Under the Same Canopy
I didn’t grow up next to the ocean, but I longed for it. In junior high, I’d sit on a bus from Fullerton for two-and-a-half hours just to surf blown-out waves with a friend. I didn’t even know what good waves were. I just knew something inside me was calling. Childhood was rough. It left some deep emotional wounds. No one in my family sailed. At 18, without ever having gone sailing, I started getting sailor tattoos. The ocean wasn’t inherited. It felt uniquely mine. And when a contractor I was working for offered to sell me his Cal 28 when I was 21, I didn’t hesitate. I went to look at her and fell in love immediately.
Fast-forward more than 20 years and my life has been shaped by the sea. I’ve taken boats to wild places in the middle of the Pacific. I’ve crossed open water with nothing but horizon in every direction. The ocean filled something hollow inside me. It taught me discipline. It taught me humility. It taught me connection. In 2015, after selling my boat in Fiji, I left the water for a while and moved to the forest in West Virginia to help care for my ex-wife’s elderly aunt, who had dementia. For two years, I lived among trees instead of tide. Something unexpected happened: The forest spoke to me the same way the ocean had. The wind through leaves felt like wind in rigging. The deep, layered stillness of the woods carried the same presence as a calm anchorage at dawn. I began to understand that the lessons were the same — patience, interdependence, resilience.
When I finally made it to the Bay eight years ago, all I wanted was to get back out cruising. I bought another boat, Sisko, sight unseen after a cruising friend told me, “If you don’t buy her, I will.” I wired the money and drove cross-country to bring her home. I got a job at KKMI with one goal: Fix her up and sail around the world. I did fix her up. And when I finally quit my job and made it as far as Half Moon Bay to begin that next chapter, something in me froze. I couldn’t leave. I called off the trip. It devastated me. I spiraled into one of the hardest depressions of my life. A relationship ended days later. I crawled back to the yard and asked for my job back. Something had to change.
For years, I’d been chasing sunsets over the horizon, convinced that fulfillment was out there somewhere. I didn’t realize that the community I needed was here, on this Bay, in these yards, on these docks. Over time, my dream shifted. I moved off the boat. I built a home. I fell in love in a deeper, steadier way. Sailing changed, too. When you’re no longer living aboard with all your possessions tumbling with every tack, the water feels different. It became joyful again.
It also became expensive. Continue reading.
