A year later, almost nothing about our life is the same shape. All six of our kids are grown, the youngest a sophomore in college now. Since February I’ve stopped selling my time for money. And this January, if everything continues the way we’re hoping, Michele and I become grandparents for the first time, to a daughter born to our son Tucker and his wife Sydney.

All of that has pulled at a question. What are we actually pursuing.

When we moved onto WonderWay full time, the mission we built around it was to learn to navigate the ocean, which has turned out to be exactly as hard and as scary as advertised, while also an amplifier of wonder and awe experiences. We set our sights on going all the way around the world, because that distance was what we thought the mission required. What we’ve learned since is that we need to live inside a place, not just move past it.

If you read my post titled “Pressure”, you know the night that put a word in Michele’s mouth she’d never used about herself before. Unhinged. What I understand now that I didn’t then is that there are two very different things we’ve been calling the same name. Floating at anchor in a beautiful harbor is one kind of life. Pushing a boat across open ocean for two or five or ten days straight, in the dark, is another kind entirely. The places where we actually got to immerse ourselves, Georgetown, Governor’s Harbour, Spanish Wells, are the places this newsletter has been the most alive. The rest of the time, we were somewhere just long enough to start loving it and then gone, leaving behind relationships we wanted more of.

That unhinged feeling didn’t resolve the last time I wrote about it. It just went awkward, the way things do when you tell yourself you only need to reset and you’ll be ready to go further. Then a second force arrived. We found out we’re going to be grandparents, and something in both of us did the same math at the same time. We’d always told ourselves the early years of a circumnavigation were fine to do from the South Pacific or Indonesia, that we’d fly home and be present grandparents on a fluid kind of schedule. But a circumnavigation is one way, and it’s the whole way around. You don’t get to turn back partway. Between that and the unhinged feeling she’d been carrying quietly for longer than I wanted to admit, Michele finally had the courage to say the whole sentence. Going around the world isn’t what she wants to spend the next four or five years of her life doing.

I’d known she was circling this for a while. I kept pushing anyway, because the variables lined up well for me. It took both forces together, hers and the one we now share, to make me actually stop and look at what we were building this whole thing around.

Here’s what we found when we did. The mission was never to sail around the world. WonderWay’s own name carries the real one. Seeking the way of wonder. That’s been the throughline of both our lives since we were kids, long before either of us had a boat or a word as tidy as wonder for it. We’ve learned a few things about it over the decades that turned out to matter here. It shows up through eight consistent doors. Nature. Art. Music. Mystic experience. Moral beauty. Life and death experience. Epiphany. The energy of doing something as a group. It gets stronger the closer you stand to the edge between joy and fear, because feeling wonder requires a little discomfort. It very rarely happens alone. Mine comes loudest with Michele, our kids, my siblings, and with friends.

We pushed that fear dial further than we meant to on WonderWay. Higher than the mission ever actually required. You lose wonder, not gain it, once you tip too far past the edge into fear itself. We’re prone to that, both of us, and we needed to come back a few notches.

So starting in December, WonderWay goes back into charter in the British Virgin Islands, the way she spent her first year, with a captain and a chef, available for anyone who wants a week aboard her. Michele and I will take her out ourselves from August through October, and share her with family and friends during the charter season. Our little green house in Satellite Beach, the one we’ve been renting out on Airbnb since we moved aboard, comes off the platform and becomes our home again, the way every other house we’ve lived in has been. We call it our SeaShack.

What that actually buys us is room. Room to finally go research WonderLand, the place Michele has been dreaming since our farm years, and start turning it into something real. It’s a place on land, overlooking water, built for the same thing WonderWay was built for, people intersecting with something bigger than themselves, and Michele has been carrying the whole shape of it in her heart for a decade. That’s her story, I still want you to hear it from her when she’s ready. This also gives me room to finish the book I’ve been writing, which I’ve decided to call “WonderJunkies”. Because that’s what we are, all of us in this family, and I don’t think there’s a more honest word for it.

So here’s what you can expect from this newsletter moving forward. It’s no longer a full-time-liveaboard story, because that was never actually what it was about. Just a place where I tell you what I’m learning about seeking wonder, wherever I happen to find it that week. A chapter from the book, or the slow indignity of trying to get it published. What Michele and I learn chasing WonderLand from place to place. A week aboard WonderWay. Or an evening at the SeaShack with people we love.

I hope you’ll keep coming.

Last two times you heard from me, I was writing about being unanchored — about losing a rhythm we needed to get back, and about the boatyard problem that put us here in the first place. A few weeks have passed since then. Michele and I have been living on land for almost a month, having genuinely amazing experiences. And in the middle of all of it, I’ve noticed something about the difference in how my brain and body feel on the boat versus on land. So let me catch you up, because what we’ve been doing has been wonderful — for us, for our friends, for our family — even though it’s turned out to be a very different life than the one we live when we’re moving across the ocean on a boat.

The short version of the boatyard

I’ve written the last two posts about the vibration, the bent shafts, and everything that turned a planned two-week haul-out into two to three months on the hard — so I won’t re-walk that ground here. If you’re just catching up, go read those first; this post picks up right where they leave off.

What matters for this one is the choice Michele and I made once we knew the timeline had blown up: not to just survive the delay, but to use it. We’d build the rhythm we needed on land, then come back to the boat at the end of September and pick up where we left off.

The house

We moved back into our place in Satellite Beach — the one land home we own. It’s a four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath single story with a pool, and we’ve spent real money making it bulletproof as a rental: zero-scape yard, no watering or mowing required, hurricane windows, a relined sewage system. A property management company runs it on Airbnb like a small hotel — full pre-cleaning, folded towels, fresh linens for every guest — and since listing it in February we are seeing steadily rising occupancy.

None of our personal belongings live in that house day to day. They live in our garage, air-conditioned, on racks: about a hundred black-and-yellow totes plus a fridge/freezer, the whole physical record of our life compressed into a two-car space. When we come back, we move our things into the house, live in it as ours, and when we leave, everything goes back into the fridge and totes and the house resets for the next guest.

This is the plan going forward — three months a year on land, split with our kids and, someday, grandkids, using this house as the place we return to in order to re-energize. When I wrote my last post about needing to re-anchor, this was the strategy: coming back to this specific place, on purpose, because navigating the world by boat takes a level of energy and intentionality that eventually needs to be refilled.

Turtles and manatees

In the middle of all this, my youngest sister Megan and two of my nieces and a nephew came to visit. We’d originally planned to have them aboard the boat on a run up toward Maine, but with the haul-out stretching to months, we told them: come be beach kids instead. Ride our electric bikes. Live the rhythm.

And that’s exactly what we showed them — mornings on bikes to watch the sunrise, running on the sand, surf lessons, evenings chasing the sunset over the intercoastal so they could watch it reflect off the water. We went sea turtle hunting and watched three mother turtles come up out of the ocean at night to dig nests with flippers that look nothing like digging tools. One of them we watched start to finish — the whole ordeal of hauling herself up the beach, working her body into position, laying her eggs, and dragging herself back down to the water. Nature doing something enormously difficult in complete silence. On a different stretch of sand and day, we watched a hatchling crawl out of a nest and make its run for the ocean while we fended off any bird that looked too interested.

Halfway through the trip, my other sister Kelly joined us, and the whole thing kept expanding.

One of my favorite parts of that whole week had nothing to do with wildlife or bike rides. One of my closest friends spent time with us during the visit, and somewhere in the middle of it, he and Megan started testing whether their frequencies matched. We all got a front-row seat to watch them sync up — the kind of firework it is to watch two people you love start to find each other. We got an extra gift out of it, too: one night he and my nephew jumped into the Banana River with Kelly and got the bioluminescence to light up the water around them, the intercoastal doing its own version of magic in the dark.

On the last day we took everyone to Blue Springs, where crystal-clear water rises straight up out of the ground in the middle of the state — no tributary feeding it, just water coming up from below and forming a river wide enough that hundreds of people swim in it at once. Manatees live in that water. You can snorkel a few feet from them while they drift by, enormous and unhurried.

It was a genuinely beautiful stretch of time. And then it ended, and I came back to the boat alone for a check-in with the yard.

What happened when I walked back aboard

The work is far enough along now that we’re building the plan to put everything back together. Currently it’s just a structure sitting on stands, not a boat. Living on it alone, without Michele, comes with its own list of inconveniences: climbing down the ladder, walking to the bathroom, all the small friction of a home built for water sitting on land.

But here’s the thing I didn’t expect. I’d struggled to write the entire month I was home. And the moment I stepped back onto the boat — still on the hard, no water under it, no Michele aboard — the right side of my brain started working again. I wanted to write. I wanted to process. That reaction caught me off guard enough that I sat with it.

