, Ulysses introduced a solid grammar and style checking tool of its own called Revision Mode. It’s a powerful proofreading tool, and I appreciate how convenient it is to check my text without leaving the app. But, at least for me, it’s not as comprehensive in its error-checking capabilities as Grammarly. When it was first released, I corrected drafts of my writing first in Ulysses with a follow-up check in Grammarly. Grammarly would always find additional mistakes that Ulysses missed. In addition, Grammarly points out wordy or unclear sentences and offers up alternative wording suggestions that are usually pretty good.
Grammarly doesn’t support the Markdown file format that Ulysses uses, so checking the text of a Ulysses document is done by copying and pasting between the apps. The problem with this approach is that any links to external sites get lost in this round-trip process.
I encountered this glitch recently after I publishing a blog post with a bunch of links to other websites. The links in the post-Grammarly document retained the appearance of a proper link with its blue underlined font, but clicking on any of them in the published article took you nowhere. The embedded link instructions were wiped clean. I had to hastily edit and republish the post once I discovered the error.
After this snafu, I contacted the support team at Ulysses and received the following guidance on how to send drafts to Grammarly and back without losing any data. I’m sharing here in case others might benefit from these instructions:
How to Preserve Links in the Round Trip between Ulysses and Grammarly:
When you copy text from Ulysses to Grammarly, perform a right-click › Copy as › Markdown. When you are done in Grammarly, copy the text there as would normally do, but then in Ulysses, right-click again › Paste from › Markdown (not Paste as...). Doing so will preserve any Markdown links in your Ulysses document.
I’ve tested this on both the Mac and iPad versions of Ulysses, and it works perfectly.
The crew of Indiscretion achieved a matrimonial milestone this month — our 25th Wedding Anniversary. This is remarkable, not only because our marriage has lasted far longer than the statistical average, but also because our friends all expected this spur-of-the-moment marriage to dissolve within six months of our elopement in Greece. There had been a large quantity of Ouzo consumed the night before we wrote out marriage vows on a rocky outcropping on Skiathos, so even we wondered early on how this would all work out.
We decide to celebrate our anniversary at Alderbrook Resort and Spa on the southern end of Hood Canal. We could have driven to this beautiful resort from our home on Vashon Island in about an hour, but what would be the fun in that? Instead, we would travel there by boat, which requires voyaging about seven hours north to the entrance of Hood Canal, and then heading south for another seven hours. Such is life at seven knots.
On our way north, we stop for the night in Eagle Harbor on Bainbridge Island. With the cooler October weather, the crowds of boaters we encountered in the high season have vanished. We tie up to the city dock in Eagle Harbor, where we join just one other boat. By late afternoon, another six boats traveling together from Port Ludlow arrive, but there is still a couple of open spots on the dock. Ah, fall cruising!
From Eagle Harbor, we push on for Hood Canal. We consider stopping at Port Ludlow, a favorite waypoint of ours and conveniently located at the entrance to the canal, but the weather forecast for the following day predicted high winds, and we want to make more progress on such a fine, calm day.
In all our years of northwest boating, this is our first time cruising Hood Canal. Part of the reason is the limited clearance under the bridge itself. Roughly 50 feet of clearance exists on the bridge's eastern span, too close for comfort for our former sailboat’s 49-foot mast. The bridge does open for large ships, but it's a hassle. Besides the bridge, the glacial-carved canal itself is extremely deep — some 500 feet even close to shore — limiting the number of suitable anchorages along this pristine 50-mile stretch of waterway.
We pass under the Hood Canal bridge on a beautiful, calm fall day. My grandfather owned a home about a mile from the bridge, and I spent my summers there as a kid, beach-combing on that sandy beach, throwing rocks, sitting around driftwood campfires while my grandfather played the accordion, feeling like life went on forever. He was the captain of a small ferry boat that took two or three cars and a few passengers across the canal where the bridge is now, and I of course adored him. Most of the ideals of how life ought to be came from that man and those summers — moving our family to an island, spending all my free time messing around on boats, and the decision to buy this trawler — all can be traced back in some way to those years. It's funny how we attempt to recreate the carefree bliss of childhood.
After a full day of cruising, we pull into Pleasant Harbor, a popular destination about halfway down the canal. We arrive on a rising tide to navigate the narrow, shallow entrance and soon find ourselves inside a well-protected, glassy bay. We tie up to the state park just past the harbor entrance. The dock has plenty of room and is free for us since we have an annual pass with the State, but we discover there aren't any good walking trails for the dogs. We walk down the highway with cars speeding by closer than I like, but soon find ourselves on a lovely waterfront strand with a couple of large marinas that offer surprisingly ample guest moorage. We'll take advantage of this guest moorage or the nice anchorage at the southern end of the harbor on our next visit if only to avoid walking the highway. And we'll have to check out the inviting dockside pub and grill.
We get an early start the next morning as we depart Pleasant Harbor. A storm system is headed our way later in the day, bringing gale-force winds, and we want to be safely tied up to the dock in Alderbrook before it arrives.
We settle in for a three-hour cruise. The tide is ebbing, so we fight a half-knot current. There are few navigational hazards, no ferries or container ships to evade, and for whatever reason, hardly any logs or other flotsam to avoid. I know from childhood memory that this stretch of water can be treacherous during winter storms. I recall the picture glass window at my Grandfather's waterfront home bowing and flexing during the gusts of one particularly fierce Christmas Eve gale. But today, even with 20 knots of wind on the nose, the sea remains flat, docile.
The morning passes almost hypnotically; the steady hum of the big Lugger engine plays bass to the oldies playlist I have on low in the pilothouse — Beyond the Sea, You Belong to Me, Earth Angel. I sip hot coffee and enjoy the warmth of hydronic forced air heat as a mostly untouched shoreside with all the colors of fall slowly passing by the pilothouse windows.
After three years and thousands of miles under our keel, I am tuned to the boat's operation. My eyes flick to the instrument panel above my head every five minutes to check engine temperature and oil pressure. I glance at the radar screen to my right every minute or so for any new dots behind us that represent overtaking vessels (I see none the entire trip). Unconsciously, I feel for any change in resonance in the main engine and am alert for any new sounds. While off watch and napping, a change in engine RPMs brings me wide awake from the deepest sleep. Even after three years, my heart rate elevates when the coffee maker completes its brew cycle and emits three loud beeps.
We pull up to the sizeable end-tie dock at Alderbrook Resort after this quiet trip from Pleasant Harbor. The predicted wind hasn't yet arrived, and docking is uneventful. I imagine this place fills up in the summer months, but on this October Saturday, just two other vessels share the dock with us. We loll around on the boat after taking the dogs on a hike through a few of the many walking trails that span out from the report. We devour take-out burgers from the resort.
We see every kind of fall weather the Pacific Northwest can drum up on this trip, but our anniversary on Sunday morning brings calm seas and brilliant sunshine. We drop the tender in the water to make the three-mile trip to the Hood Canal Marina for brunch at the Hook and Fork Café (delicious!). We check out the resort grounds with its fire pits, heated pool, sauna and bar. Lisa enjoys a massage at the spa time while I chat it up with resort guests down the docks who are curious about this unique trawler.
We enjoy a nice dinner at the lodge on Sunday night. The staff find out it's our anniversary and seat us at a romantic table for two by the window. We can just make out Indiscretion in the gathering darkness. This is the way to celebrate an anniversary, I think. We skip the Ouzo but still count our blessings.
I spend a lot of time with my nose in a book. Last year, I read 61 books, and I'm on track to read that many again in 2021. Yet, as fast as I read, I can't seem to make a dent in my To-Be-Read pile. So many books, so little time. Sometimes it feels like I'm running on a treadmill with an ever-increasing speed.
Lately, I've been questioning whether this strategy of gulping down so many books is wise after all. When I scan down the list of the books I've read so far this year, a few stand out, but many are already a blur. I hover over a few on the list — wait, did I actually read that?
I'm pretty good at taking notes and highlighting favorite passages for most of the books I read. I subscribe to ReadWise, which provides a terrific way to resurface the best parts of past books I've enjoyed. That review process, along with the ability to automatically import those highlights into Obsidian, prompted me to switch my reading notes over from Craft. And while I do see benefits of these daily reviews and the curation of my reading notes and quotes into a personal knowledge management system, I still feel like I'm somehow not getting the most out of all these hours of reading.
Maybe reading more books isn't the right answer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson taught us to shoot for big goals with his advice to "aim above the mark to hit the mark," though I'm sure he didn't mean that for a reading quota. In Experience, he finds himself drawn to just "the commonest books, — the Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton." Gustave Flaubert seemed to agree: "What a scholar one might be if one knew well only some half a dozen books."
Could deeply reading (and rereading) a few classic books be better than my shotgun approach of inhaling a book or two every week?
In his Lectures on Literature, Vladimir Nabokov said: "Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader." In a series of university lectures, Nabokov shared his take on a half-dozen classics from Marcel Proust, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and others. I've read most of these, but after reviewing Nabokov's deep analysis of these books, I realized I had merely skated over the icy surface of these great works. I did not probe deep enough into the book's structure and writing techniques, did not discover, in Nabokov's words, that "shiver of artistic satisfaction" when a reader truly communes with the author.
Is this kind of deep, analytical reading necessary? I mean, can’t we just enjoy the books in the way the author intended them? Life is short; why read the same books again and again? I imagine Vladimir looking at me over his reading glasses as he delivers his judgment:
If a person thinks he cannot evolve the capacity of pleasure in reading the great artists, then he should not read them at all. After all, there are other thrills in other domains: the thrill of pure science is just as pleasurable as the pleasure of pure art. The main thing is to experience that tingle in any department of thought or emotion. We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.
— Vladimir Nabokov
I slink a little lower in my chair under Nabokov's withering gaze. I know he's right. If I'm going to spend all this time reading, why not aim a little higher?
Last year, I joined a group of like-minded readers on #BookTwitter to read In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. I had a few false starts over the years with this six-volume masterpiece, known for its pages-long sentences and intricate narrative style. Reading just ten pages a day with a cohort of distinguished readers helped me stay on track and enjoy it more. During the hard going parts, I felt better after seeing tweets from others who shared my exasperation. Misery loves company. We finished the final volume together in June — a voyage of more than 4,000 pages — and I was glad to be done with it. Few tingles, and even fewer shivers, I'm afraid. But, I wonder now if that first reading of Proust wasn't simply the preamble to a second, more profound reading? Could I start again, now knowing the storyline and themes, and burrow deeper under the skin of this recognized classic?
I'll be honest: I'm not ready to dive back into Proust. But, I do believe I need to change my approach in reading these classics.
I've joined another #BookTwitter group this month to read George Eliot's Middlemarch, considered one of the greatest novels of all time. I read this a long time ago but remember little about it. With Nabokov's advice fresh in my mind, I've decided to use this book as an experiment in deep, focused reading. For Middlemarch, I'm making some pronounced changes in my reading style:
I'm reading the physical book. I read many books on Kindle, and I love its light form factor and ability to easily highlight passages and look up words. But writing notes in the margins is iffy, and it's harder to flip around in the book. I bought the Penguin Classics Deluxe edition of Middlemarch even though I own George Eliot's complete works in a nice leather-bound set. I want the freedom to mark this book up without remorse, to make it my own.
