What Dreams are Shaped Like

The summer I was 17, my uncle took my younger sister and me for a live-aboard week sailing around Lake Michigan. It was the beginning of my love-affair. I was already on a course toward Marine Biology studies, didn’t yet have “my” lighthouse tattooed on my arm, but was on that course too, captivated by all things marine and nautical. But that week, my dreams took the shape of a sailboat, and they’ve stayed that shape ever since.

Two years ago, that shape took corporeal form, in the sailboat we suddenly OWNED. For two years, my dreams have had a very specific shape, down to the plumbing Jon replaced and the wiring I traced through the boat’s compartments and mapped out in my largest sketchbook, page after page as I worked my way forward along the port side, sticking my upper body into the engine compartment, and my arms up to the shoulder in one locker after another.

We’ve taken her out. We’ve sailed her. We’ve docked her multiple times—which is its own kind of hair-raising initiation rite. We’ve begun to outfit her galley with cooking gear, her lockers with foul-weather gear, her cubbies with games and entertainment-gear, her berth with the thickest memory foam we could wrestle into the bunk and cut to its oddball shape, and then a veritable nest of quilts and pillows. We’ve begun to make her ours, and she has formed the physical shape of our dream, with a plan to move aboard her full-time and travel.

Here’s the thing. When you’re staring at the very specific shape of a dream, you have to look at ALL of its aspects. Not just the dreams of wind in your hair at the helm, or snorkeling from an anchor to a beach… Also the water-pump-leaking and toilet-not-flushing, the gazillion parts you’d want to have aboard when you’re going to sail out of reach of West Marine (the boater’s Home Depot). My voluminous reading has included volume after volume about blue-water (oceanic) cruising, books on weather and navigation, an entire text on Storm Tactics.

And we have come to realize that this boat isn’t the fit. We tried to add bow-thrusters for finesse in docking, but her unusual keel-shape didn’t fit the kit. We’d need to add water desalinizer, and solar power. The wind vane sitting in her aft bunk is something we’ve shied away from wrestling with. We’ve hauled out the rusted anchor chain, piece by piece, but shied away from the project of getting 300-some feet of new anchor chain down the dock to her. We need a professional rigger to replace the forward rolling furler, and we’ve shied away from that project too.

If we purchase another boat in future, we know things about ourselves, and about boats, that we didn’t when we bought this one.

In other words, it has been a journey, even though she’s remained moored in Tacoma for the entirety of our time with her.

This morning I contacted a boat broker just down the street from our marina, to see if they’d handle her sale. It’s a momentous shift, and it frees up our dream-shape again. We can stay at this job a while longer, where we get paid well to work together, doing things we’re both good at. We can charter boats at locations we want to visit, without having to take the boats there. If we do buy a boat to retire onto, we can buy it in a warm-weather location where we’d like to BE—and as I said, we have a keener idea of what we’d want.

I would have thought I’d feel sad about the decision to sell Far Reach, but I’m actually just feeling fond. I am glad she has been ours, for a little slice of time.