I’m about 350 pages into a manuscript about our family and the experiences that made us who we are. I’ve been working with an editor to take that raw draft and shape it into something worth someone else’s time, and every Sunday night, our six kids and their partners get on a call for a family book club — one chapter at a time, out of twenty-two. We rotate across the kids who facilitates each chapter. We’re currently on chapter eleven, about our move from our Redmond neighborhood house out to the farm. It’s been remarkable to watch my kids read their own history and fill in gaps I didn’t know were there — what they felt in a moment I only wrote from my side of it.

The writing itself happens the same way every time: I dictate first, and then I go back and shape that raw material into something meant for someone other than just me. And that process, I’ve realized, requires a specific kind of brain state. It’s not really about intensity, though writing does take more of that than not writing. It’s about plasticity — softness, curiosity — because I have to go back into these stories willing to see what actually happened, not just the version where I got it right. The stories are only worth telling if I let them include the parts where I got it wrong, which is often, and which I keep getting wrong even now.

So the real question became: why did that switch flip the moment I got back on the boat, even sitting on stands in a boatyard, without the person who brings wonder to WonderWay?

Here’s what I think is happening. The boat has become the place where my brain and body go soft and curious because it requires that of me constantly. It’s a floating home of uncertainty. Systems can fail at any point. Weather can turn. Water can change. Every new anchorage is an unknown. I don’t control most of the variables that create that uncertainty — I have usually never fixed the specific system that just broke, and I have to trust my own competence, the people I can call, and the resources I can reach, to get through it. I have to trust charts and instruments in waters I’ve never sailed. All of that keeps me in a constant, low-grade state of problem-solving rather than control. And somewhere in the repetition of that, the boat makes me softer. I find flow faster. I stay curious because curiosity is the actual tool that solves the problem in front of me.

Land doesn’t ask that of me. Our house has systems too, and they break about as often as the boat’s do, but the resolution is usually more known— I call my tried and tested contractors, Tucker comes over, or Michele or I fix it ourself. A storm can pass directly over our house and I might not even register it, because the house just sits there and keeps the water and wind out. On the boat, the same storm might mean moving, which means adapting to a new location, new provisioning, new everything, and constantly tracking the ground beneath the anchor. Being still in one place has real advantages — I get to be with people I love, build rhythms I can’t build while moving. Michele and I have realized we need to get physically stronger before the Pacific crossing ahead of us, and that is more efficient on land, which is exactly what we’re doing for these three months: a gym routine with amazing gym buddies and thoughtful recovery.

But the rhythm I’ve had the hardest time building on land is the one that matters most to this project — time to think, feel, and actually articulate something. I’ve trained my brain to switch cleanly in and out of work mode. That’s a different muscle than the one this requires. And that muscle simply hasn’t been firing on land. It’s not that I have had nothing to do while I have been on the boat; I’ve been working on boat projects the whole time. It’s that I haven’t created the conditions this specific kind of thinking needs.

I’ve read about this distinction before — “blue mind” versus “red mind,” the idea that proximity to water changes the texture of human thought. It’s a strange thing to notice living in a beach town, because you’d think the water would be doing the same work either close to it or on it. But I think what matters isn’t the water itself. It’s what I’ve trained the boat to mean to me: a place where I let go and follow a thought or a feeling wherever it goes, because I have no other choice.

Intention, not structure

I read an early version of this post to Michele, and she pushed back on the ending. Her point: a life of planning nothing more than 24 hours out, of staying in constant uncertainty and curiosity, isn’t something most people can actually live. If I write it up as a lifestyle — as the thing you’d have to adopt wholesale to get any of this — it stops being useful to anyone who isn’t sitting on a boat with the time to experiment the way I am right now.

She’s right. And sitting with her pushback, I think I see what I was missing. I’ve always been an extremist. I ran the first half of my life at one extreme — all structure, all certainty, all planned. Now I’m running my early second half at another extreme — less structure, more curiosity, plans written in sand. Both are teaching me something, but I’m not convinced either one is the answer. Pendulums gravitate to the middle.

Here’s what I keep circling, though, more question than conclusion: this was never really about more structure versus less structure. My story — the one I’m 350 pages into writing — is full of moments of wonder that show up inside heavily planned lives. Some of the biggest ones took years of planning to arrive at. So planning clearly isn’t the enemy. Something else is the variable, and I think it is consistent intention. I can really only hold one or two core intentions at a time, and one of them takes up most of the energy I have. Right now, on the boat, one of my intentions is to share what we’re experiencing and learning. My sunrise and sunset rhythm is checking in on that intention. It’s the closest thing I’ve found to naming why I feel different on the boat, and realizing it may not be unique to boat life.

I don’t know yet if that’s real or if it’s just a good habit for this particular season, on this particular boat, with this particular amount of time on my hands. What I am coming to know is this: I think the price of an unforgettable experience is an unforgettable intention.

We’ve had watermaker failures, water pump failures, a dozen small systems that can break on a boat and turn a good day into a long one. Right now our transmission is having issues. But none of those are the one thing. The anchor is the one thing. If it fails, everything fails. If it holds, you can fix anything else in the morning. A good anchor is how you sleep. A bad one is how you don’t.

We’ve put real money into ours because the anchor is what lets a boat become a home. Home means different things to different people — a status symbol, a place that holds the memory of your kids, a place that holds your own memories. Michele and I have landed on a narrower definition than most: home is wherever holds the routines and rhythms that anchor you to the earth. We learned that physically first, because we live on a boat that depends on a literal connection to the sea floor. We’ve been learning it a second way these last two months, because we’ve been living unanchored.

We knew this stretch was coming. We are still working out how serious the boat’s transmission problem actually is, and who’s accountable for solving it, and that kind of diagnosis takes time. So we made a choice: instead of waiting in a boatyard, we’d wait in the place the country began.

Jamestown. Williamsburg. Yorktown. We’d already been in and out of this historic triangle last August, and it had wrecked us in the best way. This time our boat was on the hard an hour away, so we kept driving back — the Colonial Parkway, the Jamestown fort, every museum in the triangle.

Fourth of July has always been a serious holiday in our family because we built our family traditions inside it. I can count on one hand the number of Fourths my family hasn’t spent watching fireworks over water — Lake Union in Seattle, then Lake Sammamish, always chasing a spot where the water would hold the light. We turned the night before into its own tradition, too. Farm Third, we call it — a homemade fireworks show on our own pastures, amateur at first, better every year, an epic playlist created by our daughter. Roman candle wars before the real show. Friends bringing food to share. By the time it grew into itself, a couple hundred people were sitting in the grass, waiting for us to light the fuse.

So when we found ourselves in the historic triangle for the actual 250th, we called Holland and told her to come. Even with everything else unresolved, this was a thing worth being together.

Here’s the part I didn’t expect to write about: we’ve fallen a little out of love with our country. Not because of who’s in office. Because of the whiplash — the constant swing from one extreme to the other, administration to administration, like the country can’t hold a single note for more than a few years. It’s made loving it harder. And that’s a strange thing to sit with, because the three of us walking into Williamsburg that week loved this country more than almost anyone we know.

Growing up, it wasn’t just civic pride. It was doctrine — God loves America, we were taught, we were the fortunate ones, born here on purpose, and that was simply how it was. So when you watch the country turn on itself, when neighbors can’t sit at the same table, the question isn’t abstract. It’s personal. How could God love people who hurt each other this much? That was the question we carried into the historic triangle. We didn’t leave with an answer. We left with something else.

We spent the third and the fourth entirely inside it. Not the news version. The 1776 version.

We stood outside the Capitol building in Williamsburg and listened to Thomas Jefferson read the Declaration of Independence, in the same place it was first read in 1776. We heard Martha Washington tell her story. We heard Patrick Henry. We watched George Washington march down Duke of Gloucester Street with the fifes going. What struck both of us wasn’t the reenactment itself. It was the reminder underneath it — that the country wasn’t founded by people who agreed with each other. It was founded by people who sat in a room and had the hard conversations anyway, then wrote down what they’d agreed to, knowing full well nobody in that room got everything they wanted.

I’m a history major, so I already loved this going in. I am not naive of the less Disney stories of our founding fathers, the way non-whites were treated, and the lost history of all the impactful women who shaped America. But I think most of those men believed, genuinely, that they were building something better than what they’d inherited. They got things wrong. Some of them got things badly wrong. But the intention was there. And I wonder if our generation might be the first in a long time asking that same question in earnest — not how do we protect what we have, but how do we make this better than what we have become. Our own six kids often ask some version of that same question.

Two women closed out the 250th for Williamsburg. The first, at a gathering with music and senators and members of Congress, the governor of Virginia spoke, Abigail Spanberger, and the way she talked about loving her country wasn’t rhetorical. It was physical. You could feel it across the crowd the way weather lands. Then, at the end of the PBS live broadcast — the one carried nationally, cameras everywhere — Carly Fiorina closed the night and had the whole audience pledge out loud, together, to leave the country better than we received it.