I'm keeping a book journal. I'm dedicating a Field Notes notebook for this reading with sections for themes, character sketches, chapter notes, and unique vocabulary. These little notebooks are the perfect size to fill with a single meaty book and are slim enough to tuck inside the cover when I'm finished. I will ultimately transcribe the notes I take into Obsidian, but for this reading, I want to keep a physical, handwritten ledger for better synthesis and retention. If I reread Middlemarch (which Nabokov suggests I should), I can review and append to the journal.
I'm reading with focus and attention. I always read a book in bed before sleep, but not this one. I'm setting aside time in my reading room with the book propped up on a lap desk, a pen in hand, and an iPad nearby for tracking down literary and historical references.
I'm going down the rabbit holes. To finish this 900-page book in a month, we're reading 30 pages a day, which translates to about 30 minutes at my usual pace. I'm doubling or tripling that time with this book. Instead of guessing at uncertain historical figures or literary allusions, I'm looking each one up and noting it in the margins. I'm recording new words and their definitions in the back pages of my journal. I'm keeping a running log for each character and a list of themes that recur throughout the novel. I'm writing a summary of each chapter, which forces me to stand back and review what happened, how it moved the story forward, what new questions arose, etc., to gain a better sense of the novel's structure and story arc.
After finishing Middlemarch, I'll have a better sense of whether this deep reading approach provides the kind of return I expect. If it does, I'm very tempted to change my approach to reading in 2022. Forget the pressure of a sixty-book GoodReads challenge or an unending "To Be Read" pile to tackle. Instead, I'll spend the year reading just a few great books, deeply, with fun reads thrown in at bedtime.
We can't slow the race of time, but we can choose to be more discerning and diligent in making use of the time we have. Augustus had the right of it: Festina lente. Make haste, slowly.
For the past ten years, I have been on a mission to eradicate paper from my work and home life. I can now access information more quickly and from anywhere, whether at sea or at the Apple Store where I need to produce the invoice for a dead MacBook Pro. And yet, one hold-out refuses to go gently into that dark night of paper annihilation: my Field Notes notebooks. These pint-sized memo books with their quirky designs and durable paper still travel with me just about everywhere. I sometimes wonder at the irony of using a $1,000 iPad Pro as a lap desk to scribble in a $4 notebook.
With everything else in my life so digitally focused, why do I still fill one of these 48-page Field Notes every three or four weeks?
This morning, I pulled out a year’s worth of tattered notebooks to see if I could solve this mystery. To be honest, I was apprehensive at looking too closely. Part of me wanted to leave well enough alone and not probe, perhaps fearing that I would find a bunch of meaningless jibber-jabber and force myself to give up these little books that I love so much. With some trepidation then, I skimmed the scribbles, diagrams, lists, weird dreams, single underlined words, whole paragraphs of intense, slanted scrawl, arrows, and lots of scratched-out words. Each notebook told a confused story about my state of mind at the time: hopes and worries, looming decisions, crazy, half-baked ideas, and incomplete solutions to problems that troubled me. As I flipped the pages, I watched meandering thoughts morph and solidify under the pressure of continued probing and analysis.
Give me a small canvas of blank paper and a pen, and I can slip into a deeper mental state than I seem to achieve in front of a blinking cursor. After a few minutes of doodles, I may even open a tiny crack into my subconscious. The physical act of handwriting may provide a familiar comfort that allows my mind to settle and focus. Perhaps it’s the simplicity of the interface: no buttons, no battery to charge, just me and my ill-formed thoughts. Maybe the old leather cover I use to carry the notebook and pen, scuffed and softened over many years of use, sends a chemical signal through my fingertips to open, to relent.
Psychologists have shown that writing things down on paper helps you remember better. The folks at Field Notes understand this:
Jamie Rubin, a writer and technology enthusiast, recently returned to notecards for his reading notes after struggling to reap the benefits he expected from keeping these inside Obsidian. I store my reading notes in Craft but have encountered few of the promised eureka moments since adopting this Zettelkasten technique of hyper-linked notes. While I appreciate the ability to retrieve and update these notes quickly, I don’t seem to be able to think as clearly (or as abstractly) within an app like Craft as I do on paper.
In one of Nabokov’s lectures on literature 1, he defines memory as one of the four key attributes of a good reader (or thinker). Whether you remember things by writing them down or searching your Obsidian vault might be a wash. He calls having a nearby dictionary the second important attribute. Here, I tip my hat to the internet. How satisfying it is to tap an unknown word on the screen of a Kindle with my finger, and as if by magic, a well-crafted definition (or translation, or Wikipedia page) appears without leaving my place in the text. But, it’s his final two attributes of a good reader, that of having an active imagination and some artistic sense, that strike me as the hardest to achieve digitally. Artistry and imagination are still the dominion of pad and paper.
When I’m stuck on something, I instinctively reach for my little notebook — not my iPad. And while what I capture is often raw and disjointed, I review these notes every morning over coffee, checking in with my subconscious, allowing fragments to inch together as if by magnetic pull. It might take days or even weeks of scribbles and circled words to reach true clarity of thought.
When Jimmy Buffett has an idea for a song — sometimes just a phrase — he writes it down on any available scrap of paper and stuffs it into an old sea chest. When he’s ready to write some new music, he sits down and pulls out all those scribbles, which I imagine must be torn off bar napkins and beer coasters, and sorts through them, one by one. He says many of his most popular songs marinated in his sea chest before emerging as lyrics.
I do something similar in Field Notes. I reserve the last page of every notebook for my “Compost Heap,” a technique I borrowed from Neil Gaiman’s wonderful MasterClass on storytelling. Here, I write down bizarre images from dreams, lines from songs, evocative phrases, short descriptions of people I’ve met, places I’ve visited — really anything. Over a few weeks, the list grows to a page or two of disconnected images and ideas, and often, I discover a larger mosaic than my conscious mind could articulate on its own.
The whimsy of Field Notes encourages this kind of abstraction. These little books would be plenty happy to record Scrabble scores or grocery lists or meeting notes. I’ve used beautiful leather-bound journals in the past and felt that unease at despoiling that first cream-colored, thick-stock blank page. Something fancy like that would freeze me in my tracks. But a wee Field Notes notebook urges me to scribble thoughts that haven’t left that gauzy symbolic state in my mind or bump together two very different lines of thinking whose offspring becomes a new insight.
Don’t get me wrong: a computer is terrific for capturing, storing and retrieving transactional or reference information. I would never go back to the stacks of files and paper that once littered my office. And while I love the promise of technology helping me uncover new insights and connections, I have come to accept — and celebrate — that my best thinking still takes place within the humble confines of a pen and a Field Notes notebook.
Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature (A Harvest Book, 1980), 32. ↩
In my office, I keep an old photograph of the Buckaroo Tavern in the Seattle neighborhood of Fremont. The photo truly captured the character of the place: two chrome-festooned Harley Davidson motorcycles parked up on the sidewalk out front, bright orbs from the lights hung over the pool tables, and an outstretched arm and pool cue of a patron poised in mid-shot. I spent many nights at this dive bar as a young man. My eyes burned from the cigarette smoke, and the rough-looking biker crowd that congregated at the bar would often chuckle over their beers at this clean-cut accountant toting a pool cue case, but I loved the place. I had the photograph framed when we first moved to Vashon Island. It hangs between a picture of Mark Twain standing before a pool table considering his next shot and a signed photograph of Jack Dempsey in his famous boxing stance. But, it’s the tavern picture that has caught my attention lately as I think back on that long ago life before kids.
You see, Lisa and I returned from a 3,000-mile road trip to drop off our son at college last week. And then, a few days later, we waved goodbye to our daughter as she drove off in her loaded-down Nissan to start her public accounting career in Los Angeles. In the space of a single heartbeat, the house went from cacophony and laughter to a hushed stillness.
We’ve been moving toward this day gradually for decades, but the suddenness caught me off guard, like a stiff poke to the solar plexus. For the first few days, I felt listless, perhaps depressed. It helped to keep busy, cleaning out the clutter and detritus left behind in the wake of these departures. My daughter’s old bedroom is now a nicely furnished guest room. I pass by it on the way downstairs each morning, and the shock of seeing her personality stripped from the room has not worn off. I should probably close the door.
Now I’m doing what any reasonable dad would do in this situation: I’m organizing the tool shed. I’ve measured out the available wall space for an elaborate tool storage system to deal with twenty-five years of disarray. I woke up last night dreaming of tools and freshly-shined equipment hanging in perfect order on the south wall of the shed, which I’m pretty sure has a clinical name in psychological circles.
At night, I’m reading Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart to see if some old-fashioned Buddhist wisdom might help. The title felt appropriate for my situation. The advice here is blunt: lean into the loneliness and despair. Accept that life is impermanent and hopeless. “Nothing is what we thought,” she writes.
Even Rosie, the robot vacuum that haunts our rooms and hallways in search of dust and dog hair, seems out of sorts. Amidst the typical family clutter, I swear she steered for the stray charging cables and hair scrunchies that littered her path, opting for a short night’s work as she squealed out error codes in protest. Now, with no obstacles in her way, she carries out the nightly routine in sullen silence. I’ve watched her run into a wall, back up, and run into the same wall, again and again. I know how she feels.
The phone rings daily with questions and puzzlement: what kind of pots and pans should I buy? Why isn’t the internet working? And most recently, a texted picture of a massive drift of white suds covering the kitchen linoleum after using Joy dish soap in the automatic dishwasher. Still, I know these calls are numbered. Their lives will soon blossom out in every direction, with little time left for mom and dad. Cats in the Cradle has become the soundtrack playing in the back of my mind.
I’ve pondered my own abrupt departure from home at seventeen and the impact I must have had on my parents. I don’t recall any remorse at leaving, so desperate to begin a life of independence. It seems Karma has found me on the receiving end of that same natural impulse.
To be fair, we did plan for this eventuality, knowing the two of us would need to fill in the vacuum of our departed children. We bought an ocean-going trawler yacht that will take us on amazing adventures up to Alaska and down to Mexico — something Lisa and I dreamed of doing long before we started a family. And we still have each other: two lovebirds and best friends who laugh and grow quiet at most of the same things.
As I consider my options for pegboard (galvanized steel, ABS plastic, or good old-fashioned fiberboard?) and the kind of hooks and baskets I will need to organize all my tools and gadgets, I understand this present obsession isn’t healthy. I should be provisioning the boat for an extended fall cruise through the Gulf Islands and Desolation Sound, glad we’re not encumbered with school-age children. Or taking my beautiful wife to Tacoma to find a new dive bar where we can resume a 25-years-in-waiting game of nine-ball.
Yet, I can’t shake this feeling that If I could walk through my little shed and admire the nicely spaced rows of hammers and garden implements, the gas trimmer hanging just so, the old jumble of tools and tarps and junk transformed into calming straight lines and order, then ... well, then I could begin to accept this new reality, to acclimate to a universe where the axis is just slightly off-kilter, like the deck of a sailboat under a broad reach. Call it a last-minute negotiation in a deal already struck — a vestige of permanence before we set ashore in this undiscovered country while the ships burn, leaving no trace but rusted keels in the shallows.
On a boat, the most basic conveniences of life — like running water — require forethought and attention. In this post, we explore how we manage water aboard our Nordhavn 43 trawler.
