People ask me what I miss when I am ashore and I always take a moment before I answer because the honest answer is not what they expect. They expect me to say the destinations — the Tuamotu or the Pacific night sky or the whale sharks of the Coral Triangle.
These things are extraordinary and I miss them in the way that you miss the extraordinary thing when it is not present. But the missing that I feel when the boat is in the yard or when I am in the city for the weeks that the logistics and the planning and the personal life require is not the missing of the extraordinary. It is the missing of the ordinary.
I miss the six o’clock morning. The specific quality of the offshore morning before the day has decided what it will be. The light on the water, the air temperature that the night has produced and that the day has not yet changed, the sound of the water against the hull and the slight movement of the boat at anchor and the specific state of the mind that wakes up in this context rather than the context of the apartment.
The city morning has its qualities. They are not the same qualities. The city morning has already decided what it will be, the calendar, the commute, the coffee that initiates the sequence of the professional day. The offshore morning has not decided yet. It is open in the specific way that the thing that has not yet become a task is open.
The Specific Things
I miss the conversations. Not the extraordinary conversations that the offshore passage occasionally produces, those are memorable by definition and the memory keeps them available. I miss the ordinary conversations of the offshore evening: the twelve people at the table after the day that the passage and the anchorage produced, talking about the day with the specific ease of the people who shared it and who do not need to explain the context to each other because the context is the same for all of them.
The land equivalent of this conversation is rare. The offshore equivalent happens every evening that the anchor is set and the table is full.
I miss the simplicity. The offshore life has its complications, the weather, the mechanical, the logistical, the social. But the fundamental structure of the offshore day is simple in a way that the land day is not: the boat needs to be sailed or the anchor needs to hold, the crew needs to eat and sleep and watch, the passage needs to be managed.
These are the things the day requires. There is not the background noise of the infinite optional demands that the connected land life generates, the things that could be done, should be done, might need to be done, that populate the consciousness of the person who is always within reach of the device that reminds them. The offshore life clears this. What remains when it clears is the specific simplicity that I miss when it is not there.
The boat departs Bodrum in May 2027. I will be on it. I am always on it when I can be. The missing is what tells me that the offshore life is not the job I do. It is the life I live when I am doing it correctly.