That night re-anchored us and gave us hope we will once again feel the energy of America. Not in a metaphor. In an actual, physical way — the kind of night that resets what you thought you’d lost the thread of.

But anchoring has an opposite, and we’d been living in it for months without naming it.

Michele has been using the word unhinged. We’d both noticed it — irritable, on edge, unsure, without being able to point to why. We knew the boat would get fixed. We didn’t know how, when, what it would take, or whether it would be ready to make next spring’s crossing to the South Pacific. That uncertainty was one thing. But underneath it was something else: we’d been unanchored, in the most literal sense, for far longer than we’d registered.

On a boat, unanchored means underway. It means the boat is moving, which means someone has to be paying attention every minute, because movement costs energy — fuel, electricity, people-energy, all of it. Anchored is where you get to stop spending that energy. It’s where rhythm becomes possible again. It’s the difference between a battery that’s charging and a battery that’s being drawn down, and we’d been drawing down for weeks without checking the gauge.

We counted it up almost by accident, looking at our calendar one night. Twenty different beds in sixty days. Visiting kids, visiting family and friends, moving the boat up the coast, and now Airbnbs in Virginia while we wait on parts and answers. Ninety-five percent of our actual life on this boat is spent at anchor — that’s the part people don’t picture when they imagine us crossing an ocean somewhere. But these last two months had flipped the ratio entirely, and neither of us had clocked it until the number was sitting there on the table between us.

You can’t build a rhythm while you’re underway. You can’t have a schedule, a ritual, a version of a day that repeats itself, because the whole posture of being underway is vigilance, whether on land or at sea. You need to be alert and aware at all times. Everything you encounter is unfamiliar, because it is the first time you have been there. It’s not that boat life is unanchored — it’s that we’d stacked multiple months of the 5% on top of each other, without the 95% to balance it, and a body only holds that posture for so long before it starts telling you.

So that’s the next three months. Through the end of September, we’re staying at our own Airbnb in Satellite Beach FL. Putting the anchor down and leaving it down. Building back the rituals that matter enough to repeat, one ordinary Tuesday at a time, until we can’t remember what unhinged felt like.

Michele thought differently. She said it the day we arrived — I think we’re going to be here longer than two weeks — and I smiled the way I smile when I’m certain she’s wrong. I had a plan. Parts were ordered. Work was scoped. Two weeks, back in the water, north to Maine.

She has better instincts than I do. I’m still getting used to that.

When you pull a boat out of the water for the first time in two years, you see everything.

You see what the ocean has been doing to the parts of your hull that you only ever glimpse during a dive — the shafts, the struts, the propellers, the places where the underwater world meets the mechanical one. We had never seen WonderWay dry. Not once since we’ve owned her. And I had carried a question for two years that I couldn’t fully answer while we were in the water.

The vibration.

From the beginning, motoring WonderWay had a tremor to it. Not dramatic — but persistent. The kind of thing that mechanics shrug at and say could be the props, could be the V-drives, could be the shafts — a long list of could-bes that never resolves into a diagnosis because you can’t see the whole system while it’s underwater.

The tremor had been there since we sea trialed her in Durban, July of 2024. And I knew, the way you know things you’d rather not know, that a sustained vibration in a mechanical system doesn’t stay contained. It radiates. It stresses whatever is around it. It had almost certainly contributed to the V-drive failures — one I wrote about a few posts ago when my hero brother Tyler helped me break down the bearings and replace them. The vibration had been quietly doing damage we couldn’t see.

Now we could see it.

The shafts came out this week.

A shaft is simple in theory: a two-inch, five-foot rod of hardened stainless steel whose only job is to transfer power from the engine to the propeller. Nothing complicated. When it’s straight and aligned, it is invisible — you never notice it. When it’s not, you feel it in everything.

We learned three days ago that our shafts are bent.

Not from impact — WonderWay has never hit anything harder than water. The bend is in the middle of each shaft, which tells you exactly what caused it: misalignment. Over time, a shaft that runs slightly off-axis will bow under its own load. Not suddenly. Gradually. Invisibly. And it will vibrate the whole way.

We ordered new propellers before we got here. New V-drives. Ready for the best case. What we found instead is the whole drivetrain needs to come apart — shafts replaced, struts aligned, bearings reset, everything measured with lasers and tolerances that leave no room for error. New props and V-drives are still going in. But the foundation has to be right first.

Two weeks became two months.

There’s a specific feeling that comes with that kind of news.

It’s not despair exactly. It’s more like watching a door close on a hallway you’d already walked down in your mind. We had been to Maine. Emotionally, we had already threaded the Cape Cod Canal, anchored in Acadia, watched the light change over a coastline we’d never seen. We had invited family and friends to join us. We had made plans inside plans.

And in the span of one conversation with our project manager, all of it was gone.

Michele and I sat with that for a while. There’s no shortcut through it — you just have to let the feeling be what it is before you can move into what’s next. The circumnavigation has taught us that. The ocean gives you a lot of practice at releasing the plan.

But here’s the other thing the ocean has taught us: when the plan goes, something else arrives.

We can’t stay in the boatyard for two months. Living on the hard — boat up on stands, no water systems, no air conditioning, climbing a ladder to get home — is survivable, but barely. Needless to say, we’ve been staying at an Airbnb nearby (while immersing ourself in Americas historic triangle…more on that next week) and would need to extend it for months.

So we made a different choice.

We’re going back to Satellite Beach.

The community we lived in for five years before we left on this voyage. The friends who watched us go, who’ve been following along, who’ve been sending encouragement from a distance. We get to walk back into that world for two months while WonderWay gets the surgery she’s needed since before we knew she needed it.

There’s a specific kind of luck in a curveball that sends you somewhere you love.

I’ve been thinking about what this life is actually training us to do.

Not sailing. Not boat systems, though we’re learning those too. What it’s actually training is something harder to name — the capacity to hold a disruption without collapsing around it. To feel the door close on Maine and not make that feeling the whole story. To find, inside the thing you didn’t choose, what it is that life is actually offering you.

Two months with people we love. A boat that will come out of this stronger than she’s ever been. Time on land to breathe, to write, to be in one place long enough to remember what that feels like.

We didn’t plan for any of it.

We couldn’t be more grateful.

Not the feeling of one — the structure. What makes it work, what makes it fail, what separates the ones that last from the ones that slowly, quietly, stop.

My son Logan once gave me a definition I keep coming back to: a relationship is an agreement between two people to grow together.

Not to be together. Not to love each other, though that’s in there. To grow. Together. That word — agreement — matters. It implies you’ve chosen it. It implies the other person has chosen it too. And it implies that when one of you stops choosing it, something essential has changed.

Father’s Day makes me think about all of it.

Here’s what growth actually requires: pressure.

Not difficulty for its own sake. Not suffering as virtue. Pressure. The specific kind that comes when something is hard and unfamiliar and the outcome is not guaranteed, and you have to move through it anyway.

Every time I’ve grown in my life, pressure was present. Financial pressure. Mortality pressure. The pressure of doing things I didn’t know how to do, in places I’d never been, with consequences I couldn’t fully anticipate.

You don’t always win. But you do get to the other side — and the other side is the growth. Not because you conquered it. Because you moved through it and came out changed.

The problem with trying to reduce pressure is that you reduce growth at the same rate.

We’ve been running north up the East Coast for two weeks.

Two engine failures offshore. A hull carpeted in barnacles from a month in murky marina water. Cape Hatteras in 30-knot winds and 10-foot seas. A haul-out deadline in Virginia we could not miss.

The night that stays with me most is the one I slept through.

Michele was on watch. Four hours on, four off — the rhythm we’ve built over thousands of miles. She’s extraordinary on watch. What she’s still developing is comfort in crowded waters, in situations where the decisions are fast and the margin is small.

A ship hailed her. Get a mile away — we’re laying cable.

She moved. But the vessel was closing faster than she could respond to with sails up in strong winds, and suddenly the lights weren’t a point in the distance anymore. They were filling the dark in front of her. A boat five times our size. No good option for which way to turn.

She did everything right. Hard turn. Cleared it by too small a margin for comfort.

And then she screamed my name.

I came up from below half-asleep in time to watch the other vessel pass, leaving WonderWay rocking in its wake. Michele was shaking. I was shaking. We got clear, and she told me what happened, and I could see it on her face — not just the fear, but the weight of having been alone in it. Of having had to make every decision in the dark, by herself, and then having it not end in disaster.

She took a breath. She went below. She took a shower, got in bed, and eventually fell asleep.

I don’t know a better sentence for courage than that.

We made it to the anchorage at 3 a.m. Six hours ahead of our noon deadline.