Ample fresh water aboard Indiscretion is one of the many extravagances we enjoy aboard this expedition trawler. Our Catalina sailboat had just 50 gallons of fresh water, which we stretched to six or seven days of cruising with careful dishwashing and quick cockpit showers for the kids. The trawler holds 300 gallons of fresh water with onboard water-making capability that, in theory, provides us with an infinite supply.
With greater supply comes greater use. Besides washing dishes, we take hot showers every day and wash our clothes in a Splendide combination washer/dryer. Every toilet flush uses fresh water. I wash down the boat using fresh water outlets in the bow and stern after most passages. Even the watermaker uses fresh water during its flushing routine. Between two people, we use about 50 gallons of water a day when we’re cruising. With our 300 gallon tank, that equates to six days of water — ironically, the same as our sailboat.
But Can We Drink It?
Water treatment on our sailboat was pretty simple. Once a year, I treated the 50-gallon tank with a small amount of bleach and let it sit overnight. I drained and refilled the tank twice, then patted myself on the back for a job well done.
On the trawler, it’s not so simple. For one thing, draining and filling a 300-gallon water tank takes a long time, let alone twice. And wasting that much fresh water makes me cringe. But more importantly, bleach damages the expensive membrane in watermakers that use fresh water for periodic flushing and is, therefore, a no-no in our trawler’s water system.
Without our bleach routine, I had concerns about the potability of water from the tanks without some kind of water treatment or filtering process. I considered installing an inline water treatment system, but in the end, we opted for the simplicity of a dockside water filter setup that many RV owners use. We bought an Ultra with VirusGuard from ClearSource that filters incoming dock water in three stages: a 5-micron filter that removes any sediment or rust in the water; a 0.5-micron coconut shell carbon filter for improved taste and smell; and finally, a NASA-designed filter that removes any bacteria, cysts, and viruses from the water before it enters our tank. We keep a Brita water filter pitcher in the galley for drinking water.
ClearSource Ultra with VirusGuard in action ...
We keep the Ultra in the lazarette locker and pull it out when we take on water at docks. The filters last about a year and a replacement set costs about $60 from ClearSource. While dock water here in the Pacific Northwest is generally potable, we definitely noticed an improved taste in our water after switching over to this filter system.
Water, Water Every Where
Besides a large water tank, we have a Spectra watermaker that transforms seawater into drinking water using a desalination process. The system makes 12.5 gallons of fresh water an hour, so we can keep up with our daily usage by running the system four hours a day. For expeditions like our planned trip up the inside passage to Alaska, we’ll run the watermaker in open water while underway and never worry about running short.
The Spectra Catalina MPC5000 MKII Watermaker nestled in the port side of the lazerette.
Making water at anchor is also possible, but comes with some cautions. Our system utilizes two pre-filters — a 20-micron filter and a 5-micron filter — before seawater enters the watermaker itself. When making water in open sea, these pre-filters might need to be cleaned every two or three months. When making water at anchor, the pre-filters might need to be cleaned daily or even hourly. The Spectra provides a pre-filter status on a control panel in the pilothouse during the water-making process that helps you track how mucked up the pre-filters have become.
The process of cleaning (or replacing) pre-filters is straightforward, if a bit disgusting: First, the seacock that feeds seawater to the watermaker must be turned off to prevent flooding the lazarette. Then, you unscrew the filter bowls from their housings with a filter wrench, careful not to spill too much seawater. I learned to keep a disposable aluminum baking pan nearby to catch the inevitable spills. Once the filters have been extracted, they get rinsed using a seawater wash-down hose on the swim platform. Words fail to describe the smell coming off these filters during this hosing-off process: a bouquet of rotten eggs, seaweed, decay, and a dark, primordial stench you hope washes off as it splashes around your bare feet. When the filters look clean and the water runs clear, they get a final rinse of fresh water and spend a couple of days of drying in the sun to kill off any lingering sea life before being put back in rotation for the next filter swap. A pre-filter can withstand a half dozen cleanings like this before needing to be discarded. I pop in a clean pair of filters from a supply I keep near the watermaker and apply a little silicone grease to the o-ring of the filter housing to keep a good seal before reattaching. Finally, I reopen the watermaker seacock, and we’re back in the watermaking business.
Recently cleaned watermaker pre-filters.
We had family join us midway through a long stretch of anchoring during a recent cruise through the San Juan Islands. I had neglected to run the watermaker, and our water tank was getting low. We were anchored inside Garrison Bay on the northwest corner of San Juan Island, which was crowded with boats ahead of the July 4th holiday. I decided to make water in the morning and night to coincide with our daily running of the generator to boost our water supply. However, after just one hour, the pre-filter alarm sounded in the pilothouse. The brand new pre-filters I installed at the start of our cruise were miserably clogged. I cleaned the filters and tried again, only to have the alarm sound again the next hour. Either the bay was too shallow (we had just five feet under our keel at low tide) or too crowded, but I gave up trying to make water after the second alarm. We had to watch our water usage for a couple of days — no showers, careful dishwashing, etc. Leaving Garrison Bay, I ran the watermaker on our two-hour trip to Sucia Island without any trouble and again once we were anchored in Echo Bay to replenish our tank.
I learned I need to be more proactive about managing our water levels when we’re away from docks. I had many opportunities to make water ahead of our stay in Garrison Bay, but became complacent. Likewise, I discovered that some anchorages are much better for making water than others, that making water is better on an incoming tide, and that the best water you can make is underway in open sea.
Did We Just Run Out of Water?
Indiscretion has Tecma electric toilets that magically flush with fresh water at the touch of a button. I still delight in this technological marvel after so many years of pumping seawater by hand into the heads of our sailboats.
About halfway through our recent cruise, I encountered a problem with our master stateroom toilet. Pressing the flush button caused the toilet to make all the sounds of a proper flush, but no water flowed through the bowl. Huh.
I tried the nearby sink. No water. I tried the galley sink. Nothing. I knew the tank couldn’t be empty. If a tap had been left open, we would have heard the water pump cycling. Could the tank itself have developed a leak? My mind raced through all the dependencies we had on running water. Toilet flushing rose quickly to the top. No water, no toilets. I began cursing myself for not keeping a spare pump aboard. A Marco UP6/e supplies our water and runs about $700 to replace. I was waiting to buy one on sale, but hadn’t found a deal before leaving for this trip. Ugh.
I powered off the water pump at the distribution panel and waited a few adrenaline-filled moments before powering it back on. Resetting power to the water pump restored water pressure. Whew! A scan of the Marco operating manual led me to a series of coded blinking lights on the pump itself, which could mean overheating, an obstruction, or a leak somewhere in the system. A quick search on the Nordhavn Owner’s Group forum revealed that other owners with this pump had similar malfunctions without a clear resolution apart from powering off and on.1
That morning, I ordered a spare Marco pump from Fisheries Supply in Seattle by express delivery to Roche Harbor Marina. I may be $800 poorer, but I’ve eliminated a critical dependency aboard this expedition trawler that would disrupt our cruising plans. A captain must keep the water flowing and the toilets flushing!
Questions or comments about water systems aboard Indiscretion? Leave us a comment below.
Once back in port, I checked the water filter that feeds into the Marco pump. After cleaning out a fair amount of debris, the pump has functioned flawlessly. ↩
One of the great joys of anchoring out in a beautiful bay is the free time you have to focus on lingering boat projects. When you’re away from the boat, these issues seem to stack up until a later day. But here in Hunter Bay in the beautiful San Juan Islands? I had plenty of time.
My focus of the day: a wiring problem lurking somewhere in the pilothouse that randomly kept flipping our Maretron system circuit breaker. This happened when I opened or closed the ship’s service panel door, so I suspected a loose wire somewhere.
I had done just about everything I knew to do: wiring checking and connection tightening, temperature reading with an infrared thermometer, voltage checking with a voltmeter, and wire tracing to the Maretron computer. It all seemed fine, which led me to think the breaker switch itself must be failing. This conclusion troubled me. The internet is full of caution about replacing a circuit breaker when the real problem is a short somewhere, akin to bringing down a new canary to your coal mine after the last one up and died.
As I pondered this dilemma, I watched a fellow trawler yacht drop its anchor out in the channel for at least the tenth time today. The boat left the anchorage early this morning, headed out of the bay, only to stop about 500 yards out and drift. They soon dropped their anchor again, but out in the middle of the channel. I thought initially they meant to do some fishing. But an hour later, the boat pulled up the anchor and headed out again, only to stop and drift, then redeploy their anchor. The process repeated all day. It sure seemed like engine trouble.
I decided to take a break from my circuit breaker problem and head over in the tender to see if I could lend a hand. The idea that I might help another boater with an engine issue would have been preposterous three years ago, but I’ve learned a lot since then. Who knows, but maybe I could help? At a minimum, I could tow them into the anchorage for the night.
I arrived alongside the boat to find a flustered skipper. The boat's gas inboard was overheating, and he had run out of ideas on what could be wrong. It was the hottest day in history here in the northwest, and he was drenched in sweat. His first mate smiled, but looked worried.
We talked through the possibilities: clogged raw water intake? Good flow and no obstructions. Bad impeller? Replaced, though the old one looked fine. Coolant level? Topped off. He thought it must be a clogged or corroded heat exchanger. I asked him if he had an infrared thermometer to confirm it wasn't just a bad gauge. He didn't have one.
I motored back to the boat to retrieve my Fluke 62 Max IR thermometer. I learned the importance of carrying one of these indispensable gadgets aboard after our first Northern Lights Training class with Bob Senter. I take temperature readings of a half dozen areas in the engine room when I complete my routine checks underway. Knowing the baseline temperature of your coolant tank, stabilizer system, alternator, prop shaft, etc. can help identify potential problems early if something is running hotter than normal. These point-and-shoot thermometers can also verify temperature readings from digital and analog gauges that can sometimes produce erroneous, heart-thumping readings.
The Fluke IR thermometer in action.
After checking all parts of the engine with the IR gun, the trawler skipper was able to confirm that his engine wasn’t overheating, despite a gauge in the pilothouse saying otherwise. It turns out he had pulled out a faulty temperature gauge on the flybridge last week and planned to replace it at some point. He reinstalled the non-working gauge, and voilà, the pilothouse gauge started working correctly again. He promised to buy an IR thermometer when he got back to his home port in La Conner. His smile as he waved goodbye was priceless.
I returned to my Indiscretion and my circuit breaker problem, feeling good about helping another boater in a jam. Lord knows I’ve been the recipient of some good boating Samaritans these past three years. I finally got to pay some of that goodwill forward. I inspected the circuit breaker again, thinking I would detach it from the ship’s service panel to see if I could detect any cracks or corrosion. That’s when I noticed the single screw that attaches the circuit breaker to the panel was loose. Really loose.
When I opened or closed the panel door, the loose screw allowed the circuit breaker to shift just enough to nudge the switch off. Tightening a single screw solved the entire issue.
The screw holding the Maretron circuit breaker was loose.
I laughed at myself when I realized how simple the problem was. Sometimes we look too far beyond the most obvious solution in front of us. A faulty temperature gauge, a loose screw. As the old saying goes: “When you hear hoofbeats in the night, look for horses — not zebras.”
