I kept kicking the notion of a new blog entry down the road until some life-events played out. Then the missus and I were fussing, and I don’t blog when we’re fussing. I’m certain to say something that will escalate, even if I was writing about the prayer ritual of Tibetan monks. Somehow that would constitute some hostile subtext I didn’t mean to convey.

There are times when silence is golden. Or at least ‘survivable.’

I went through an interview process for a job. Got the job. Decided that it wasn’t the right job for me and that I was giving up more than I would have earned from the position. I turned it down. There was a lot to like about the opportunity. It was interesting work for a good company. But they were just too coy about the long term prospects of the position. I got the impression that they were hiring only for a project and the more successful I was at completing the project, the closer I would be to the unemployment line.

Nearer to home, for the second time in my working life I have been “left behind” in a mass defection at my place of business. A couple months ago, THE senior manager at my corporate outpost took a job with a startup competitor. Yesterday seven of the 22 people who work in my building turned in their resignations to go work for the defector. Seven in one blow.

Life here is a bit weird, as you may expect. He cleaned out an entire division of the company, so I’m not even sure how the company will go about rehiring the positions. The middle manager who would have plugged the gaps also jumped ship today.

I have other irons in the fire. Those are playing out slower than I’d like.

The missus and I have been kicking around the idea of moving south for some years. For the first time I put in for a couple jobs that were out-of-state, knowing as sure as sugar that if one of them hired me, I’d be gone and the missus would follow whenever she found a job of her own and sold the house.  There is a fantasy component to meaningful change, and then there’s the day that the fantasy becomes manifest by the weight of practical realities. It has come to pass. I’m ready for the next phase of my life to shift into gear. I’m ready to sacrifice comforts to make it happen. I’m ready to live a lonely bachelor existence in a roach-infested trailer park for a couple years until my wife can follow me to the next phase. One of us has to go make a beachhead for the other.

I know the “retire to blue waters and a sailboat” is a stupid cliché of a middle-age pipe dream. Tenfold for a guy who has virtually no sailing experience.

Many years ago as a function of my job, I flew out to Balboa Island (Newport Beach) to sit with a secretary and learn about how she used the training I wrote. Her husband was a muckety-muck exec for BMW. They had a nice boat and they offered to take me sailing to Catalina for the day. Of course I jumped at the opportunity. It was a beautiful day. The waters were calm with low chop. I could see the bottom of the ocean for most of the trip (A big surprise. I assumed the Pacific was deeper than it was for that stretch.) The dolphins raced the boat and porpoised out of the water to say “hey.” Great fun. What I remember most about the day was how the husband and wife worked that damn sailboat like a machine. It was a ballet. Those two were sharing the same mind and dancing over that deck with a practiced ease that made me wistful to one day have a mate as perfectly matched as my hosts were.

And so I have. My wife and I make a great team when we are both committed to the same project. We’d make a great sailing tandem.

After reading a million web pages on the sailing life, I had to admit that I’m not a good match for “blue water” sailing. “Blue water” is the deep ocean, around-the-globe sailing where you are docked in Myrtle Beach and you say, “Hey, yaknow, I always wanted to see Fiji. You wanna go to Fiji, Hon? Great. Weigh anchor and let’s go.”

Yeaaaah. Sounds like fun. Sounds like total freedom, and I loves me some Freeeeedom! It requires a boat that looks like every other boat docked in Myrtle Beach, but blue water boats are built to withstand a lot more punishment than your average Intercoastal Waterway (ICW) sailboat. The boats are more expensive. The sailing is a lot more complicated. Ocean passage boating is no fun and often an exercise in punishing self-abuse and white knuckle terror.  Blue water sailing takes a certain kind of person, and I have come to realize that I am not that person. I’m not the kind of dude who can keep my shit together when a forty foot wave rolls my ship and I’m cabled to the stern, underwater, holding my breath and waiting for the next big wave to flip us upright.

“Waiter! Check please! And perhaps some clean underwear, thank you!”

Not a matter of “if.” Only a matter of “when” and “how often.”

I thought the alternative to blue water sailing was just puttering in a circle from a home base marina on a coast somewhere. “Hey. Nice weather this weekend. Let’s take the boat out and sail in a circle until we are seasick and then drive home sunburned.”

Meh.

Turns out there’s something else. Something that is safe, adventurous, and fun. The Great Loop. My cyberfriend Cheryl mentioned this on Facebook. Essentially, it’s a way to keep a small boat in safe water while making a giant circuit from the Bahamas, up the East Cost to New York, west across the Great Lakes to either Chicago or Canada, and then down the Mississippi, the gulf, and eventually back to winters in the Bahamas. Never very far from the watchful eye of the Coast Guard or safe harbor from a big storm.

If you Loop it right and don’t try to set an America’s Cup record, you can live your entire year on a boat, and for not much money. Assuming you don’t sink two or three crafts, you can have a boatload of fun (sorry) and stretch your retirement coin a long way. Remove food and boat maintenance from the equation and you can live on $10K a year. If you fish for your supper as you sail, you can really keep costs down.

This from a man who has never gutted so much as a carp. Go ahead and laugh. My wife did.

The concept of seeing Broadway shows in New York for two weeks every May, a nice tour of Canadian water towns when the States are burning up, gorging at restaurants in Chicago every September, stopping in St. Louis to check in on the kids every October, New Orleans every November, and then back to the Keys and maybe a couple days in Miami before heading to ride out the winter in the Abacos…  I’m sure it would get old after a while, but that could take a few loops until I was ready to park my ass in The Villages and play pickleball with the neighbors.

Anyway, it’s a dream. Perhaps it’s just the longest February of my life big talkin’. Perhaps it’s time to change the channel. The kids are gone. I’ve got more money than I have month for the first time in my life. The missus and I are pouring a ridiculous amount of money into investment products.

For the first time in a long time, I’m asking myself and MBW what comes next.