Michele came up as we were coming in. Together we got the sails down, set the anchor, and looked at each other in the dark. One of us said we made it. I don’t remember which one.

We hugged for a long time.

The next day we navigated our 28’ wide boat through a 40’ wide very challenging S curve to get it in position to be taken out of the water. I got to feel the pressure on this one, but fortunately my past pressure filled navigations are making me more and more confident that WonderWay, Michele, and I are a good team. We are now on land for 2 weeks pushing a bunch of boat maintenance and improvement projects to make her stronger. While we are here in the sailing capital of the United States, Michele is going to get her sailing captain license to make our team even stronger.

Michele said something recently about our kids that I haven’t been able to let go of.

She said: the agreement to grow together only works if both people are actually growing. Not just the child. The parent too.

That landed hard. Because it’s easy to watch your children press into hard things and feel proud — and miss that the agreement requires something of you. That if I stop growing, I’m not holding up my end. The relationship doesn’t coast on history. It requires both people, continually, choosing to press into something.

I’ve been watching two of our sons do that this summer in ways that genuinely humble me.

Scotty is 19. He landed a competitive sales internship in Austin (thanks to help from his sister & her husband) — packed up, left the college friends and routines he knew, and moved to a city where he knows his sister & her husband but no one else. New company, new product, new environment, everything unfamiliar. The pressure of that alone would slow most people down. Instead he’s been their top salesperson in one of their main categories for four straight weeks.

I don’t think that’s talent. I think that’s what happens when someone chooses pressure instead of avoiding it.

Warnick, our fifth, is back in Seattle — the city we left when we started this voyage. He’s interning at our friends financial planning company, bringing technology into the financial world, immersed in new work and new colleagues. He’s staying with my brother and his family, which is its own kind of generosity I don’t take for granted. He didn’t have a driver’s license when we left Seattle. Now he’s navigating that city on his own, feeling what it actually is — not as a kid, but as someone becoming himself in it.

Both of them are in pressure. Both of them are growing. And watching them do it reminds me that my end of the agreement is to keep doing the same thing alongside them — not ahead of them, not coaching from the outside, but actually in it myself.

That’s what Michele saw. The agreement isn’t me watching them grow. It’s both of us growing, in parallel, at the same time.

Michele and I agreed to grow together 33 years ago when neither of us knew what that would cost.

The catamaran. The circumnavigation. The night watches. The moment she navigated a near-collision alone in the dark and then went to sleep.

That’s what the agreement actually looks like when you’re living inside it.

Growth requires pressure. Every time. No exceptions.

And I couldn’t be more grateful to have a partner who still wants to keep going.

Three-hour drive from Brevard County. When I called him the night before, I told him what had happened — both engines, offshore, the belts shredded, the slow sail into St. Augustine. He asked the right questions. Then he asked what time he should arrive.

That’s Tucker.

He was the kid who took everything apart that he shouldn’t have. Clocks, toys, the television remote. I spent years asking him to put things back together. He did, eventually. Better than before. By the time he was fourteen I had figured out what this meant about him, which is why I bought the Mustang. 1967. Junkyard. Needed everything.

I told him this was his project. I would point him in the right direction, I would answer questions, but he would turn every screw. He spent two years taking it down to the frame — sanding rust, recoating bare metal, rebuilding from the ground up. The only part he didn’t do himself was the final paint job, because even Tucker has limits, and paint is an art form.

That Mustang taught him something that no classroom would have. That broken things have a logic to them. That if you are patient and methodical and willing to be wrong, you can find the logic and follow it back to function.

He took that to cars. Then to tractors, four-wheelers, motorcycles, our riverboat, the Bobcat on our farm in Duvall. A friend rebuilding a property hired him. He framed walls, ran plumbing, did electrical. He turned a shell of a house into something livable the same way he’d turned a shell of a car into something beautiful. Then he became the head mechanic at Brevard County Zoo — where he could bring his hands and his love for animals into the same room every day. Employee of the year. Multiple promotions. They know what they have.

So when I reach the edge of my own skill, I call Tucker.

He didn’t flinch at the V-drives. I had always flinched at the V-drives. It’s the system that sits between the engine and the propeller — large pulleys, spinning fast, connected by belts that do the work of redirecting power. When it’s right, you don’t notice it. When it’s wrong, it announces itself with heat and noise and the smell of burned rubber at three in the morning fifty miles offshore.

With the help of Tucker’s hero, my older brother Tyler, I’d replaced a bearing in Nassau and felt like I’d passed some kind of test. But I still didn’t fully understand the system. Tucker helped me understand it. We pulled the idler pulleys — four of them — and he showed me what had happened. The bearings inside had overheated, swollen, seized. The grease that was supposed to keep them running had been contaminated with water and metal shavings. It wasn’t really grease anymore. It was a record of everything the system had been through.

We went to Harbor Freight. Got the right tools. Pressed the old bearings out, repacked them, pressed them back together. Installed new belts. Reassembled.

When we tested it that afternoon, the engines sounded better than they had since we got the boat.

Michele and I hugged Tucker, and hugged him again, and sent him home with our gratitude. He drove three hours back to Brevard County. We made a plan: day sails up the coast, 60 miles at a time, until we reached Virginia and the upgraded parts that were waiting for us there.

We left St. Augustine the next morning.

The day was beautiful. We had the sails up, one motor running easily alongside the wind, enough propulsion between them that the boat moved the way it’s supposed to move. I helmed for a while from the hot tub at the bow — which sounds like recklessness and isn’t, quite. I could see everything. I had the controls I needed. I was in warm water with the ocean behind me and the coast to our right and a working boat under my feet.

Then, halfway through the day, the same chirp.

I went below. Same idler pulleys. Same seized bearings. Same failure, different engine.

Tucker had told me when we were doing the work: I think this will get you to Virginia, but I want you to know what you’re looking at. These bearings have already been through a lot. The grease in them has water in it. They’ll run, but they’re not going to run forever.

I had heard him. I had thought: Virginia is close enough.

It wasn’t.

We diverted to Fernandina Beach — Amelia Island, last island in Florida, just south of the Georgia line. Safer than dramatic: one engine was still working, the seas were manageable, the channel was accessible. We weren’t limping in on no power this time. We just needed to stop.

The difference, this time, was that Tucker wasn’t with me.

In St. Augustine, I had followed his hands. Here I would have to follow what his hands had taught mine.

I pulled everything apart again. But this time I knew what I needed wasn’t repacked bearings — it was new ones. Sealed bearings, factory-greased, no water contamination, no history of heat. I needed eight of them and no one in Fernandina Beach had them.

I found a bearing specialty shop in Jacksonville, an hour and a half away. They had exactly what I needed. I ordered online, called an Uber courier, paid fifty dollars, and watched a driver cover ninety miles of Florida highway to hand me a box on the dock.

I pressed in the new bearings. Installed new belts. Reassembled the whole system.

When I tested it, it sounded like the evening Tucker left St. Augustine.

There’s something I keep coming back to about these failures.

I don’t know how to fix every system on this boat. I don’t think I ever will. The list is too long and too varied — watermaker, air conditioning, diesel motors, hybrid motors, navigation electronics, water pumps, sails, winches, davits. Each of them has its own logic, its own failure modes, its own vocabulary of sound and smell and behavior that tells you what’s wrong before it tells you completely.

What I’ve learned is that you learn them one at a time, when they break.

In Georgetown, the watermaker died and I learned how watermakers work. When the air conditioning threw a high-pressure warning, I learned about seawater strainers and how organisms colonize the intake lines over time. Now I know how V-drives work. Not abstractly — bodily. I know the weight of the idler pulleys, the way the bearings press in and out, the sound difference between a belt that’s right and one that’s about to fail.

Tucker gave me the first layer. The second failure made it mine.

We left Fernandina on Wednesday morning. The conditions were so good — calm seas, light wind from the south, everything moving in the same direction — that by the time we reached our planned stop sixty miles up the coast, Michele and I looked at each other and kept going.

Charleston. Then past Cape Fear to Wrightsville Beach. Three hundred miles, sixty hours, two nights, three days. The longest passage we’ve ever made together.

Every four hours we traded the helm. The other one slept, or tried to. I would leave Michele alone on the water at four in the morning — pitch dark, the instruments glowing, other vessels appearing as dots on the radar — and go below and try to turn off the part of my mind that wanted to stay awake. I couldn’t always manage it. She scared herself regularly and recovered, which is the only way that courage actually works.

I’ve watched Michele do things that frighten her so many times now. She does them anyway. The fear doesn’t go away — it just gets to know her, and she gets to know it, and slowly it takes up less of the room.

We pulled into Wrightsville Beach on Friday evening, an hour before the sun dropped.