I have read 50 books so far this year, though it doesn’t feel like I’m really reading that much. I simply cut out the hours I might have scrolled through social media feeds or listened to half-baked podcasts, which freed up more time for reading books. I believe we are experiencing a golden age for reading with technologies like ebooks and digital audio, offering the ability to consume books wherever we are, whenever we want. More published works are available to us, most within seconds, than at any point in history.
Despite these riches, one in four adults in the U.S. won’t pick up a book this year. The typical adult reads just four books a year. Teenagers spend only 4.2 minutes per day reading during weekends and holidays (excluding homework-related reading). According to research by Common Sense Media, these same teenagers spend nine hours a day with digital technology, entertaining themselves with streaming video, listening to music, and playing games. With all that interactive entertainment, it seems the lowly book doesn’t stand a chance.
I’ve been thinking about books and the benefit of reading after attending a recent talk here on Vashon Island with Nancy Pearl, a former Seattle librarian, the author of Book Lust, and a lifelong proponent of reading. Nancy reads a lot, and the two hundred people who came out on a Sunday night for the event clearly share her passion for books. Looking around, I pegged the average age of the audience at around 60. During the talk, I noted a shared sense of handwringing about the demise of the book with young people. An audience member asked about whether young adults would eventually turn to books after growing up on a diet of digital entertainment.
“I hope so,” Nancy said after a pause. “But I’m not sure.” This younger generation has grown up on the immediate gratification of video games and the endless quick bites of scrolling social media. Books require a sustained mental focus, and that may be lacking without constant exercise. Will they ever come around to books?
A recent conversation with my seventeen year old son confirmed something I had long suspected. He holds a low regard for reading despite being raised by two constant readers and surrounded by books throughout our sprawling farmhouse. “You old people don’t get it,” he replied after I pressed him to explain. He lumps books and broadcast television in the same useless basket of low transfer technologies. This hurts as I write this from my little book-lined study, though I can see his point about television.
I’m hopeful he will come around to the lure of reading in his twenties or thirties. I’m chalking it up to a natural rebelliousness inherent in being a teenager. Perhaps if he were raised in a home without readers or books, he’d be carrying around a battered copy of Infinite Jest to the dismay and consternation of his non-reading parents.
This vague worry about the demise of the book has put me on the defensive though. I have a deep-rooted belief about the importance and necessity of books, but I never tried to articulate precisely why I believe this. Might my assumptions be misplaced?
After a little reflection, most all the benefit I receive from reading falls in one of these four categories:
Entertainment. Whether it’s walking alongside Gandalf in the Shire or crouched down next to Jack Reacher behind a boulder with gun-toting bad guys nearby, reading provides an unmatched entertainment. MRI scans of the brain show when people read about an experience, they display stimulation within the same neurological regions as when they go through that experience themselves. Talk about the ultimate virtual reality! When the page disappears, and your imagination takes over, even the largest screen can’t match the power of the experience.
Health. A less well-known benefit of reading is its positive impact on your health. Reading certainly provides access to knowledge on how to live a more healthy life. Did you know that reading can help with depression, stress, and is considered an essential brain training exercise that reduces the chance of developing Alzheimer’s disease later in life? Further, a Yale study of adults over the age of 50 showed that readers outlived non-readers by almost two years.
Learning. A near-universal trait of highly successful people is a constant quest for self-improvement and learning. Like most U.S. Presidents, Harry S. Truman was a voracious reader in his youth, reading some 4,000 books spanning every subject from his town library: “Believe it or not I read ’em all… Maybe I was a damn fool, but it served me well when my terrible trial came.” For me, the main benefit from reading hasn’t come from textbooks, but from specialized knowledge about subjects I taught myself through books. For example, Books taught me how to cure chronic back pain, sail a sloop, build elaborate financial models, lead a team, write a software program, build a garden, and cook delicious meals for my family. I will admit that the internet has become a fantastic resource for learning, and in some cases, it is better than staid old books. For example, fixing my lawnmower via free YouTube videos or learning the craft of storytelling with a Neil Gaiman MasterClass. But for in-depth, immersive learning of a new subject, I still prefer reading.
Wisdom. Perhaps the greatest gift of reading is wisdom and developing a deeper understanding of the meaning of life itself. Anne Lamott sums it up so well: “What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.” How else can we step inside the head of another person, even someone long dead, and see and feel the world as they saw it? Ceridwen Dovey believes that reading “is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks.” People have felt this way about reading for millennia. King Ramses II of Egypt had a special chamber for his books; above the door were the words “House of Healing for the Soul.”
Considering these benefits, it seems crazy not to dedicate time every day to read. At average adult reading speeds and typical book lengths, you could finish 25 books in a year with just 30 minutes of reading a day. Between your commute, bedtime, and all those little periods of dead time during the day when you reach for your phone, pick up a book instead. Before long, you’ll develop a daily reading habit that will make this feel natural, and over time you will reap the amazing benefits of reading.
As we look forward to the new year, set a goal to read more books, and then set aside time every day to read. Your future self will thank you!
I stood mostly naked near the bow of the boat in the early hours of a Thursday morning. The sun hadn’t risen, and it was damp and chilly in my underwear. I hoped other boats anchored nearby wouldn’t witness this act of indignity. Desperate times require desperate measures, I told myself, as I contemplated the orange traffic cone standing before me atop a square yard of fake grass.
It was our sixth day into a month-long cruise aboard Indiscretion, and neither of our two dogs had availed themselves of this onboard privy, despite long passages and persistent coaxing by captain and crew.
On walks back home, they’d let go great streams on every one of these we encountered, barely sniffing it first. Even at the end of a long walk with bladders long emptied, they would find a way to dribble urine at the base of these bright orange beacons. They could not resist.
This gave us the brilliant idea for of a “Porch Pottie” for the dogs to relieve themselves without the hassle of shore leave. We even bought an aerosol spray to mimic the scent they most desire before the act.
“Maybe you should pee on it first,” Lisa suggested on the second day of the cruise. We had chugged along for 14 hours our first day out, with many fruitless trips underway to the traffic cone with the dogs.
“There is no way I’m doing that,” I said. “They’ll figure it out. They’re smart dogs.”
Thus, every morning began the same way. A persistent urging for the dogs to do their business at the traffic cone just beyond the Portuguese bridge. Zero interest. They wouldn’t even smell it. Tugging them to the cone with the leash felt like pushing the wrong ends of powerful magnets together. After ten or twenty minutes with both dogs looking at us like we were crazy, we’d relent and go ashore in the tender.
By the fourth day at anchor, the dogs took sport in the morning routine. If they humored us long enough with confused looks and a strong aversion to the orange cone, they would get to go for a walk afterward. Joyous barks and yips erupted once I began futzing with the tender. They had won again.
“You need to pee on it,” Lisa encouraged. Like that would make any difference.
Cruising with dogs is very popular. I’d say most trawlers we meet have a dog aboard. The necessity of frequent trips ashore means we explore beaches and inland areas of the anchorages while other boaters might stay afloat. Dogs warm up a cold sea berth and stand watch with you on blustery evenings at anchor. Even on our smallest sailboats, we had a dog along. I can’t think of a better way to travel or vacation with a dog than on a boat.
We didn’t know how good we had it with Bouncer, a small Boston Terrier that traveled with us on every cruise we took aboard our sailboat. Bouncer seldom barked. She slept a good part of the day and night. Her bathroom duties were carried out without fuss: she would step carefully into the dinghy in the morning, taking in the watery surroundings as we rowed or motored along, her front paws up on the bow of the inflatable. We had a leash for her somewhere rolling around the bottom of the boat, but we rarely needed it. She would jump out as soon as the dinghy touched the sand, trot about ten yards and pee, then poop. She took no notice of other dogs. She was usually back in the dinghy before I had a chance to properly tie up, ready for breakfast, and then snuggle back into a berth with one of the kids.
[caption id="attachment_563" align="aligncenter" width="525"] Bouncer on a kayak[/caption]
“I miss that little dog,” I muttered, feeling sorry for myself as I stared at the traffic cone, and thought about how different our life is now aboard the trawler with Franklin and Preston.
Franklin is a four-year-old Puggle, a cross between a Pug and Beagle, and the only dog we’ve owned that can’t be trusted off-leash. Should our front door be left ajar momentarily as you carry in the groceries, this sly little bastard will dart between your legs and race to freedom, looking over his shoulder with a look of delight and mischief before disappearing into the woods. Calling him is pointless. His brain is routed through his snout, and the outdoor smells are much more interesting than our shouts to come back. We’ve tried chasing him, but he sees this as a terrific keep-away game, his eyes flashing with mirth as he darts in and out of reach. Eventually, he grows tired or hungry, and trots home, clearly pleased with himself. It’s hard to be mad at him when he loves these romps so much. We live in a rural part of Vashon Island, so there’s not too much trouble this little fella can find here at home. However, afloat and in strange ports, we all worry about what might happen if Franklin were to escape on one of his adventures. One hand for the ship, one hand for Franklin’s leash.
He did escape in Roche Harbor, leaping in a flash from the cockpit to the narrow port side deck, and then down to the dock. In his excitement, he took a wrong turn down a dead-end, but soon reversed course and galloped at full speed toward the dock entrance and freedom. It was blind luck that Connor and Lisa intercepted him on their way back to the boat. We might still be looking for him had he made it to dry land.
Franklin defends our home against would-be intruders with a combination bark-howl that you have to experience to understand. It’s impressive. He employs this howl-bark to repel the UPS truck when it visits our home. Franklin runs from door to window, making a god-awful ruckus for a good three minutes until, sure enough, the truck decides the danger is too great and drives off (after leaving our packages and shaking his head). This near-daily occurrence has reinforced Franklin’s belief that if he barks and howls as loud as possible, the dreaded enemy will eventually retreat.
We hoped Franklin might be less possessive on the boat. Not so much. He soon learned that if he sits on the upper pilot berth in the back of the wheelhouse, he can enjoy a near 360-degree vista surrounding the boat. A fellow trawler captain dared to slowly cruise by and wave - to Franklin’s shock and outrage. He launched into howl-bark mode until the trawler was out of sight, saving us yet again. Ugh. He also defends the boat from kayakers, paddle-boarders, and any form of bird, in particular, the tame Cackling Geese we encountered in large numbers at Sucia Island. These, it turns out, are Franklin’s arch-enemy; his Moriarties. No amount of treats or admonishments could convince him otherwise.
Dog number two is Preston, a five-year-old Boston Terrier, the same breed as our beloved Bouncer, yet so, so different. He’s massive, tipping the scale at 35 pounds which is an outlier for Bostons, yet all muscle and gristle. He’s a rescue dog with extreme anxiety issues. He warmed to Lisa and the kids right away after we adopted him, but he wouldn’t come near me, especially if I wore a baseball cap. After a few months he decided I was OK, and now loves us all unconditionally. Other people or dogs outside our family unit, however, are Not OK. He has nipped more than one of our house guests and has a complete fit should another dog have the nerve to meet us on a walk. He’s a bundle of nervous energy that no amount of love, or CBD, seems to diminish.
Also, he has poop anxiety. He must have been abused as a puppy, for he refuses to poop while in the presence of others. This is a problem on a boat. On a cruise last summer, he went three days without pooping. By day two of the trip, his eyes appeared even bulgier, and his butt was definitely puckering, but he refused to go. Finally, after a long trek on the third day, a volley of poops shot out of his bum while he carried on down the trail. He did not squat or even stop. They just flew out, and he kept walking, apparently making the case that the impossibly large pile of poop on the trail came from some other dog. He’s done better on this trip, but it’s still a celebration when Preston has a bowel movement.
