All Good Things

After five years of amazing adventures aboard our Nordhavn trawler MV Indiscretion, we’ve decided it’s time for a change. We are coming off the water.

We didn’t plan on this. We dreamed for decades to be at this very spot in our lives — casting off the bowlines to explore the world under our own keel at the unhurried pace of seven knots. But life doesn’t always work out like you hoped.

On September 27th, 2022, our son Connor was killed in a motorcycle accident in Colorado Springs. A car pulled out in front of him on a busy street a half mile from his apartment. He was just twenty years old.

After Connor’s death, reeling with loss, we took what would be our final cruise aboard Indiscretion. We were in shock and did not know what else to do. If any solace were possible for our crushed family, we thought it must be found in the harbors and bays of our beloved San Juan Islands. Our daughter accompanied us, and her partner joined a week later. We met up with dear friends from MV Fortitude and MV Equinox who helped distract us from our misery with companionship and love. Still, every anchorage, every island hike, every trip ashore in the tender, every sunset and moonrise — all of it reminded us of Connor’s absence. We found peace but agony too, as this new reality sunk in.

We put the boat away in November and headed south to our new winter home here in Arizona. We’ve spent these past months wondering how we move forward after such a tragedy.

Each time we discussed our return in the spring, we both felt despondent. Our plans to cruise to Alaska this summer felt empty and joyless. Despite our love for the pristine cruising grounds of the Salish Sea and our wonderful boat friends we’ve met along the way, we just couldn’t imagine resuming our life afloat.

Connor spent his youth sailing and boating with us, and the reminder of the memories we made together is simply too painful. In this new grief-stricken world, returning to the familiar and comfortable fills us with dread; we need to invent a new life that won’t constantly remind us of our loss. And maybe, in the process, allow us to accept what feels unacceptable.

Here’s a lesson for us all. Despite our best wishes and plans, life is incredibly uncertain. We don’t know what the future may bring. No one does. We insist on having it all figured out before acting on our dreams. But sometimes, before the plan is perfected, the unthinkable changes everything. If there’s one bit of advice I could offer, it’s this: don’t wait. Go sooner. Better yet, go now. Right now is all we have. You may not get another chance.

The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.  — Seneca

We aren’t saying goodbye to adventure. That’s the last thing Connor would have wanted. Instead, we’ve decided to pivot in a direction that will honor his memory and allow us the chance to heal without the constant reminder of our loss. In the last two years of his life, he developed a passion for off-roading in his Jeep. He and his friends would take old forest service roads deep into the Colorado mountains, looking for challenging routes that might tax the 4×4’s crawling capabilities. The battered underside of his Jeep proves he pushed that vehicle to its limits. We treasure the selfies he sent us from the summits of his off-road adventures, the vivid blue sky and Rocky Mountain vistas framing his smiling delight.

In that spirit, we bought an off-road capable RV, more akin to a camper van than a plush motorhome, that we’ll use to explore the deserts and mountains that Connor grew to love in the last years of his life. We’ve never been a fan of crowded RV parks, so we chose a rig that can take us far off the beaten path — boondocking as it’s known in RV vernacular — the boating equivalent of dropping the hook in a secluded anchorage. On some trips, we’ll tow Connor’s old Jeep to seek out the otherwise unreachable places he would have loved to see. It comforts us that we’ll follow a path our son would have taken had he lived.

As we close this chapter, we are grateful for the adventures and friendships we enjoyed during our five years of trawler life. Joining the Nordhavn family, even aboard one of the smallest vessels in the fleet, was both a privilege and a joy. I learned so much from the many experienced captains and marine experts who freely shared their wisdom with me time and again. I felt like I was getting to the point where my growing skills and talents could be paid forward to the newest crop of skippers. And oh, will we miss the friends we met along the way. I have to trust that our paths will somehow cross again in the future.

We are incredibly grateful to Devin Zwick of Nordhavn Northwest. In all my years of boating, I’ve rarely encountered a more capable, knowledgeable and compassionate yacht professional. Devin personally skippered the boat from her slip in Seattle to Anacortes, oversaw her annual haul-out, worked with me remotely to iron out the logistics and terms of the sale, and found a terrific new owner for Indiscretion — all in the course of a few short weeks. They say the happiest days in a skipper’s life are when he buys and sells a boat. This is surely not the case with Indiscretion. We dearly love this trawler. But Devin worked extremely hard to make the process as seamless for us as possible. For most people, there’s an “oh shit, what have I done” moment before you sign the papers to buy a boat, particularly one as expensive as a Nordhavn trawler. Our story should lessen the uneasiness for those about to make this plunge. Believe me, that spreadsheet you keep studying won’t help you. Go for it. You only pass this way once.

I kept this blog as a way to share my amazement and good fortune at having the chance to operate and cruise aboard a little ship like Indiscretion. Many nights I sat in the darkened pilothouse when everyone was already asleep, listening to the sounds of the wind, watching the moonlight on the water and the spin of the lights on shore as we circled our anchor, feeling utterly incredulous at my luck. I hope these posts have been informative and inspiring to others who also feel drawn to the wildness and tranquility of the ocean.

And who knows? I’ve skippered a boat for most of my adult life. We might find our way back to the shore one day when the pull of the saltwater in our veins overtakes the grief in our hearts. In a world where nothing is certain, anything is possible.