Having spent the last thirty years trying to buy the perfect sailboat, outfit it to our needs, and then head off onto the wine dark sea, and then done just that, we’ve come to the realization that the dream isn’t nearly as dreamy, and the reality is certainly more costly.
We’d hoped to be able to afford the cruising life style using only the income from my wife AnnMarie’s business, but that turned out not to be very practical. It wasn’t that it couldn’t be done, but it meant that we were unable to just go cruising. Instead, we hung at anchor (in some amazingly beautiful places) always within the evil grip of a cell tower, our only (and quite necessary) lifeline to the interwebs.
And we weren’t keeping our heads above water, no pun intended. Cruising is no longer “cheap”, at least not in Mexico. Our expenses were limited (we didn’t frequent marinas, theatres, bars, restaurants, discos, or any of the other extravagances that tend to break the typical cruising budget) but we still encountered costs we weren’t anticipating, and many items we’d assumed would work for years broke, often just after their warranties had expired. More frustrating was that boat parts are often twice or three times the price you’d pay in the states, fuel costs are higher, and yard prices have risen dramatically. Most surprising of all was that food is expensive; at least if you want to eat reasonably healthy meats and vegetables. All of those things forced us to the conclusion that if I didn’t go back to work we’d end up depleting of meagre sailing kitty quickly.
So I’m back in the states, looking for work. Which has proved to be an interesting exercise. I haven’t really had to look for work in over a decade; I’d spent the last two years sailing, before that I spent almost five years working at Azul, at a job a friend who worked there offered me. Before that I’d been at Zhone (yet another job obtained because a friend there recommended me) and before that I’d been off sailing the boat from the British Virgin Islands (where we bought it) to Trinidad (off the eastern coast of South America) through the Caribbean to Panama, through the canal, and then back up to San Francisco. And before that I’d enrolled in a paramedic program, because it seemed like a fun career change. It wasn’t, but the combined effect was to leave me unfamiliar with the modern job-seeking world.
So now I’m looking for work, and have been told that just being really good at what you do, and having done it for a long time, isn’t good enough. In fact, many recruiters have told me to expunge the first ten years of my resume as “having too much experience” will actually count against me. So will grey hair, non-ironic beards, lack of a web presence with twenty-seven colour glossy photographs describing one’s hip side-projects, or using a phone with less processing power than most small countries. People said this to me with a straight face.
Life goes on, let’s see how this goes…