Living The Dream
Published: Wednesday, February 27, 2019
By: Bob Bitchin
There are a lot of ways that people come into the sailing lifestyle. Some are brought up in the life by parents who love to sail, and some enter it through friends when they are young. There are a myriad of ways to find sailing, and each of us has come to that place in life from a different direction, but we have all made it.
When it comes to cruising, the field narrows a bit. Cruisers are usually introduced to the lifestyle by dreaming; dreaming of getting out and getting away from the day-to-day struggle we know as civilization and escaping to sail off into the sunset.
Cruising as a way of life can be a daunting endeavour for people who enter that lifestyle through dreams. You see, dreams are more than when they are first thought of, just because of the nature of the beast. Don't believe me? Then, just check out the old family copy of Merriam Webster's:
dream (drēm)
A series of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations occurring involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep.
A daydream; a reverie.
A state of abstraction; a trance.
A wild fancy or hope.
A condition or achievement that is longed for; an aspiration: a dream of sailing into the sunset.
One that is exceptionally gratifying, excellent, or beautiful: Our new boat sails like a dream.
So you see, no matter how you look at it, a dream is not based in any kind of reality. But, wait, if you want to turn this dream into a reality, isn't that a kind of madness? I mean, it's a dream. Dreams can't be made to come true... can they?
Well, fortunately for us, they can't. Why fortunately? Well, it's pretty simple. If you have never been cruising, then you are basing your dream on a conception created from your current reality. You can only conceive of things that have been introduced to you in your lifetime. And most of us have been working or going to school for "a lifetime" and these experiences are what we base our dreams on.
I know that my dream of cruising, before I set out to actually cruise, was formed with a lot of help from Cruising World magazine which, in the late 70s and early 80s, was being done by a couple of cruisers who had returned from "out there" to show us what it was like. I also had input from Lin and Larry Pardey, Herb Payson and Tristan Jones, as well as my real inspiration, Earl Hinz. What I read from these people gave me my dream.
You know what? When I finally got out there, it wasn't like the dream I had had. It couldn't have been because the dream was based on other people's realities, and I had my own realities.
Lin & Larry's dream was to be self-sufficient on a low maintenance boat, and to sail the world sans engine. I tried this on my first long voyage on Captain Alan Olson's Stone Witch. Drinking tepid Kool-Aid was okay then (I was 30 years old!) but it wasn't my dream.
Over the years, I found that cruising was actually better than my dream of cruising. Yes, I enjoyed the books by my "heros" of the time, but they were living their dreams, and in the fulfillment of their dream, they passed on how great it was.
My original dream was based on their input. Once out there, I realized I was not them. I was "me" and "me" likes to drink from a glass with ice in it! "Me" likes a motor to get me where I am going when the wind lets me down, and "me" likes a little more comfort than "they." In other words, had I the input from someone like "me," my dream would have been different.
The truth of the matter is, I couldn't be happier that my dream was erroneous. Know why? Well, I'm gonna tell you anyway... It's because the reality of cruising turned out to be even better than the dream cruise I created in my head prior to taking off.
In the early years, I tried to emulate what I'd gleaned from books. I bought a used Newport 30, as the average cruising boat back then was around 28-35 feet. But, wait, I am six feet four and weighed in at 300 pounds. What was comfortable for Herb Payson wasn't so comfortable for me. So, I moved up to a Formosa 51 and this boat had a big old diesel. Kewl! That meant I had batteries so I could put in refrigeration. My dream got better! And there was this new fangled goodie called a VHS that would allow me to watch TV while anchored in paradise. Great! I was raised on TV!
So, you see, my cruising turned out to be even better than the dream. And yours will too because if there is one piece of advice I can pass on to you, it is this:
"Don't dream your life, live your dream!"
This article first appeared in the Winter Issue (Jan/Feb) 2019 of Great Lakes Scuttlebutt magazine.
tags: Feel Good Story, Lifestyle, Sailing
