Slowing Down is Hard to Do
My wife, Michelle, was visibly angry with me. “You’re RUDE to me! You’re GRUMPY all the time! You just don’t seem HAPPY! If this is the way it is going to be, I’m OUT OF HERE!” This was not the kind of conversation I was supposed to be having just three months into living the dream!
We had left San Diego in November in the annual Baja Haha sailboat rally south to Baja California. We were on our way South with an indefinite ending date, on our dream Catamaran, having amazing and beautiful cruising experiences. It was now January and we were finally alone, enjoying an easy sail down the Mexican gold coast. We were supposed to be enjoying ourselves more than ever!
Our project had only started about a year and a half earlier, but the idea was more than thirty years old. I had hatched up this idea in my head as a teenager, when I left Colombia. We were now sailing to Colombia, and we hoped to try and sustain this adventure for as long as we could afford it. But here we were, three months into it, having a major crisis.
Michelle is not a sailor. She is a person that belongs to trees and mountains. She is earth. She is happiest when she is in a forest, surrounded by huge trees. “I’m in church!”, she says. So when she brought up the idea of sailing, I was stunned, incredulous, I could not believe that this could possibly happen. She had always said, “I’ll fly to wherever you sail!” Somehow, despite her nature, she found the freedom she craved in sailing. She loves traveling, and she wanted to change our way of life. So, after years of working hard, toiling to make a living, raising children, getting degrees and buying and setting up houses, she was ready to make a change. She knew that I had a passion for building software, that I loved being part of a team that built startups, and that the only thing powerful enough to remove me from that would be my other passion: Sailing! With that most awesome proposal, we set out to build a new home, but this time a floating one. In a couple of months, after seeing only four other boats, we found the perfect Catamaran for us, fast but homey. We bought a Catana 431 in San Diego, brought it to the San Francisco bay and as luck would have it, we found a berth for it.
Only 9 months after she brought up the idea, we were living (illegally) on the boat! The first few months were cold, wet and rough, but we endured. We fixed one thing after the other and by September, the boat started moving South. On weekends we cruised and during the week Michelle stayed on the boat while I returned to work in San Francisco. By November, the boat was back in San Diego and we were mostly ready for the Baja Haha rally. This was all very high paced and stressful, but it was the life I was comfortable with.
The Baja Haha was a thrill, but also a blur. The rally was set up to fit into a seven day cruise, so that it could be accessible to the maximum number of people, and it headed South very fast. This pace matched my need and desire for efficiency. I thought I was calm, confident and completely ready, but those around me saw me a bit differently. They saw someone who was still moving at the pace of Silicon Valley, working long hours on the boat fixing this or that, stressed and managing the crew like they were a startup team. I did not stop at any point, nor did I change my intensity to look around me and truly be present.
Once the Baja Haha was over and Michelle and I were alone, a new challenge presented itself. We now had to try and sail by ourselves and work out the kinks of both the boat and our working relationship on the boat. We took on the challenge with the same efficiency as everything else we did, after all, we had worked together before. We have been married for 20 odd years. Despite a few disagreements and a couple of uncomfortable moments, we managed our way around the cape, and started heading into the Sea of Cortez, then South the coast of Mexico.
What I didn’t realize then was that those early moments of discomfort were the symptom of a deeper problem. I simply wasn’t slowing down at all. I was keeping up the same style of living and fast pace in a different location. I was still managing things, working on the boat non-stop, focused and intense, without pacing myself.
Michelle had looked at the dates, and even though she had never done this type of cruising, she had put together a very reasonable plan for moving South through the Mexican gold coast, out past Acapulco and the bays of Huatulco, well south of Mexico. The plan was very complete but left enough room for us to wander around and linger, explore and slow down. I was happy to have deferred that part of the cruising planning to her, and felt comfortable with it. After La Cruz, near Puerto Vallarta we would sail past Cabo Corrientes and enter the area cruisers call the Gold Coast. I think it is called that because it is a sweet set of small, cozy quiet stops which are both beautiful and relaxing, filled with great swimming, beaches, and anchorages, everything you want in your dream cruising experience.
But one good month into this slow sail, while lingering in Barra de Navidad, which has a classy old resort, a great little town and a sweet little estuary, together with a hidden beach, and fun bars; one good month into lingering, into being cruisers, barely three months after leaving San Diego, and we were having our first really serious fight.
The irritation had lingered for days, for reasons that neither of us could understand. It had somehow started after I got the stomach flu for a couple of days. I don’t remember what triggered the argument, but it was likely a careless word on my part, that had piled on top of another careless word from a week before. I do remember that we were not able to resolve it right away. The discomfort continued for several days. Things kept getting triggered again and again, and the bickering seemed like it was non-stop.