While Preston has his issues, he is without question the smartest dog we’ve ever owned. His understanding of English is unrivaled. He communicates his intentions and desires very clearly and responds with joy once you finally understand him. He runs circles around Franklin’s somewhat dimmer intelligence. Should Franklin have a toy that Preston wants, he runs to the basement door and barks until Franklin races down the stairs, through the doggie door, and outside to our fenced yard, seeking out the intruder. Preston then takes the dropped toy for himself. Franklin falls for this every time.
Franklin’s whimpers had commenced early this morning. I nestled further into the blankets to block out the sound, which repeated just often enough to reawaken me.
“The dog needs to go ashore,” Lisa informed me from her side of the berth. Her voice contained a trace of accusation as if peeing on the damn cone would solve all our canine issues.
“Aah ump,” came my muffled reply.
As sleep faded, I began to think through the sequence of events that must soon unfold to stop that dog’s whimpering. I would get up and dress. I would get the dogs ready for sea: collars, leashes, doggie life jackets. I would bring the tender around to the stern and warm up the engine. Our anchorage doesn’t include a dinghy dock, and the tender is too large and heavy to beach, so I would need to deploy an anchor. I would load the dogs into the tender and head for land through the chop. About 20 feet from shore, I would hurl the Anchor Buddy over the stern, goose the engine a bit, and quickly raise the prop, so it doesn’t hit bottom. I would lash the leashes of the dogs to the rail while I leap off the bow into the frigid water to pull the 800 pound craft up near the shore. Wet and sandy, I would secure the tender and hoist the dogs out on to the beach to do their business.
This assumes, I mused, that the beach at this early hour is empty. Meeting another dog would spell serious Trouble.
Each dog comports himself reasonably well alone, but some pack chemistry born into their genes a millennia ago transforms them into would-be killers when they meet another dog together. On a quiet walk up the dock, they are angels, taking in exciting smells, jostling each other good-naturedly, smiles apparent on their canine mugs. Yet, the second we encounter a dog - a Poodle or, heaven forbid, a German Shepherd, the fangs come out, and pandemonium ensues. Restrained by their leashes, they often set upon on each other, snarling and biting. Folks emerge from their boats to observe the carnage, and dog people along the docks look on in dismay. I know that feeling. I’ve been there with my docile dog, wondering what in the hell is wrong with those awful dog owners who can’t control their dogs. And yet I am now that guy, tugging ineffectively at the leashes of two gnashing demons, blood-lusting for the nervous Poodle, the tail-wagging Lab, the puzzled Shepherd.
As a result, one person cannot take both dogs anywhere we might meet another dog. Two humans must form an escort to maintain any semblance of order.
“You’ll have to go with me,” I told Lisa as I came fully awake.
“Why won’t you just pee on the damn thing?” She moaned back.
And so, it finally happened. In the growing light on this Thursday morning at sea, I let go a great stream of piss, covering the cone, grass, and a bit of my bare left foot as I misjudged the strength of the breeze.
Did it work? Did the dogs finally grasp the purpose of the great orange cone after their alpha dog modeled the way? No. If anything, they viewed the apparatus (and me) with even more mistrust.
I cleaned most of the sand out of the tender from another morning expedition with the dogs. I was finally ready for that first cup of coffee.
And still, despite the hassle of frequent trips ashore at ungodly hours, and the anxiety of what might happen when we invite friends with dogs to the boat, we wouldn’t consider cruising without our canine mates. They’re part of our family, after all. And they bring us joy in their own peculiar ways.
“I can’t believe you did that,” Lisa said, smiling at me. Both dogs were fast asleep on the settee beside her. “I didn’t really think it would work.”
[caption id="attachment_562" align="aligncenter" width="525"] Happy dogs on shore leave[/caption]
Want to establish a consistent journaling habit and record your most important life events? Let me give you some simple advice from a long-time journal writer: scan your previous half dozen entries before you start to write. This two-minute drill will help you fight writer’s block and improve the overall content of your journals.
Let me explain.
Keeping a journal has many benefits. Looking back on thirty years of continuous journaling, I am grateful I took the time to capture my innermost thoughts on the big decisions I faced, the gains and the losses I experienced, and the otherwise-forgotten anecdotes of everyday life. I didn’t realize how much I would come to value the record I’ve created of my life.
The vast majority of my life’s journal is analog: my unflattering scrawl in small leather-bound books. I carried one in my battered briefcase and wrote most often while sailing on a ferry boat between my office and home.
Before sitting down to write in my journal, I would flip back through the preceding ten or twenty pages to remind myself where I left off and to help get the juices flowing for that day’s journal entry. This pre-writing review became almost an unconscious act after a time, feeling the ink with my fingertips as I scanned the pages, establishing a neural link between the present moment and the most recent past through my own words.
My journals teem with thoughts about the future: decisions I needed to make, thorny issues that were nagging me, and uncertain outcomes that hung in the balance. Scanning these recent pages before I began writing helped me address the resolution of some of those questions and improve the overall context of my journal entry as I picked up the pen and began to write.
I gave up paper journals about eight years ago and turned to Day One, a fantastic digital journaling platform. While I occasionally tap an entry from my iPhone or write a more extended entry on my office iMac, I vastly prefer the iPad for journal keeping. My entries typically run from 300 to 500 words, so I need a comfortable keyboard, and I prefer to write where I am - a wing chair in my library, a coffee shop, an airplane seat, or the cab of my truck while I’m waiting for the next ferry boat.
While digital journaling has many advantages over old-style paper, I’ve encountered two pitfalls which can diminish the quality and narrative of your journal writing “story,” or worse: stop you from writing altogether, frozen by writer’s block.
As I reviewed my earliest digital journal entries, I discovered that I was writing a lot less often than I had on paper. And I frequently repeated myself, forgetting what I had written in the previous days or weeks. I also failed to address some critical open questions I had posed during the last days or weeks. How could I leave myself hanging like this? Rereading these now, I am dismayed by the journaling amnesia of my younger self.
Why did this happen?
Every Day One entry starts with a blank screen and a flashing cursor; the proverbial blank page that can strike fear in even the most hardened writer. I have spent many wasted writing sessions entranced by that hypnotic blinking line, frozen in some meditative state, and unable to type even a single sentence.
Hemingway ended each writing session in mid-sentence, knowing exactly how he planned to finish it. This technique helped him jump-start the new day’s writing and avoid writer’s block. It’s so much easier to write after that first sentence is on the page.
Also, you’re more apt to write down independent and isolated thoughts when faced with a blank screen, disconnected from the storyline of yesterday or last week. The resulting journal over time will be more disjointed and lack continuity.
I’ve discovered that the solution to these digital journal obstacles is simple: scan your previous half dozen entries before you write.
Day One provides an easy way to flip through previous entries. On an iPad, swiping to the left lets you move to the next entry in a seamless, elegant way. I’ve trained myself to carry out this review every time I sit down to write. I almost always find one or two things I can clarify or resolve in that day’s entry. I find that these pre-writing reviews keep me from repeating myself too much, or rehashing already well-trodden topics. And I take Hemingway’s advice to start each journal entry where I last left off. No more writer’s block.
I’ve been doing these journal reviews before I write for about five years and can attest to the higher quality of the writing and the completeness of the story I am capturing in my journal.
If you’re trying to establish a journaling habit with a digital tool like Day One, consider practicing these journal reviews before you write. Take it from a 30+year constant journal keeper: your future self will thank you.
We’ve been back ashore now for a few weeks, home from our month-long trip aboard Indiscretion in the San Juan and Canadian Gulf Islands. We spent the majority of our nights at anchor or tied to a mooring buoy, enjoying the onboard accommodations and tranquility.
I expected to run into some form of mechanical difficulty on the trip, having checked and double-checked our spare parts inventory before departure, and thinking through the various fall-backs and redundancies we might employ should a significant failure occur.
But we were blessed with completely trouble-free operation of the vessel throughout our trip.
We cruised these Islands for years aboard our sailboats, so this trip wasn’t about exploring new ports of call, though it was nice to see our old cruising grounds again. Instead, this trip helped us get our sea legs aboard a trawler and figure out the intricacies of multi-week voyaging and ongoing sea life without getting too far away from civilization in case we ran into trouble. Call it an extended shakedown cruise as we set our sights on longer, more remote expeditions in the summer of 2020, and ocean-going travel down the west coast in 2021.
In this regard, the trip was a tremendous success. We had good practice with anchoring this larger vessel in small crowded bays. We learned about how long we could go at anchor before needing the facilities and services of a dock (about a week). We got very good at planning our routes around weather, tides, and currents. We maneuvered and docked this big trawler in a variety of tight marinas and wind conditions without any trouble which was a welcome confidence booster.
We also established a nice cadence in our morning ship routine: generator started up, coffee on, laundry and watermaker started, battery charge status checked, a quick run into shore with the dogs for their morning constitutional, and finally a hot shower. I can’t say enough about the therapeutic benefits of a real shower on a boat. Lisa and I would then relax and enjoy that first delicious cup of coffee together around the pilothouse settee, taking in the watery scene around us and talking over our plans for the day.
Most mornings we would touch on a familiar topic: could we live like this full-time?
In just a year or so, our big family home on Vashon Island will become an empty nest as our youngest child, Connor, goes off to college. We purchased Indiscretion with the idea that it would become a much cozier and adventuresome home for the two of us as we reinvent life together without kids. Marriage 3.0.
So, along with testing out our seamanship and systems aboard the trawler, we also got a sense of what living aboard a 43’ vessel would be like for the two of us.
By the end of the trip, we each agreed that this little ship was plenty spacious enough for the two of us to live very comfortably for extended periods. For me, there’s a zen-like comfort that comes with the compactness of a boat; everything has a purpose and a place. To quote E.B. White: a cruising boat is “the most compact and ingenious arrangement for living ever devised by the restless mind of man.”
We also agreed that our two devil dogs are a pain in the ass, causing all sorts of mayhem ashore and afloat, but that wouldn’t change no matter how large of a vessel we owned.
I discovered something important about myself once I got home. I felt tired and went to bed early, falling into a dreamless sleep of the dead. I slept in until late morning, which I rarely ever do. For the first night in a month, I wasn’t up prowling the pilothouse in the wee hours, checking on our anchor, or investigating a strange sound in the night.
It dawned on me that I was maintaining a constant level of nervous energy while awake or asleep on Indiscretion. It took a night at home to realize I had struggled to fully relax aboard the boat, thinking and worrying about all sorts of shipboard issues:
Did we set enough anchor rode? Too much?
Are we too close to that sailboat anchored off to port of us?
Will the anchor hold if the wind picks up tonight?
Will we have trouble docking in that tight marina tomorrow?
Where are we going to get provisions next? How far of a hike into town is it?
Will the gale force winds forecasted for the Strait of Georgia make trouble for us as we head north?
I believe this nervous energy will eventually subside with time. My confidence as skipper will grow with every week and month afloat. Still, it remains an uncertainty as we ponder full-time cruising. Will I find a way to wind-down and relax through the constant motion and commotion of long-term voyaging? I’ll have to work on this.