We meant to leave Saturday. The weather didn’t allow it. The weather didn’t allow Sunday either. Cape Hatteras — two hundred miles to round, two nights for us, storms that arrive from angles you haven’t anticipated — requires a window. We’re still waiting for one.

What I know is this: the plan has never survived contact with the ocean. Not once, not fully. We have a haul-out scheduled in Virginia for June 18th. We may or may not make it. The ocean doesn’t read our calendars.

I used to fight that. I would feel the friction between what I intended and what was actual, and I would push against it, as though pushing hard enough would change the weather or the bearings or the conditions on the water.

I still feel the friction. But I’ve stopped fighting it.

Living the dream. You’re always on vacation. YOLO.

There’s a version of those comments that’s true, and I’ve never wanted to be ungrateful for it. We are living on a boat. We get to take our home anywhere it can float. That is not a small thing.

But vacation means something specific. It means the responsibilities of your normal life are temporarily suspended. The stress is on pause. Someone else is managing the systems. You are a guest in a place that exists to serve you. That is what vacation is.

That is not what this is.

We got back on WonderWay on June 6th, after a month on land. The transition was immediate and physical. Within an hour, I was listening differently. Every sound the boat made — every pump cycling on, every unfamiliar vibration, every beep from any panel anywhere — landed in me with a question attached. Is that normal? Was it doing that before?

On land, I hadn’t thought about a water heater once. On the boat, I know exactly when ours kicks on. I know the sound of the pressure pump. I know when the holding tanks need attention. I know whether we have enough power for the night and whether the solar will recover it by noon tomorrow. Every system that a house simply provides — power, water, pressure, waste — we produce, manage, and monitor ourselves. All of it, all the time.

That ambient awareness never fully turns off. It is the background frequency of this life.

It is not the background frequency of vacation.

We had twelve days to move WonderWay from Cape Canaveral to a boatyard in Virginia, where a set of heavy, expensive parts was already waiting for us. Haul-out scheduled. Maintenance window set. We left on June 6th heading north, toward St. Augustine — about a hundred miles, roughly seventeen hours with a sail and a motor working together.

Michele took the watch from eight to midnight. I slept. When I came up to relieve her at midnight, she told me what she’d seen: not much. Clear. No other boats. We handed off and she went below.

Somewhere around one in the morning, the port engine started chirping.

Not a loud noise. A small one. But I am tuned to small noises the way some people are tuned to their children’s voices in a crowd. That chirp didn’t belong. And with it came something else — a faint smell of burned rubber rising from the engine compartment.

I knew what it was. My engines face forward, but the propellers are at the stern. Between them is a V-drive: a belt system that redirects the force from the engine shaft backward to the propeller shaft. If the belts are heating up, the system is working against something. I shut the port engine down and switched to starboard. One engine is enough for open water.

For about two hours, it was enough.

At three in the morning, the starboard engine started chirping.

I went below with a flashlight. The starboard V-drive had four belts connecting the two shafts. Three of them were gone — not worn, not loose. Gone. Shredded into nothing. One belt remained where four used to be, and it was hot, and the smell of burned rubber was stronger now.

I stood in that engine compartment doing the math I didn’t want to do. Fifty miles from St. Augustine. Fifty miles back to Cape Canaveral, except that was into the wind. No anchor option — we were in open water with no shallow ground. If I pushed the starboard engine and lost that last belt, I had zero propulsion. And zero propulsion, fifty miles offshore, at three in the morning, meant a tow call. An expensive one. But more than the money — it meant a complete loss of control over where this boat went and when.

Michele was below, sick. She had come off the boat from Europe and never fully recovered. Coughing, headache, and now, on top of everything, nausea. She was throwing up. I was not feeling well either — body aching, head aching, stomach somewhere between motion sickness and dread.

I didn’t show her my face in those hours.

What I decided: rest both engines entirely. Use only the sails. Let whatever wind existed push us north at whatever speed it offered. We went from six knots to three. Sometimes two. At three knots, fifty miles takes sixteen hours. But we were moving, we were safe, and both engines were intact.

For sixteen hours we drifted north. We ate. We watched a few episodes of something, neither of us really watching. We took turns sleeping in short windows. The boat moved slowly through flat, gray water with almost no wind and almost no conversation. There was nothing to say that the situation wasn’t already saying.

By six in the evening we were at the St. Augustine inlet.

We ran the engines conservatively — no strain, no urgency — two miles an hour through the channel to a mooring field. It took an hour to go two miles. We picked up the ball, cleated off, and cut the engines.

I sat there for a moment.

The relief wasn’t excitement. It was the specific feeling of a door closing on a room you’d rather not go back into. We were stopped. We were attached to the earth. Whatever was wrong with the engines, it was now a problem to be solved rather than a problem to be survived.

I called Tucker.

He’s our second oldest. He is the person I call when I’ve reached the edge of my own skill and need someone who will not flinch at the problem. I told him what had happened. He asked the right questions. Then I asked him if he could come down tomorrow — meaning today — and help me find what we were actually dealing with.

He said yes.

Earlier in the day, I put a camera on a pole and held it underwater beneath each hull, watching the live feed on my phone. The propellers looked clean. No line, no debris, nothing visually wrapped around them. Which means the problem is internal — somewhere in the belt drives themselves, or in the bearings that support them. I’ll dive down this morning to confirm what the camera showed me. Tucker arrives today.

This is the part I want to say plainly, not to complain, but because I think it’s true and worth naming:

Most people, if they spent the night I just described — two engines failing in the dark, fifty miles offshore, one sick, both exhausted, three of four belts gone, going two to three miles an hour and not knowing if the last belt would hold — most people would not describe that as vacation.

They would describe that as one of the harder nights of their life.

We are not on vacation. We are living — with all the weight that word actually carries. We are managing systems, reading water, listening to engines, navigating uncertainty that doesn’t care what our plans are. We are doing hard things, often when we don’t feel capable of them, because the boat requires it and we chose the boat.

That’s a different thing. I’m not sure it has a name yet.

But I know what it isn’t.

Not because nothing was happening. Because everything was happening, and most of it wasn’t on the boat.

It started with an engine.

Somewhere in the middle of the Yellow Bank — twenty miles from land in either direction — the starboard engine stopped. On a 53-foot catamaran, losing one of two engines doesn’t just cut your power in half. It changes what the boat can do, which changes what you can do, which changes everything downstream. I got us to anchor. Safe. But now I was in Nassau with a seized bearing and a plan that needed to be gone by morning.

There is exactly one machine shop on Nassau Island. The taxi driver who took me there said: are you sure you want to go in here? She pointed out where the cameras were and told me to stay inside them.

The men inside were hot-rodding cars. One of them pressed the bearing out in ten minutes, handed it to me, and told me I was not going to find that part on the island. Too rare. A week minimum to get it through customs. We needed to leave the next day.

I went back to the boat. In a bin of spare parts I had been hauling for eighteen months, I found the exact bearing.

He pressed it back together. I reassembled the drive. Michele and I looked at each other, engines running, anchor up.

That’s boat life. The plan dissolves. You fix what broke. You continue.

The next three weeks were the least nautical sailing has ever been.

Salt Lake City first, where we spent an afternoon with Michele’s birth mom Julie and her birth siblings — the family that entered our lives a few years ago and keeps becoming more real, more ours, every time we’re together. Watching Michele in a room full of people she is genetically woven into, seeing herself in their gestures and their expressions, is one of the more quietly extraordinary things I’ve witnessed. Then a day with Janie, Michele’s adopted mom — up into the canyons for breakfast, a walk through Red Butte Gardens, hours that I will keep. Janie has always made me feel like the world is going to be okay. That hasn’t changed.

Then Reno.

Cameron, our oldest, took his first post-residency job at a hospital there. He took us through his hospitalist work. He told us stories of sitting with patients through something hard and being exactly the person he needed to be — present, unhurried, competent in a way that has nothing to do with performance. Some of those patients were at the end of their life. Cameron was part of that with them. I sat with that on the drive back.

He and his partner Sam drove us to the apartment we lived in when we were twenty-five, then to the bakery across the street, then to our first home, and then up a three-mile dirt road into the Tahoe National Forest to the off-grid house. The house where we first figured out how to make our own power, gravity feed water from a spring, live on the edge of what we knew.

We didn’t know anyone would be home.

The owner came out intending to tell us to leave. I said: we lived here in 1998 and it changed us. He said: come in.

We walked through a house that held some of the best and worst moments of our early life. Cameron had been a toddler in this house. He stood in it thirty years later as a doctor, with the people who had been young and sometimes frightened in those same rooms. Together we felt a connection to our past.

Tyler, Texas next. Three sisters, their husbands, a nephew graduating from high school. The cousins are close enough in age that the relationships are still forming and I get to watch. We played pickleball in the heat, swam, ate too much, stayed too late. My sisters married good people. Their kids are becoming people I want to know.