People had asked me how long we were planning to do this crazy cruising thing, and I would jokingly respond with, “we will do this until Michelle starts chasing me around the boat with a knife!” She hated this joke! And here we were, barely three months in and she was angry with me, ready to drop this whole idea. In my mind, we had reached the point the joke was alluding to.
This particular week we had a friend staying with us, and she unfortunately had to deal with our bickering. The benefit was that she kept Michelle company while we dealt with whatever was ailing us. Michelle and she went to town, bought food, found restaurants, explored hidden beaches, and enjoyed Barra during the day and during the evening.
While she did this, I setup my laptop, fixed the water maker (again), changed a pump, helped another cruiser with his laptop, and generally stayed to myself, working non stop. On a boat, every day is a weekend, or rather, everyday is a weekday. You can’t tell which.
This temporary separation of affairs was somehow helping things from exploding, but was not moving things forward. It seemed to me that during these days in paradise, she was slowly moving further and further away from me and the boat.
One morning I relented to her daily request and went with her to morning Yoga. It somehow seemed like a chore to me to join a crowd of retired and semi-retired people doing Yoga on the beach of the resort, facing the cute Barra de Navidad town. I don’t know that this changed things, but it did put me in a mind to try and resolve the problem. Hours later, I asked Michelle upstairs with me to talk, away from our guest. We found a space in the Hotel that we thought was private enough and we argued, discussed, bickered and cried for an hour.
Then she proposed to let me go on my own, that she would wait for me somewhere. I could find a fellow sailor to keep me company.
I thought about it for a millisecond and panicked! I realized at that moment that the point was not to be sailing on a really cool boat or to be in a perfect secret beach, or to find that perfect tropical bar, or catch that perfect beautiful Tuna, or to make the perfect mix of Tequila and Mezcal to achieve that most delicious Sun Downer, or even to find out some crazy way to become a digital nomad and code on my boat. The point was to do it WITH HER! To share the sunsets with her and to find the perfect beach WITH HER, to experience every minute in full presence with her! To be in the moment, in the boat, next to her! I think the point for Michelle had also been that, to pull me from non-stop work and have me spend time with her. The boat and the ocean were just a way to do it.
With the room spinning, I asked her to give me time to fix the problem and to understand it better. Still buzzing with fear and walking for what seemed forever, we returned to the boat while seeing the beautiful sun setting in the ocean, visible from Barra de Navidad Hotel overlooking this gorgeous little part of Mexico.
For the next few days I thought hard about the weeks since we left La Cruz. I remember slow sailing to Chamela. I remember swimming together in that bay. I remember sunsets while at sea, and I thought all was well. But she saw something else. She saw me being tense and short and difficult and rude and unhappy.
UNHAPPY? How could this be? I searched my brain trying to understand how could these glorious days be wrong? Then it hit me. I was like a speeding truck and suddenly in this quiet peaceful, charming part of Mexico, without weather challenges, without real boat challenges, without any serious problems, my internal engine was still speeding down the road and my mind did not have enough hard problems to drive through. When Michelle asked a question, made a comment or interrupted my racing brain, I would inadvertently respond in a curt or rude way. When she wanted to share a moment, I was still somewhere trying to solve a problem that probably did not need solving. She was reacting to this and sensing that I was not fully changing the way I had been.
As we left Barra de Navidad, now alone, I handed the helm to Michelle. She had sailed us in because I was sick as we arrived and it was fitting that she should steer the boat out as well. Sailing away from Barra we saw a wreck of a big container ship that is on the rocks of the Island. It is a mighty sight to behold, a wreck in more than one way. I felt a bit like that ship, stuck on the rocks, breaking up slowly.
The next days and weeks did not seem to change things much. But I do remember being more mindful of what I said, and more careful of what I did. We arrived at Isla Ixtapa after a whole day of sailing and motoring, racing to beat the sunset, adjusting the sails constantly, sharing responsibilities and enjoying food together. As we arrived, two beautiful spotted dolphins greated us, seeming to say “welcome”.
We then settled down, made ourselves a drink and watched the Sunset. We sat on the bow, contemplating, floating on our home, tied to the sand under the water as the sun hid behind the edge of the island. I don’t know when I started to slow down for sure, but I think it must have started in Barra, after that talk, or after the Yoga or after crying a bit. Maybe just maybe it finally hit me, after that Sunset. It hit me that I could still race a little, to feed my racing nature, but what mattered was to do this adventure with my wife. Maybe that is all that needed to change.
