The last twelve months were certainly not what I had planned when I was entrusted with Jean-du-Sud. I thought the engine install would take me a month, and that I would be cruising in no time. The install took three, leaving me stranded by the Canadian fall and winter. I found my way in the Caribbeans, as a Skipper for a charter company, got my commercial endorsement for my YachtMaster Offshore and became a Sail Canada navigation instructor. Sailing wise, they were not wasted months, but they were not the months I had planned.
When I came back from the boat delivery along the east coast, I knew I still had some work to do on Jean-du-Sud. Fearing a repetition of last summer, I chose the projects to undertake with greater care: an electricity upgrade, a paint job and a liferaft installation. No more. I was so worried it would take more time than the month I had planned that the paint job almost did not happen. It is only because other projects went pretty well that it finally happened.
So after a year, a bit of a tap on the back: Jean-du-Sud has a new engine, a top notch electricity system, and has a better looking hull. Not bad! There are however a lot of tasks to be done on the boat. Some easy, like installing washers on the pivot point of the gimballed stove, some medium, like varnishing the teak, and some bigger, like revamping the deck or the interior.
In my original thinking of how a departure would happen, I thought these tasks would be finished, that the boat would be in top condition and that « leaving » would be a neat transition from boatwork to cruising. That idealized transition takes too long, in fact so much time that may tie the boat to the dock forever.
The passage of time, and with it the sailing window to get to warmer seas, really shifted my mentality on thinking about leaving. First, it forced me to defer some projects further in time. Second, it led me to accept some aspects of the boat « as is », rather than spending time on tweaking them to my tastes. But more importantly, a realization that came to me when the boat got in the water, it is possible to do work on the boat while cruising. In other words, leaving means realizing that boat upkeeping is a continuous task and that choosing what system on which to perform maintenance is key in freeing time for cruising.
I am writing this post at anchor, with a Starlink connection fueled up by the recently installed lithium batteries. The anchorage, on the northern side of Ile d’Orléans, is well protected from the usual southwesterly winds. The St-Lawrence is almost flat and offers a sea breeze. Given the 29 degrees (Celsius), it is not a bad night!
This night at anchor is about testing systems on Jean-du-Sud and lifting the last remaining condition to activate the new engine warranty (a sea trial). While at anchor, I fixed a few things that needed attention, and saw immediately what needed adjustments for sailing in less forgiving weather. This goes to show that the transition from boatwork to cruising is not as clearcut as it can be imagined.
When I was a kid, I read an interview of a former NASA space director. In the middle of the interview, talking about risks, he stated that there were always system failures during a mission. The issue, he stated, was not about having no failures, but rather about not having too many, and about mitigating those that happened. Failure management is inherently part of the mission design.
Sailboats are not as complicated as space shuttles, but there are obvious transposition to be made. For long and successful cruises, we must also manage likely failures: redundancy, makeshift solutions and ports of refuge. But perhaps a more subtle takeaway is that we must somehow be ready to embrace the risks of failures. Otherwise, we might just never leave.