I walked away from Tyler fuller than I arrived.

Then Austin, where Holland and Cory have just bought their first home. We walked through it with them and did what you do — imagined new spaces, new design elements, and how they would make it theirs. Scotty is interning at the same company Holland and Cory work for, which is either a remarkable coincidence or exactly what family does. Logan flew down for the weekend. Three of our six children at one dinner table in a city none of them lived in two months ago, and I sat there taking it in.

The last stop was Michele’s.

She planned this one. The few times in our marriage that she has taken the reins on a trip, and they have become my favorite ways to travel.

We were invited to a wedding in the Cotswolds — Jessica, daughter of Jim and Ann Black, who raised their kids on the same block as ours, whose children called us mom and dad the way ours called them mom and dad. A manor house with fifteen rooms, every one of them part of the wedding party, the whole event catered to the same group of people for two days. We spent 3 days before in villages that looked like they’d been assembled by a Disney Imagineer — stone walls with beautiful floral vines, roads barely wide enough for one car. Then we spent 2 days with a beautiful group of people that Jessica and her new husband James had collected across their lives. People who carry interesting stories and are willing to tell them. I sat at different tables and listened. That’s one of the better things I know how to do.

Then London. Jim had arranged guides for everything — Winston Churchill’s Cabinet War Rooms, Oxford, the Harry Potter stage tour. Jim is the kind of person who can see an experience before it happens and then build the conditions for it. Each tour had depth and meaning. Oxford in particular landed in me in a way I’m still processing — the accumulated weight of a place that has been making people sharper for nine hundred years, and the feeling of walking through it and understanding why that matters.

But it was Churchill that stopped me.

I have quoted Winston Churchill my entire life. One specific line — about being tapped on the shoulder, about preparation meeting the moment you were made for. The Black family knows this about me. I have said it at enough dinners and late enough nights that it belongs to the shorthand of that friendship.

In the museum, I learned the quote is almost certainly not his.

I stood there for a moment. And then something settled that I didn’t expect to settle.

What I felt was not the embarrassment of having been wrong for thirty years. What I felt was: the quote is a description of him, not from him. Someone watched his life — the decades of preparation, the wilderness years, the moment in 1940 when everything he had ever been finally had somewhere to go — and distilled it into one line. And that line found me at twenty-two years old and never let go.

If anything, it means more now. Not less. I spent thirty years living by a description of someone else’s life without knowing it. And it turned out to be a good life to organize yourself around.

I have been thinking for a long time about what the feeling I like to call contact actually is — that feeling of being fully present with something larger than yourself, where the warmth in your chest is not metaphorical and you know, without reasoning toward it, that you are exactly where you are supposed to be.

May was thirty days of it.

Not from the ocean. From people. From Cameron standing quietly in a house he barely remembers living in. From Logan at a dinner table in Austin. From a niece saying something she didn’t know was remarkable. From an owner who said come in when he had every reason not to. From Jim engineering two hours inside Churchill’s life in a way that changed something in me permanently.

The ocean will give it to me. I know that now. But it turns out the ocean isn’t the only one.

The feeling is the same. The source keeps surprising me.

Not far — just to the end of our first season on WonderWay, before the Bahamas, before Georgetown and Governor’s Harbour and Spanish Wells. Before pickleball courts became doorways and sandbars became classrooms. Before I understood what it cost to be truly present or what childlike play could give back to a fifty-four year old man.

Every season on WonderWay ends with a question: what did I actually learn? Season one was the US East Coast — New York City, Annapolis, the Chesapeake. Season two was the Bahamas, and I’ll write that reflection soon. But I realized I never shared what I wrote at the end of season one, before any of the stories you’ve been reading. It was a different kind of writing — more reflection than scene, more reckoning than story. But it’s the foundation everything else has been built on. So here it is, with some hindsight now that season two is behind us.

I used to narrate my life as a search for truth. I thought my job was to locate the right answers, protect them, and build a family inside them. And I did that with real sincerity. I wasn’t faking it. I wasn’t play-acting certainty. I was trying to live faithfully inside the story I had been given.

But when I look back with softer eyes now, I see something that runs deeper than my beliefs ever did.

I see a boy lying under a Sierra sky, feeling small without feeling afraid.
I see a young man discovering that love can make the whole world feel charged with possibility.
I see a husband and wife taking risks that were too big for their bank account, too big for their experience, and somehow still worth taking because the feeling of contact made life feel lit from the inside.
I see a father trying to build a home where meaning could be felt, not just taught—where stories could move us, and not everything sacred had to happen in a chapel or on a mountaintop.
I see a community builder organizing conditions for teenagers to have honest conversations around campfires and under stars—not because I needed them to believe what I believed, but because I wanted them to feel what I had felt: the world widening, the ego quieting, the heart opening.
I see the ocean turning the volume up on everything, forcing my certainty to loosen, and teaching me the old lesson in a new language: there are rhythms larger than me, and I am not outside them.

And now, finally, I see what I couldn’t see then: those weren’t disconnected chapters. They were the same pursuit wearing different clothes.

The pursuit was never just certainty.

It was contact.

It was a lifelong hunger to be near what is larger than me—near beauty, near meaning, near connection, near vastness, near the kind of moments that reorganize a human life from the inside out.

For a long time, I called that “God” without distinguishing between the power and the person. And I don’t feel contempt for that younger version of me. I feel affection. Because I can now see what he was doing: he was trying to honor the reality of his experience. He was trying to stay loyal to what felt most alive and most true in his own body.

But somewhere along the way, adulthood narrowed the pipeline.

The more responsibilities I carried, the more I unconsciously treated wonder as conditional—something I had to earn through correctness, alignment, discipline, and control. The older I got, the more my internal life relied on managed structure to feel safe. And the cost of that safety was that I became less permeable. Less teachable. Less available to the raw, surprising, ungovernable ways life wants to touch us.

The gift of the last decade—often through pain, often through confusion, often through watching people I love need something I couldn’t supply with my old answers—is that I’ve been softened back into permeability.

I’ve begun to remember how to be shaped again.

And then, as if life wanted to make sure I didn’t miss the point, I was handed language that didn’t reduce the sacredness of my experience, but clarified it: wonder. Awe. The biology of being moved. The ways memory is formed. The way chemicals and consciousness conspire to make meaning feel real.

That language didn’t replace my spirituality.

It rescued it from scarcity.

It gave me a way to hold the last fifty years without having to force them into a story that no longer fits as cleanly as it once did. It let me keep what is undeniable—the lived experience of expansion, meaning, connection, transformation—while loosening my grip on explanations I can no longer claim with certainty.

So this is my check-in.

I’m somewhere between reverence and rebuilding.

I’m not trying to destroy my past. I’m trying to understand it without distortion. And I’m not trying to manufacture a new certainty to replace the old one. I’m trying to live in continuity—with more humility, more curiosity, and more willingness to let reality teach me directly.

If the first fifty years were about pursuing the feeling, then I hope the next fifty years are about learning to live in partnership with it.

Not as a high I chase.

As a way I practice.

Here’s what I hope for the fifty years ahead of me:

I hope I keep softening.

Not into fragility—but into responsiveness. Into honesty. Into the ability to be changed by what is real. I don’t want the rest of my life to be a tightening spiral of control. I don’t want to become the kind of older man who confuses certainty with strength and calls it wisdom. I want to stay warm enough inside that love, grief, beauty, and difference can still reach me.

I hope I keep widening.

Not by collecting experiences for ego or storytelling—but by expanding the conditions under which wonder can find me. I want to stop outsourcing my access to life’s bigness to a narrow set of approved channels. I want to remain open to wonder through nature, yes—but also through moral beauty, through stories, through music, through laughter, through the courage of other people, through the quiet dignity of everyday life.

I hope I keep internalizing.

I want to become fluent in my Inner Universe—not as self-obsession, but as stewardship. I want to recognize when my body is in threat, when cortisol is writing the story, when fear is at the console. I want to learn how to widen my attention again, how to invite the chemistry of connection, how to choose presence over performance. I want to make memories on purpose—unforgettable ones—not because I’m desperate to feel something, but because I want to build a mind and a heart that reduce suffering and increase love.

I hope I keep choosing connection over certainty.

If I’ve learned anything from my children, from Michele, from community, from the ocean, it’s that relationships are more important than being right. I want to be the kind of father, husband, friend, and fellow human who makes space for people to become. I want to be safe for evolution. Safe for questions. Safe for complexity. I want my presence to feel like oxygen.

And I hope WonderWay becomes what we meant it to be.

Not an escape.

A practice ground.

A living laboratory where we keep testing this hypothesis with our bodies and our lives: that wonder is abundant, that it follows patterns, that it multiplies when shared, and that a life organized around presence can become a life that heals.

I don’t know what I’ll believe in fifty years.