So, we’re home again for a while. I’ve scrubbed away the salt and crud of a month of cruising, and Indiscretion gleams once more in her Quartermaster Marina slip. We’re busy making plans for fall and winter weekend cruises around Puget Sound and potentially a longer excursion up north for some off-season cruising in the islands. And very happy to have the memories and experiences of this lovely summer trip with the promise of many more to follow.
I have kept a paperless office for nearly a decade. The technology has improved a lot since I started, making it pretty easy for anyone to reduce to eliminate paper from their daily life. In this post, I’ll share how I eliminated 95% of the paper from my home and office, and in the process, increased my productivity in a meaningful way.
My technology platform is exclusively Mac, iPad and iPhone. If you’re a Windows user, the software tools I recommend won’t be available — sorry.
Why I Went Paperless
Reduce Clutter. I am one of those people who has to keep a neat desk and office clutter at a minimum to avoid distraction. The adage that a clean desk is an indication of a disorderly mind describes me well. When I see a mess of papers, it bothers me enough to interrupt my concentration. Before I went paperless, I hid all the squalor in stuffed filing cabinets and desk drawers. Now, all that paper is filed away digitally. Out of sight, out of mind, yet organized.
Save Time. Having all my documents stored in an electronic and searchable format makes finding information when you need it much, must faster. Gone are the days of sifting through stacks of file folders, or waiting until I get to the office to retrieve an important document. Usually, anything I need can be retrieved on my iPhone wherever I am. Having near-instant access to all my files and documents is a real productivity boon.
Increase Security. In my strategy job, I necessarily work with confidential information, usually about a potential acquisition of another company. Physical access to loose papers and files is far easier to snoop than hacking password-protected and encrypted digital files (though that’s still a risk).
Help the Environment. There’s an environmental cost to all the paper that clutters our lives. By moving to mostly electronic means for office paperwork, home bills, note-taking and even the books I read, I’m doing my small part to save trees.
Peace of Mind. Knowing I have complete access and control to all my information, both professionally and personally, is a real comfort to me. Important things like insurance policies, home repair dates and costs, school transcripts, and vital records — all available to me from my phone, tablet or computer — yet secured by password protection and two-factor authentication (more on this later).
[caption id=“attachment_445” align=“alignleft” width=“525”] No clutter, no stuffed drawers.[/caption]
A Paradoxical Love of Paper and Technology
My life has long revolved around paper. I’m a big reader and keep a private collection of treasured books. I still prize the heft of a leather-bound book in my hands: the texture of the pages on my fingertips, a faint smell of ancient cigar smoke left over from the previous owner many decades ago. I’m also an avid journal and note-taker, filling many journals and cheap spiral notebooks with my chicken scratch writing for all my adult life I still think more clearly with a pen and paper at hand.
Life as a certified public accountant in the 1980s and 1990s drummed into me the importance of paper: permanent files, work papers, ledgers, and forms filled the large audit case I carried to back and forth clients. There’s something damned satisfying about reviewing a well-organized client file with proper dividers and labels; the tactile feel of the paper, wired into the file through two holes punched at the top of the page (a vestige of accountants and attorneys), making me feel more like a Special Agent reviewing a top-secret file than a mere accountant. Ah, those were the days.
But I’ve also believed in the promise that technology can make me more productive, and I’ve dabbled in numerous emerging technologies over the years to help me, from the 20-years-too-early Timex Datalink (you could get radio alerts right on your wrist!), various models of Palm Pilot PDAs, and a couple of early eReaders that never quite took off.
The introduction of Amazon Kindle and Apple iPhone in 2007, and the iPad in 2010 paved the way for my current paperless environment. Technology finally caught up with human nature and needs, and I was able to piece together the basics of a paperless system that I still use today.
My Paperless System
Office and home paperwork and bills make up the bulk of the paper in my life. A good digital system needs to have an efficient collection and filing process, a fast and accurate retrieval method, and a comfortable way to consume the information.
Storage System
I use Apple’s iCloud cloud-based file storage system for 99% of my non-media storage. I switched from Dropbox after Apple’s solution became robust enough to handle my needs and benefited from better integration between my Mac and iPhone/iPad for file storage and retrieval. I spend about $40 a year to host my family’s files, photos, and device backups on iCloud, which was considerably less than I was paying for DropBox. And it’s a comfort to know that all the priceless photos on our iPhones are securely backed up each night.
File Organization
There are many schools of thought on digital file organization from do-it-yourself files and folder systems to cloud services like Evernote. I tried Evernote initially but became disenchanted with privacy breakdowns and the bizarre direction their various apps took to monetize their service. What clicked for me is a nested-folder system of broad categories at the highest level, with additional sub-folders beneath that. For example, I have a top-level folder called Receipts and Bills which includes a dozen additional folders for each type of expense (i.e. Car Costs, Travel, College, Utilities, etc.). I have a work folder with another dozen folders spanning the major responsibilities of my job. And I have top-level folders for each major interest or responsibility in my life. I rarely create additional folders below this one-level-down system. I find this organization scheme gives me a good balance of filing efficiency and information retrieval (more on this later).
Fujitsu ScanSnap Scanner and Scanner Pro
I have kept a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 document scanner on my desk from the beginning of my paperless system. After eight full years of service, I replaced this original scanner because its 32-bit software would no longer be compatible with Catalina, Apple’s newest Mac OS. Fujitsu offered a $200 credit to upgrade as compensation for the soon to be out of service scanner which I sold on eBay. The new scanner, the ScanSnap IX1500, tears through scanning jobs even faster than its predecessor, and sports a touch screen interface which allows easier and wireless scanning. The resulting scans are saved in PDF format with OCR capabilities which means I can search for information within the document, not just its title.
For mobile scans and anything that can’t be fed through the ScanSnap sheet feeder, I use an iPhone app called Scanner Pro. This inexpensive app includes OCR technology and provides more advanced document workflow management to allow me to process these scans into the same paperless system as my desktop scanner.
More and more documents are available digitally (electronic statements, owner’s manuals available for download, etc), and phone apps like Scanner Pro are quite powerful, eliminating the need for a dedicated desktop scanner for most people. I’m sure I scan less paper today than I did five years ago. And while I like having a robust scanner on my desk, it’s more of a luxury than a necessity.
File Storage and Hazel Automation
Files come into my system one of four ways: (i) computer or iPad generated documents; (ii) email and email attachments; (iii) web page downloads; and (iv) via desktop or iPhone scanner.
Files I create on my Mac or iPad and emails are filed away using a simple “Save As” command to the appropriate place in my system. Apple’s relatively new Files App on the iPad is now powerful enough to save files pretty easily, putting it almost in an equal footing with the Mac and its Finder tool.
For web downloads and scanned documents, I use a Mac automation app called Hazel to help me properly name and file away routine documents like bank statements, credit card statements, utility bills, etc. This ingenious little program watches for any new PDFs that I’ve scanned or downloaded from the web. I have roughly 50 Hazel “Rules” I’ve created to help me name and store these routine files in the proper nested folder.
For example, I download a credit card statement from my utility company every month with the unhelpful name of ViewFullPdfBill.pdf. I have a rule in Hazel that looks for any PDF with contents that include “Puget Sound Energy” (my utility company) and my specific 10-digit account number. Hazel then searches within the document for the statement date, renames the file to Puget Sound Energy (2019-08-29).pdf, and finally moves it to my Utilities folder within Receipts and Bills. These Hazel rules take care of the mind-numbing and soul-sucking drudgery of routine file naming and storage for the vast majority of file intake in my system. I wouldn’t have been able to keep up a paperless system without a tool like Hazel to help me.
Finding Information
For a paperless system to work, finding and retrieving files must be fast and accurate.
On the Mac, I have replaced the built-in Spotlight search tool with Alfred, a very handy freemium utility from Running with Crayons Ltd. To find a file, press CMD-Space and start typing. Here’s a search result where I’m looking for my most recent utility bill:
[caption id=“attachment_444” align=“alignleft” width=“525”] Alfred search results.[/caption]
Alfred uses artificial intelligence based on your past searches to put what it thinks are the most likely documents at the top of the search list. Search terms include Find (locate a file in Finder), Open (opens the file), and In (searches the contents of the file). Keyboard shortcuts are displayed next to each search result take you quickly to your document.
While I could use Spotlight, the Mac’s built-in search tool, Alfred is consistently better at locating the files I need. Alfred has many other features, including more advanced workflow automation, clipboard manager, and application launcher, but its ability to quickly retrieve the information is why I became a Mega Supporter of Alfred a couple of years ago as a way to give thanks for the boost in productivity this app gives me.
On iPad and iPhone, the built-in Spotlight search tool works really well. A one-finger swipe down from the home screen brings up a search box you can use to find apps, search the web, email messages, or files in iCloud.
Having this easy search function on my iPhone has been incredibly useful and has saved me money and hassle more than a few times. One recent example: a marine technician was troubleshooting an electrical issue on our boat and suggested I replace all eight of our heavy-duty batteries. I did a quick search on my phone and showed the tech his $5,000 invoice for changing out these same batteries from the prior year. A digital information system with fast on-the-go access can pay dividends.
Consuming and Reviewing Information
Most of my files are stored in PDF format these days. On the Mac and iPad, I use PDF Expert to read, review, and annotate PDFs. I have a 27” 5K Retina iMac in my office, but given a choice, I prefer to read these documents on my iPad Pro because of the small form factor, the bright screen and Apple Pencil. I use PDF Expert because I like its simple user interface, solid annotation tools, and seamless cloud integration between the iPad and Mac. Like many software developers, PDF Expert has recently moved to a subscription platform. I haven’t subscribed yet as my paid-for version does everything I need.
I rarely print out a document ahead of a business meeting these days. Armed with an iPad and Apple Pencil, I can follow the conversation with the materials in PDF Expert, jotting notes in the margin, and flipping around the document as needed. I am not alone in this: at a strategy retreat last week, only two people out of eighteen participants chose to bring paper copies of the discussion materials. This is good progress.
Security and Backup
Unlike loose paper on a desk or stowed away in folders within a metal filing cabinet, the information I need in my paperless system is locked away pretty tight. The Wild West days of early cloud storage security breaches are hopefully behind us. Even so, I take security very seriously and employ these best practices:
Unique and strong password. The password I use for my iCloud system is a long string of meaningless letters, numbers, and symbols that my password manager 1Password generated. I don’t use this password anywhere else, and I change it once a year. Using the same password on multiple online services because it’s easy to remember is the fastest way to get hacked. Don’t do it!
Two-factor authentication. I also use iCloud’s two-factor authentication which provides an additional layer of security. If a new computer or device logs into my iCloud account, even with the correct password, trusted devices on the account are notified, and a secret code must be entered to allow access.
FaceID and Passcodes. Both my iPhone and iPad have FaceID technology which effectively the device from prying eyes or if one of the devices is ever lost or stolen.
Paper Shredder. I use an Amazon Basics Shredder to destroy sensitive paper documents once scanned. I had to replace the first one after about five years, but the cost is low enough that I think of these as disposable.
Even with all these strong security measures, there are files and information in my system I still won’t save to iCloud. These include any documents with my bank or investment accounts, social security numbers, income tax records, and certain will/trust documents. As a result, I can’t access these unless I’m physically at my office desktop Mac. It’s just too great of a gamble to have these sensitive documents in the cloud, even with the strong security measures I have in place.
