Life Aboard: Accept and Adapt

One of my favorite movies is Sliding Doors, staring Gwyneth Paltrow. Paltrow’s character lives in London, and the movie opens with her running to catch a train. Just as she’s approaching the train car, the sliding doors close and she misses it. The scene then suddenly flashes and she’s on the train. The film then takes you through two parallel lives for Paltrow’s character, one where she’s caught the train, and the other where she missed it. We observe, as the seemingly innocuous event of missing a train changes her life forever.

Life aboard a cruising boat is full of unexpected changes. Delays or a change of plans due to weather, mechanical problems, or medical issues, is not an interruption to boating—it is boating. We’ve learned the faster we accept and adapt to the change, the less frustration we feel and the more open we become to new experiences. We’ve also grown to believe in the theory; when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. Delays can exasperate us, or we can change the way we look at them. In doing so, they become an opportunity to experience something new and unexpected.

It is frequently said, plans made in boating might as well be written in the sand at low tide. One such plan was an overnight run from Fort Pierce to Fernandina Beach, Florida, but when dawn broke, the higher-than-predicted seas and current we’d been fighting all night showed no sign of abating. Neither of us had gotten much sleep and St. Augustine’s inlet was only a short distance away. Our plan to get to Fernandina was abandoned when we passed through the St. Augustine’s inlet, into the calm waters of the Tolomato River. Camachee Cove Yacht Harbor, located just up river from the inlet happened to have a slip available, so we headed there to rest, regroup and decide what was next.

The day before, Scott and Teri Miller were cruising north in their new (to them) 58-foot Kadey Krogen when a stabilizer component failed. Without stabilization, the beam seas were making for quite an uncomfortable passage. With the forecast calling for seas to stay out of the east, the thought of continuing on to their planned destination of Charleston did not sound like a good idea. They too were near St. Augustine’s inlet and called the Camachee Yacht Harbor to see if they had a slip available where they could tie-up and diagnose the problem with their stabilizers.

Two couples aboard two cruising trawlers, unexpectedly found themselves in a marina neither had planned to be in, much less at the same time. We noticed the good looking Kadey Krogen tied to the wall when we came in, and they couldn’t help but notice our trawler pivoting next to their boat, as we backed into our assigned slip. When Dori stepped off the boat with our two Portuguese Water Dogs, Teri had to bring Charlie, their PWD over to say hello. From that moment on, we could have viewed our lives in two parallel paths, one with us continuing on to Fernandina, and the other with us stopping in St. Augustine, and they would have looked very different. That meeting and the friendship that followed, altered all of our lives more than we ever could have predicted.

On another occasion, what was to be a two-night stop in Oriental, North Carolina, turned into a 10 night stay, when lightning struck our boat on our first night. Our plan to get to Virginia Beach to spend the 4th of July with friends at their yacht club, changed in a flash. Little did we know the local electronics company in Oriental had just become the distributor for the parts damaged in the lightning strike, and that the community of River Dunes was hosting a star spangled 4th of July event where we met new friends and even reconnected with some old ones.

Life aboard a cruising boat is an ever-evolving adventure, where unexpected changes and new experiences become the welcome norm.

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This article originally appeared in the November 2023 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.

Source: https://www.powerandmotoryacht.com/column/life-aboard-accept-and-adapt