I don’t know how my theology will evolve, or whether I’ll ever resolve the person of God the way my younger self wanted to. I can’t promise a clean doctrinal arc. I can’t promise closure.

But I can name what I’m choosing.

I’m choosing to live in a posture of contact.

To keep placing myself in the presence of what is vast and real—whether that vastness is a night sky, a piece of music, a story that breaks my heart open, a teenager talking honestly on a trail, a shared sunrise on the ocean, a child becoming themselves, or a quiet moment where time slows and I remember again: I am part of something larger, and I am alive inside it.

If there’s a prayer left in me that I can say without needing certainty, it’s this:

May the next fifty years make me more permeable, more connected, and more capable of wonder than the first.

Not because I need wonder to prove anything.

But because wonder keeps me growing.

And I’m not finished yet.

If you have made it to the end, you get a special treat. Our friend Scott Porter composed a “Seek WonderWay” song that puts the story of this post to music. We LOVE it! Enjoy!

The sun hadn’t cleared the horizon yet. The water was glass. She was already there, watching the sky do what it does in the Bahamas before sunrise — the colors that arrive before the thing itself, the announcement before the event. I sat down next to her and we didn’t say anything for a while. My brother Tyler came up a few minutes later. The three of us sat there in the quiet, watching the light change, and I felt something I have been feeling often on WonderWay.

I felt like a child.

Not in the diminished sense. In the full sense — the way a child feels when the world is enormous and beautiful and the person sitting next to them is the reason they feel safe inside of it.

This trip took months to engineer. Michele needed a week in Florida to see our three boys. I needed a window where my parents and Tyler could fly in and meet me on the boat. The math worked once — one week in late April. Nassau as the staging point, a marina where Michele could get to the airport and my family could step aboard the same day.

I had one real fear going in. Years ago, on my ski boat, my mom was sitting in the wrong place when we hit a wake. She fractured multiple vertebrae. I was the son who had broken his mother’s back — not metaphorically. Literally. I carried that. So when we first invited my parents aboard WonderWay, we kept it simple: docked, land-based, no dinghy transfers, no open water. Just getting comfortable. They did great. But this was different. This was seven nights. Exuma anchorages. Mangrove rivers. Sandbars. The dinghy.

I wanted my brother there partly because if I broke my mother’s back again, at least someone would be there to share in it. But mostly because I knew this week was going to be something I’d want to remember with someone I’d want to remember it with.

We left Nassau on a Wednesday into a windstorm. The Yellow Bank is an eight-hour crossing and we were motoring directly into the weather — three-foot seas, wind on the nose, the boat pounding through it. My parents were good. Not comfortable, but good. We got to Shroud Cay that night and dropped anchor, and that’s when everything changed.

From that moment forward, the weather gods were entirely in our favor.

Every evening, we sat in the hammock chairs on the stern and watched the sun go down. Tyler ran the music. We ate well. We stayed for the full two hours — from the moment the sun touched the horizon all the way until Venus appeared, which we learned is always the first “evening star”, and then Jupiter, which is almost always second. We tried every night to see the green flash that sailors swear appears in the last sliver of sunset over open ocean. We never saw it. We’ll keep trying.

What I remember from those evenings is not the sunsets, exactly. It’s the stories. My parents are almost eighty. There are things they carried for fifty years that came out in those two hours, in the hammock chairs, while the sky changed color and nobody had anywhere to be. Stories I had never heard. Things they were proud of. Things that were hard. My dad’s voice going quiet at something he hadn’t said out loud before. My mom laughing at something she hadn’t thought about in decades.

I am fifty-four years old. I sat in that chair and felt twelve.

Every day we planned one excursion. Simple things, but the right things.

The first day we took the electric dinghy up the mangrove river — silently, music playing softly, nobody else on the water. Turtles below us. Stingrays. Eagle rays moving like shadows. The water so clear it didn’t look like water.

The second day we found the Washing Machine — a narrow cut where the Atlantic pushes through at high tide into the Bahamian sound, creating a current you can float. You wade in on the open ocean side, let go, and the water carries you through. We did it together, all four of us, and we laughed the way you laugh when your body is doing something it didn’t plan and the feeling is only good. My mom laughed. My dad laughed. My brother and I looked at each other.

We felt like children. With the people we were children with.

The third day we took baseball gloves to a sandbar at low tide and played catch. My dad played church softball for years. My mom was good at it in high school and will tell you so. The four of us threw the ball back and forth on a strip of sand surrounded by turquoise water and I thought: this is the kind of thing you forget is possible until you’re doing it.

I gave my parents Subnado jets — underwater propulsion handles that let you hold on and fly through the water while they do the swimming for you. I watched my mom and dad become children in real time. I filmed them coming toward the camera side by side, and at exactly the right moment, without coordinating it, they split apart like synchronized swimmers. I have that video. I will have it forever.

The last night out, we lay on the bow after the sunset and looked at the stars.

I have a laser pointer that lets me trace the constellations so everyone can follow. We found Orion. We looked at the nebula and the moons of Jupiter through binoculars. The four of us lay there on the deck of WonderWay, in the middle of the Exumas, under a sky that had no competition from any light on earth, and felt what it feels like to be small inside something vast and to not mind at all.

Every night before bed, my dad asked for a group hug. The four of us — my dad, my brother, me, all roughly the same height, and my mom a foot shorter and shrinking — would press together and my mom would say, you’re going to break my glasses. She said it every time. And we laughed every time.

Our last name is Seamons. Four generations back it was Seaman — we were people who navigated the ocean as their vocation. I feel it on the water. The pull that isn’t quite explainable. I’ve felt it since my first lake boat, but more so every time I’ve sailed open ocean.

To share that with my parents — the people who made me — was something I didn’t have words for in the moment and don’t entirely have words for now.

My mom taught me how to feel wonder. She was making dinner, driving us to practice, loving and supporting our friends, holding us when things were hard, and building something she couldn’t see yet. She found out on a sunrise, on the bow of WonderWay, with her two sons sitting next to her, watching the light come.

She did something exceptional.

She just needed someone to say it out loud, in the right place, at the right time.

That’s the only way I know how to say it. Every other island we’ve been to in the Bahamas has felt continuous with the Bahamas — the same rhythm, the same architecture of life, the same faces. Spanish Wells feels like someone picked up a small European village, set it down at the northern tip of Eleuthera, and let it develop for four hundred years without much outside interference.

Which is almost exactly what happened.

In the 1640s, a group of English Puritans — known as the Eleutheran Adventurers — left Bermuda seeking religious freedom and shipwrecked on a reef north of the island. They sheltered in a cave, eventually settled, and never really left. Later, after the American Revolution, Loyalists who refused to leave British rule came south and added to what was already there. The name itself came from before any of them arrived — Spanish galleons had been stopping here for generations to refill their water supply from wells on the island. By the time we arrived, roughly half of Spanish Wells’ sixteen hundred permanent residents shared a handful of last names, descendants of those original families. The rest were people who had come later and stayed long enough to belong. The island has its own economy — lobster fishing, primarily, done by families who have worked the same waters for generations. Its own church. Its own fair. Its own gravitational pull.

We’d heard about Spanish Wells for months. Everyone who had been through the Bahamas mentioned it the way people mention a place they couldn’t quite explain. You just have to go, they said.

We came in from the south after working our way up Eleuthera — through Current Cut, two quiet days anchored at Meeks Patch letting our batteries recover, then finally around to the anchorage on the south side of the island. We didn’t go ashore for two days. We just sat with it. Watched the island from the water. Let the stillness do its work.

When we finally went in, we rented a golf cart, which is how you move around Spanish Wells. St. George’s Cay and Russell Island together run about five miles end to end, connected by a bridge. One road goes east on the north side, one comes back on the south. Circular. Contained. We drove the whole thing on Easter Monday, which we didn’t realize was a national holiday until we found that everything was closed. We found a coconut cinnamon roll at a pop up bakery. We drove to the western tip of Russell and turned around. We looked at the water on both sides — the Atlantic on one, the sound on the other — and felt the particular quiet of a place that doesn’t need to impress anyone.

On the way back, I wanted to see WonderWay from land. I saw an opening in a fence line and drove through it.

Michele saw the no trespassing signs before I did. She said: Mike. Stop. We need to go back. I turned the golf cart around and headed for the gate — which had closed behind us, automatically, the way gates do when the last vehicle exits. Easter Monday. The office on the other side: locked. The last car out: already gone. Nothing ahead of us but the hum of the power plant we were now standing inside of.

Michele took out her phone and made a video.

She sent it to our kids and my siblings. The message was something like: this is what it looks like to live with Mike. Everywhere he goes, ten feet too far. And then we’re locked inside a power plant on Easter Monday with no way out.