Finally, it’s critical to have a backup strategy for a paperless system in the event of a catastrophic event or system issue. I use the following belt and suspenders approach:
The files I save to iCloud are automatically backed up to Apple’s servers as well as being stored on my local Mac hard drive.
Every file on my hard drive is backed up continually using Apple’s Time Machine backup system. I have a 3TB hard drive on the network to process these backups.
I store a complete copy of my Mac’s hard drive every week on a series of four rotating external USB drives using program SuperDuper. I keep three of these drives in a fireproof safe. One is stored at an offsite location. These copies are “bootable,” meaning I could plug one into a brand new Mac and boot up my system using the external drive.
I keep critical paper documents like wills, passports, vital records, titles, etc. in the fireproof safe along with the backup drive.
Conclusion: Some Tips for Going Paperless
So there you have it: my paperless system from stem to stern. It’s been a multi-year process of tinkering with software tools and automation to get this right, so I hope you picked up a few tips and ideas on how to improve or expand your own paperless environment.
I’ll leave you with a few tips I wish I had known when I was starting down the path of a paperless system.
Don’t Scan Old Unnecessary Documents. As I was setting up my paperless system, I had to sift through drawers and drawers of old paper documents stuffed in my filing cabinets. I recall a moment of despair as I considered how long it would take to scan and organize such a mess. I realized that just because I had saved all these documents, I didn’t have to keep them forever. For example, I had utility bills going back to the 1990s from a home we no longer own. I decided to limit my scans to the three most recent years of invoices and statements. That decision reduced my initial scanning project by at least 75%. I kept the old documents in bankers boxes in storage for two years but never found a need to hunt through them and finally destroyed the whole lot.
Search before You Scan. I had a large number of operating manuals for equipment we own stored away in filing cabinets. A lot of these are bound books that would be difficult to scan through a scanner’s sheet-feeder without destroying the binding. Luckily, 95% of these manuals were available as PDF downloads from the manufacturer on their website. Do a Google search of the make and model to see if you can find it online.
Sign Up for Paperless Statements. Look at all the bills you pay and monthly statements you receive and see if a paperless option exists. In my case, just two of my normal monthly bills don’t offer paperless billing. Every other bill is downloaded from a password-protected website and stored automatically using Hazel. I keep a list of these bills and statements I need to download in an Apple Notes file, so I don’t forget.
Pace Yourself and Have Fun. Getting over the initial hump of dealing with an office full of paper can be a challenge. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and you don’t have to tackle every stack of paper all at once. Find some time to tinker with a program like Hazel to learn how a few simple automation rules and a capable scanner can devour stacks and stacks of documents without any mental energy. Once built, these tools keep working for you while you focus your talents on more productive (or fun) tasks.
Thanks for reading this paperless office manifesto. As always, let me know if you have questions or comments in the section below. Cheers!
We are tied up to to the guest dock at the Causeway Marina in Victoria Harbour with a front-row seat of all the bustle and glamour that waterfront Victoria provides.
We've cruised all over the Gulf Islands these past ten days, revisiting some favorite spots and exploring some new ones. We decided not to head further north to Desolation Sound since we were enjoying ourselves here in the southern part of BC and had planned to meet our daughter in Victoria this weekend.
Before sharing the pictures and highlights of our cruise through these beautiful Gulf Islands, I thought I might provide some more comparisons to sailing now that we're nearly three weeks away from the dock.
On Parlez, our 32' cruising sailboat, we took two month-long trips up to the San Juan and Gulf Islands and various multi-week trips over the years as a family. We had some incredible adventures, but I recall a sodden feeling around the end of the third week. Laundry had piled up, we all badly needed showers, and a dampness pervaded the boat from so many wet clothes, towels, and jackets stowed below that never really dried. One of the cockpit lockers was usually cram filled with trash. We had a small water tank which made showers impractical and dishwashing an art of using just enough water to wash, and the bare minimum to rinse. On rainy days, we crowded into the salon or retreated to sleeping berths. We took it as a good thing that our thoughts turned to heading south around this time - a mark of a good vacation when you start thinking of home.
We're at that same three-week mark here on Indiscretion, and times have certainly changed. This little ship was designed for long-range expeditions, so these weeks of short passages and island hopping have hardly taxed her abilities. Likewise, the crew seems fresh and eager to carry on. If I had to pick a single word to describe the difference, I'd choose sustainability.
First, we all take showers every day. I can't tell you what a joy it is to emerge from your stateroom fresh from a shower after a day of cruising and a night at anchor. With a 300 hundred gallon water tank and onboard watermaker, we don't worry too much about water consumption. I never fail to smile as I come into the wheelhouse, squeaky clean, ready for a hot cup of coffee.
We run the generator every morning and evening to charge up our batteries. This gives us plenty of energy to power anything we need on the boat. While the generator is charging the batteries, we run the watermaker and do a load of laundry to load up the generator. Indiscretion has an Italian all-in-one washer/dryer unit, the Splendide 2100, and it washes and dries a moderate-sized load of clothes in about two hours. I am impressed with this little machine. My performance expectations were low after reading a few negative reviews online, but our experience has been fantastic. And all our clothes are clean.
Indiscretion has a good-sized galley, two half-refrigerators, and a larger freezer than we have at home so that we can make great meals for an extended time. The galley also has a trash compactor which sounds weird to have on a boat but is really useful. We can compress the equivalent of five sailboat trash bags into one pretty small bag in this compactor, saving a lot of trash-storage space.
Finally, we have lots of living and lounging spaces on Indiscretion, so no one feels cramped or confined. There's the salon where we eat our meals and watch movies at night; the pilothouse with its settee and helm chair (where I'm writing this now); the cockpit where we sip coffee in the morning; the flybridge with its two comfortable chairs high above everything where we take in the sunsets and the watery world around us; the boat deck platform provides outdoor dining or lounging when the tender is in the water; and two large staterooms provide comfortable privacy for reading or sleeping.
All these creature comforts make long-term cruising a reality for many, and a very happy summer cruise for the crew of Indiscretion. I long disparaged these hulking powerboats when we were active sailors, but now that we've crossed the bar, I wouldn't go back. Trawlers are great.
Cruise Notes
Our first stop in Canada was Bedwell Harbor to check in by phone with Canadian Customs. We've done this a few times before, and it still feels like a strange process. We decided to take a slip at next door Poet's Cove Marina for a couple of days to explore the area and enjoy the resort.
Lisa had a spa day while Connor and I and the doggos went for a walk around nearby Greenburn Lake. It's about a three-mile hike there and back from the marina, but be warned, the trails on the north side of the lake were a challenge. Beautiful scenery for the intrepid hiker:
From Poet's Cove, we made our way to an old favorite, Montague Harbour on Galiano Island. Lisa injured a rib a few days earlier after falling onto the swim step from a kayak, so we spent a couple of days healing up in this lovely harbor.
We headed north to Ladysmith on Vancouver Island. Ladysmith is without question the friendliest destination we've visited so far. We took a slip at the Ladysmith Community Marina and explored the town. It's a bit of a hike to the main town center, but well worth it. Along the way, we encountered wild rabbits - not something we ever see on Vashon.
At Ladysmith, Indiscretion moored next to a Nordhavn 47, MV Sea Cairn.
We got a chance to meet her owners, Keith and Kathy, and swapped tips and stories. Nordhavn owners are the best. We watched this lovely trawler back out of the skinny fairway like a pro, and I learned a few things about using thrusters to navigate in reverse, which I was able to immediately apply as we departed. Thank you, Keith!
From Ladysmith, we headed back south to Ganges Harbour in time for the famed Farmer's Market held on Saturdays. It had been at least ten years since we visited Ganges, and to me, it seemed a lot more crowded. I'm not a big fan of crowds, so after about ten minutes of wedging my body between the masses of shoppers, I found a park bench in the shade and let Lisa carry on. She persevered and came away with all sorts of great produce, fruit, and baked goods. God bless her.
[caption id=“attachment_520” align=“aligncenter” width=“525”] Smiles on the way to the Saturday Market[/caption]
After a couple days and nights on the hook in Ganges, we headed to Brentwood Bay, deep inside Saanich Inlet. We had to transit Shute Passage which must be the super-nexus of BC ferry traffic. On the chart, a dizzying array of ferry courses were splayed across the chart. Sure enough, as we approached the nexus, the BC Ferry Coastal Celebration appeared on AIS, traveling at its cruising speed of 22 knots, and coming up fast. I adjusted course to hopefully allow this mammoth ship to pass me to port.
The radio crackled: “Motor Vessel Indiscretion, this is Coastal Celebration, do you copy?”
I gulped. Being hailed by a ferry can’t be good. To be honest, I’ve never been hailed by a Washington State Ferry before, though many of them have certainly gone off course to try to run over me when I was sailing.
“Coastal Celebration, this is Indiscretion,” I responded.
“Indiscretion, we’re the large ferry vessel behind you. We were just wondering what course you were steering so we can safely pass you. Over.”
“I was planning to hold this course and let you pass me to port, over,” I replied in my most captainly voice.
“OK, roger that, Indiscretion. Passing you to port. Have a nice day. Out.”
The Coastal Celebration passed us to port going off course by about 200 yards to give us more sea room. I was dumbfounded. Canadian ferry captains are so much nicer than our Washington state counterparts.
We stayed a night at the Brentwood Bay Marina to charge batteries, take off the trash, and have a bite at their resort pub. The docks here are a little tired with a startling sign about midway down the marina:
[caption id=“attachment_521” align=“aligncenter” width=“525”] Beware of Rocks![/caption]
We then took the short passage to Tod Inlet, a beautiful little bay just south of Brentwood Bay. We anchored in about 20 feet of water close to three nearby boats. We're always amazed at how close other boats look from the wheelhouse, but far away from the tender or ashore. There were about twenty boats in the little bay during our stay but learned from a local that upwards of 200 boats squeeze into the harbor on Saturday night to watch the Butchart Garden fireworks. Local boaters avoid the place on the weekend for this reason. "You can basically step from boat to boat," he laughed. Yikes. I'm glad we were here during midweek.
[caption id=“attachment_522” align=“aligncenter” width=“525”] One Particular Harbour …[/caption]
Tod Inlet has a dinghy dock and a beautiful network of trails. It's a short dinghy ride to the back entrance of Butchart Gardens. We took the dogs for a whirlwind tour of the garden, admiring the beauty of the place, but vigilant to avoid other dogs. Ah, the stress of boat life.
After two restful days and nights at Tod Inlet, we motored back up Saanich Inlet and down Haro Strait to Victoria. The weather was blustery, and we had a chance to put Indiscretion through her paces in some larger seas. Stabilizers worked well to remove the side to side roll, and her heavy displacement and full keel took the four-foot waves in stride. Here's a short video from the stern during this stretch of water:
We navigated the crazy maze of Victoria Harbor - wow that's a busy port - and found our slip at Causeway Marina. A police boat sped over to us with lights flashing - uh oh. The policeman yelled over to ask if we knew our AIS reading shows us as 390 meters long. He guessed a massive cruise ship was making an unannounced entrance to the harbor. I apologized and said we were still learning the systems on the boat but would fix that. He laughed and waved, shouting "beautiful boat!" as he pulled away.
