Interesting Exercise

So this morning I was in the Blogger Dashboard and noticed I had 78 Blogs in my reading list. My first post was in November of 2009, so needless to say, I have been doing this for a while and have read a lot of blogs. There have been great friends I made along the way with these silly blogs, I am grateful for the opportunity.

Anyway, out of the 78, five of them are not sailing related, while the other 73 were. It made me think for a minute as there are only a few, maybe 6 or 7 sailing blogs on my list that post regularly...and when I mean regularly, I mean once a monthish. There are some, you know who you are :), that post daily and I usually start my day with a cup of coffee and a peruse of who is doing what and where. Since I am basically land locked for a lot of reasons, I enjoy reading along.

So what about the other 60 or so folks I started following at one time or another? It made me wonder, so I started going down the list one by one and taking a look at when the last post was entered.

I have to admit I was somewhat surprised at what I found. I never realized that so many people hung up their sailboats for good until I found post after post saying goodbye. In most cases, there was a final post that said goodbye, thanked everyone for following and that they were sad to go. Some posts I remember, others I do not. It was a tough thing to see, as it seemed like there were a lot of dreams put on the mantel and unfortunately, in some cases, I don't know why.

Of course they weren't all like that. I am sure some folks just got tired of blogging and just stopped, while others maybe in a place that they can't blog or something else unexpectedly popped up and...you get the idea. Regardless, I deleted about 34 inactive blogs this morning and it was somewhat depressing. It is possible that one day I will post one more time thanking everyone for following and wishing everyone still out there fair winds, but for now, I hope to still get on-board and sail off following the dream. Till then, Skylark will just have to wait patiently for me to be as ready as she is.

December 1, 2013

You might remember this picture from a post quite a few years ago. It was taken of me at the helm of Skylark about 20 miles off the coast of North Carolina. It was one of  the best times of my life, albeit one of the most intense as well. Not too long after this picture was taken, we were hit with an unpredicted storm that threw us around like a cork for about 16 hours before we ran for cover at Cape Lookout Spit. I had never been so exhausted both mentally and physically in my life.

That trip however sparked something in me that changed my life. I will never forget the feeling I had on that midnight to 3:00 am watch when the winds were right and Skylark cut through the water like she was meant to do. Never have I ever felt peace like that, and I will always continue to look for that, whenever I can.

Unfortunately though, life does get in the way and the time needed for a good adventure has been very hard to find. Although Skylark is ready for such a trip, I am not and continue to battle with time, work and everything else that makes up a modern life we lead today.

I will continue to hope for the best and have Skylark and myself ready to go if the stars ever align, but in the meantime, I will think back to that time when I was a very small being on a very small boat in the middle of a very big ocean. Hopefully, it will be enough...

Fair winds.