We've thoroughly enjoyed Victoria, though logistics didn't work out for our daughter Mallory to join us here. We will meet here in a few days back at Roche Harbor.
Boat Notes
We're running the generator between five and six hours a day while on anchor to keep the batteries charged which seems like a long time. We're tracking our generator time and battery statistics on the trip to share with a marine technician when we get back home to see if our Xantrex inverter settings need to be tweaked, or if a second battery charger would make sense to add to the system. The sailor in me still cringes at running a generator for so many hours, but the sound insulation on these Nordhavns is genuinely amazing. You can barely hear it outside the boat, so I doubt we're bothering anyone.
Our first week in the islands was a blur. It usually takes about three days for us to lose our landward ways and find our sea legs, but our entry seemed easier this time. The pace of life on a trawler forces you to slow down, let the stress fall away - very much like our years under sail, but with so much comfort!
We’ve spent the week hopping around our favorite spots in the islands: Spencer Spit on Lopez Island, Fossil Bay on Sucia Island, Roche Harbor on San Juan Island and Reid Harbor on Stuart Island. It’s been ten years since we’ve seen these places and it was good to visit again.
The time underway on Indiscretion continues to be a marvel of luxury compared to our sailing days. I spend most of the time seated in the pilothouse in a Stidd helm chair which must certainly be the most comfortable chair I’ve ever used. I’m surrounded by windows providing terrific visibility forward, laughably better than a sailboat with the sails blocking practically everything foreword (a good reason to give sailboats the right of way!). Below the windows lies a set of navigation screens that provide amazing detail of the geography and vessels around me. The engine is a soft rumble down below in the engine room, a comfortable, powerful sound. Various gauges let me know the rate of fuel burn, the coolant temperature, the oil pressure - all vital statistics to running the ship. The Furuno autopilot steers a way better course than I could with the wheel, so most of the time, the boat steers herself. I turn a little wheel to adjust course every once in a while. We have a Bose sound system throughout the boat so I can play music as we ply the waters. All in all, it’s a delightful experience to be underway. We’re all looking forward to longer and longer voyages as we continue our travels.
Sucia Island is an incredible place to visit. We usually anchored in Echo Bay but decided to try Fossil Bay to take advantage of the dinghy dock for the dogs. A beautiful place.
We decided to turn on our underwater lights and do some night fishing. We expected the bright lights to attract fish, or maybe shrimp. What we didn’t expect is some alien life form to circle around the lights looking for some ingress in the boat to invade and kill us, one by one, Alien style. Here’s a video of these sea creatures which we now know are called a Polychaete (thank you, Steve Mitchell, for the ID!). Still very creepy:
From Sucia we made our way to Roche Harbor, probably our favorite destination in the islands. We arrived on the opening day of crab season in the islands and limited out on huge Dungeness crab after an overnight pot soak. I have a secret crab pot spot in the harbor that I was excited to try. Connor was doubtful about this, but after pulling up twelve huge Dungeness crab in our single ancient pot, he is starting to believe.
Connor and I tried our luck fishing from the tender outside of Wescott Bay, but only caught Dog Fish. Still fun.
We spent two nights at Roche Harbor, resting up and charging boat batteries. We enjoyed a fantastic dinner at the Madrona Pub and lolled around the resort. By coincidence, we were docked two boats away from our sistership, MV Curiosity, another Nordhavn 43.
We departed Roche Harbor with full water tanks, charged batteries, and a rested crew for Stuart Island, literally a hop, skip and jump away. We took a mooring buoy in Reid Harbor and enjoyed a beautiful evening on the boat deck, cracking our big crab harvest. Reid Harbor has a dock with a ramp to shore which we enjoyed with the dogs.
It’s been fun to put this capable ship through her paces here in the San Juan Islands. Tomorrow we cross the border into Canada and explore the Gulf Islands.
Boat Notes
Knock on wood; we’ve had zero mechanical or system issues on the trip so far. We had our first Watermaker alarm tonight, but cleaning the two pre-filters did the trick. I was making water in Reid Harbor, which must not be the cleanest of bays. One of our watermaker filters was severely fouled. Yuck.
I’m writing this in the red glow of the wheelhouse courtesy lights on this calm night at Spencer Spit on the northwest side of Lopez Island. Lisa and Connor have retired to their respective staterooms, bushed from a long day of sea air. I’m tired, but I want to capture some of this experience while it’s fresh in my mind.
I’ve dreamt of moments like this. All around me is calm water. A half-dozen other boats float nearby at anchor. All is silent except for the small sounds of the ship: a creak from somewhere as the boat gently rocks, a soft slap of a wave. The waxing crescent moon provides a shimmering runway of light from the boat to shore, ever changing in the ripples, mesmerizing. I smell the faint odor of a campfire on the beach and something else - a primordial salty smell that reminds me of beaches and seaweed and boats. I am happy.
Spencer Spit has long been a favorite spot of ours in the San Juans and it nice to be back here early on this trip. Sandy beaches, driftwood forts and walking trails make this a fun place to visit with kids. The protection is surprisingly good, even with a frequent ferry that runs through Lopez Pass. The scenery is breathtaking. Here’s a view south over the spit from the flybridge:
And here’s shot of Indiscretion looking north. What an incredible backdrop to take in. You can see why this part of the world is a favorite for boaters.
Spencer Spit has no dock, so we’ve used our anchor buddy to keep the heavy tender floating while we go ashore. I’ve been wanting to try this out and it’s dead simple to use. I’m kind of amazed that it works so well. We’ll see how I feel about it tomorrow at six in the morning when the dogs need to go ashore.
Our voyage has begun! We cast off the dock lines in the wee hours of Saturday morning to catch the ebb tide and are now comfortably anchored in Hunter Bay on the Southeast part of Lopez Island in the San Juan Islands.
The ninety mile trip from Vashon Island took eleven hours, about two hours less than we planned due to the benefit of favorable currents through Admiralty Inlet. A small craft advisory was in effect for the Strait of Juan de Fuca for the afternoon. This trawler can handle most any weather and we were looking forward to a little excitement to start off our big trip. Despite the warnings, the wind was a no-show and it might have been the calmest afternoon crossing we’ve ever made.
We’ve made this passage aboard sailboats many times, but there were a number of new experiences that are worth sharing. Here are my “firsts” for our trip so far:
First single-day passage to the San Juan Islands without laying over in Port Townsend or other stop-over ahead of the straits.
First time I’ve enjoyed a hot shower while underway. Even on our largest sailboat, cruising accommodations were spartan and cramped. Having a full-size stand-up shower aboard is a wonderful luxury.
First night-time departure. Indiscretion has a FLIR infrared camera which provides a near-daylight view of the water ahead and around us, even in complete darkness. We could make out individual wavelets and any debris in the water quite easily as we made our way through the crowd of anchored boats in Quartermaster Harbor.
First full-day passage where I wasn’t cold or wet for long stretches. Comforts abound within the pilothouse of a trawler, regardless of the weather outside.
First time I’ve encountered sustained 11 knot speed over ground in a vessel under my command. Love those strong currents when they’re in our favor!
First time I’ve shared the helm so much. Lisa steered for a large portion of the trip, letting me shower, rest, and just enjoy the comfortable ride aboard a trawler. I love sitting in the shelter of our stern cockpit, watching the wake and miles roll away.
It was a good day.
This morning, we’re anchored in about 16 feet of water in Hunter Bay on the Southeast side of Lopez Island. The harbor is a popular stop-over spot for boaters needing to cross the strait, or like us, a protected place to anchor after a crossing. There are about fifteen boats anchored in the bay this Sunday morning with room for many more.
There is a public boat ramp with a dock which we’ve used with the dogs to do their business. The area is primarily residential with private beaches, so there isn’t much to do ashore, though it’s been a perfect spot to rest up and recharge before heading further North.
Boat Notes
We’re testing out a new WIFI/internet system on the boat. We purchased a MOFI 4500 WIFI router which accepts cellphone style SIM cards for internet service. We signed up for a $60 per month plan from OTR-Mobile which provides high speed unlimited data throughout the U.S. This seemed a little too good to be true, so we were anxious to test it out. We had spotty coverage as we crossed the Strait, but otherwise has worked perfectly. Here on Lopez Island we have faster internet than we enjoy at home. Go figure.
One of the things we’re still trying to learn is proper power management. Indiscretion has a lot of power-hungry systems which will quickly sap our batteries without recharging them via generator. We have an oversized generator that will develop issues if we run it just for battery charging. So, every morning and night, we run the generator to recharge the batteries, but also hunt for things we can turn on to put more load on the system. Last night we watched TV, turned on the air conditioning, and made 40 gallons of water with our watermaker. This morning, we’re doing laundry (my sailing friends are rolling their eyes now), heating the boat via the HVAC system, and making more water. Coming from a sailboat with very few systems and no generator, this has been a challenge to accept.
I’m writing this tonight from the settee of Indiscretion’s wheelhouse — one hell of a place to put down words. It’s just past twilight now, and I’ve turned on the red courtesy lights that provide just enough glow to see my surroundings, but not enough to spoil vision while voyaging at night. Ahead of me lie the helm chair, the ship’s wheel and the wrap-around pilothouse windows that look out over the bow and Quartermaster Marina.
From my perch, I can take in a wide swath of the lighted marina as it shifts from the gusting north wind that buffets the stern and starboard quarter, twisting and turning the boat so that the view is endlessly moving, as are all the other boats ahead and around me. A loose halyard slaps on a sailboat’s mast off to starboard. Waves lap along the hull. Indiscretion’s dock lines creak and groan from the pressure of the wind, the sounds softened from the heavy insulation of Nordhavn construction. The slapping halyard somehow beats in time with the rhythm of the country music playing on the radio.
When I was ten, my new step-dad took me out on a commercial fishing boat, the Nushagak, which had a roughshod version of this pilothouse. Wires dangled from above the helm and giant charts covered the navigation station — more like Hemingway’s Pilar than this modern trawler. I remember a feeling of complete enthrallment aboard her, the unique smells aboard a fishing boat, the steady vibration of the engine felt through my feet, the swells making my movement unsure, and the dawning recognition that we could point her bow further offshore, chugging along inside that windowed world, and leave the world of land life astern.
On the hundreds of nights we spent on sailboats, we stayed belowdecks on the hook or at dock. But in a trawler, the promise of adventure tugs at you day and night from the beckoning pilothouse windows. It would be so easy (and comfortable!) to slip the dock lines and go. Or stay and plot out the next passage or port, while taking in the beautiful surroundings, and dreaming of more distant ports.
In all my years of sailing, I rarely felt the same sense of belonging as I do on Indiscretion, particularly here in the wheelhouse, like coming home and discovering an unfound door of childhood dreams.
Red Sky at Night ...[/caption]
The Family Home[/caption]
Boat neighbors are the best.[/caption]
So many cruising opportunities (Source: Salish Sea Pilot).[/caption]
Happy snowbirds[/caption]
The new back porch.[/caption]
Indiscretion underway in a fresh gale.[/caption]
Bouncer on a kayak[/caption]
Franklin[/caption]
Preston[/caption]
Happy dogs on shore leave[/caption]
Smiles on the way to the Saturday Market[/caption]
Beware of Rocks![/caption]
One Particular Harbour …[/caption]