She’s not wrong. I’ve thought about that framing since. There is something in me that keeps moving toward the edge of the frame, past the point where a reasonable person would have stopped. It has cost me things over the years. It has also given me things I could not have gotten any other way. The ten feet past comfortable is often where the interesting part lives. The fee for that is occasionally a locked gate on a holiday.

I walked until I found a door with someone behind it. Knocked. Explained. The man looked at me the way people look at you when your explanation is technically true but raises more questions than it answers. He opened the gate. We drove out.

That’s the thing about ten feet too far. You don’t know it’s the door until you’re already through it.

We came back the next day and the day after that, learning the island in layers. A week in, we saw a Facebook post about the annual Spanish Wells Fair at the Methodist Church. We went. Carnival games. Fried food. The whole community out in the sun, everyone knowing everyone, children running between adults who had watched them be born. We were strangers in it, obviously, but welcomed in the way people welcome strangers at a fair — not with depth yet, just with space.

We needed the door. We needed what we always find the door through.

The No Foreign Lands app had mentioned pickleball at the People’s Church on the east end of the island. Facebook confirmed it — four o’clock most afternoons. We showed up one day: wedding. Another day: Sunday. Finally, on a Monday, we walked into what I can only describe as a converted aircraft hangar with three pickleball courts painted onto a basketball floor and fifteen men who looked up when we entered, clocked us, and went back to playing.

The energy was not unwelcoming. It was just — calibrated. These were serious players in the middle of a serious game, and two strangers had walked in with backpacks and flip-flops, and the reasonable assumption was that we were tourists who had wandered in by accident and would leave when they realized what they’d found.

The awkward has a specific feeling. I’ve started to recognize it as the same feeling as the gate — that moment when you’ve gone ten feet past where a reasonable person would have stopped and the door has closed behind you and there’s nothing to do but find someone to let you out the other side. Most people don’t stay in that feeling. They back up before it closes. We pulled our shoes out of our bags. We pulled our paddles out. Someone pointed us to a court.

We stayed. We played for three hours. By the end of it, I was mixing into their best games, staying on the court under their winner-stays rules, hitting drop shots that were changing the geometry of points in ways that surprised people. Michele was doing the same. We asked if we could come back the next day and bring two friends who were coming to stay on the boat. They said yes.

Jeff and Marci had been on WonderWay before — twice, actually. Jeff had crewed with us on a passage from Annapolis back down to Florida, and they’d joined us for a couple of days in New York. These are the people you call when something is too good not to share. They flew in, we rented a golf cart, drove them the full circuit of both islands, ate well, sat at the waterfront watching the water do what water does in the Bahamas. And then we took them to the church hangar.

The four of us walked onto those courts the next afternoon and the dynamic changed immediately. Four people with good energy — on and off the court — are hard to ignore. The games got more competitive. The combinations started shifting — Jeff with one of the locals, Marci with another, Michele and I splitting into opposing sides — and the balance was close enough that every game went deep. Points stretched into tiebreakers. Tiebreakers refused to resolve. The best kind of pickleball: nobody can pull away, so nobody wants to stop. Jeff and Marci eventually had to go home, but we kept showing up.

And each time we would stay after and talk — the real conversations, the ones where you hear who a person actually is. Multi-generation lobster fishing families. People who had watched their grandparents work these same waters. A way of life so rooted and continuous that four hundred years felt recent.

They invited us to church on Sunday. We knew it mattered to them. We went.

The theology wasn’t ours. But what we felt in that room with those people was something we recognized. The warmth. The intention. The way people move through space when they’ve been showing up for each other for a long time. The chemistry was human.

We took a picture before we left.

Not because we wanted a record of a place we'd been. Because we were already thinking about next January — about routing back through Spanish Wells, and Governors Harbor, and Georgetown, on our way south to Panama. About the specific people we want to find again. About what it means to have a path through a place instead of past it.

That’s what Spanish Wells gave us. Not just a beautiful island. Not just great pickleball. A reason to come back. People we would go out of our way to find again — because the energy that is them is something we want more of.

The gate was awkward. The hangar door was awkward. Ten feet too far, both times. That’s the whole story.

Not a thought exactly. More like a physical reading — the way you glance at your phone and see the battery at eleven percent before you’ve even registered doing it. I was sitting in the cockpit watching the sun go down over the anchorage, and something in me said: I’m low.

Not tired. Not sad. Just — low. Spent in some way that wasn’t about sleep.

I’ve spent most of my adult life in a state of chronic overdraft. Not the financial kind — the internal kind. The kind where you keep pushing past the reading because the calendar doesn’t care about the reading. Meetings don’t move because you’re depleted. Flights don’t shift because you haven’t recovered from the last one. You run the device until it shuts off, you plug it in for six hours, you run it until it shuts off again. That was the system. I didn’t question it for thirty years.

On the boat, I have no choice but to question it.

Governor’s Harbour started on a pickleball court, which sounds trivial until I tell you what pickleball actually is for me now.

It’s a playground.

Think about what happened to you on a playground when you were eight. You showed up, there were other kids, and within ten minutes you were in the middle of something — chasing, building, competing, laughing, negotiating the rules on the fly. Nobody was optimizing. Nobody was performing toward a goal. You were just playing, which turns out to be one of the most metabolically complete things a human body and mind can do together. Energy spent, energy returned, connection forming without anyone trying to form it.

Then we grew up and the playground disappeared. I replaced it with sports, but sports aren’t play — not the way I did them. Football, basketball, volleyball, triathlon training, anything with a performance target attached. That’s something else. That’s pushing yourself toward better, faster, stronger. It produces its own kind of satisfaction, but it doesn’t produce what a playground produces.

What pickleball gives me — what I’m starting to understand it gives me everywhere we’ve taken it — is a gathering point for adults who are willing to play like children again. No agenda beyond showing up. Competition that’s real enough to focus you but light enough that you can laugh at yourself on the next point. The same faces returning the next day, and the day after that, until the faces stop being anonymous and something starts. It could be pickleball. It could be something else. The game is just the excuse for the playground.

I didn’t understand that until the Bahamas. Now I look for it everywhere we go.

From the courts it spread, the way things do when the conditions are right. Strangers became familiar inside of forty-eight hours because that’s what happens when you play hard together every afternoon and then linger too long afterward.

We rented a car for the first time in the Bahamas — Eleuthera is long enough to actually need one — and drove both ends of the island. Caves. Inlets. The glass window where the Atlantic stacks up dark and violent right next to the calm Bahamian sound, separated by maybe thirty feet of rock.

We got invited to Windermere Island because of a conversation that started when two women overheard us talking in a coffee shop and couldn’t help themselves. They had lived aboard for over sixty years between them and could not resist two people still making the early mistakes. We scooted over to their table. An hour disappeared. By the end of it they had our WhatsApp and we had theirs.

Windermere is where old money has been going quiet for generations. Prince Charles and Princess Diana honeymooned there. Rockefellers. People who had enough money to go anywhere and kept choosing this — a small island in the southern Bahamas with no pretension about it, just nature that someone with means had tended carefully and left mostly alone. We played pickleball on the most beautiful courts either of us had ever seen. Afterward, the couple who brought us there showed us their home, their gardens, the life they had assembled on that island. We showed them ours. They climbed aboard WonderWay a few days later for sundowners and we sat in the cockpit while the light changed and everyone told the real version of their story.

All of it was good. All of it cost something.

That’s what I’m learning to read — not whether something is good or bad, but what it does to the gauge. Life stress: costs. Watching a sunset from the cockpit in silence: returns. Expanding into a group of twenty new people at a Windermere beach party: costs. Sitting with two people across a narrow table for three hours of actual conversation: returns. Moving the boat: costs more than I expected. Arriving somewhere new: costs more than moving.

Michele charges differently than I do. I’ve watched her long enough now to see the pattern. Smaller groups return energy to her the way they return it to me, but what depletes her fastest isn’t crowds — it’s uncertainty. An unresolved navigation question. A forecast that won’t commit. A piece of equipment behaving strangely. She needs the systems to be reliable so she can be present. When the systems are unreliable, presence is gone — she’s running calculations, running contingencies. That takes everything she has.

I deplete on noise before I deplete on uncertainty. Too many voices at once, music too loud to talk over, a social situation where there’s no way to hear the actual story — that’s where I go empty fastest. I can handle an ambiguous weather window better than I can handle a party where we are talking but not connecting.

Neither of these is wrong. They’re just different batteries with different chemistries.

When we finally left Governor’s Harbour and worked our way north up Eleuthera — through Current Cut, which is not a casual passage, a narrow slot where the ocean pushes both directions depending on the tide and you have to time it exactly or your engines just cancel out the current and you go nowhere — we got to a place called Meeks Patch and both of us looked at each other and said something without saying it. We dropped anchor and didn’t leave the boat.

Not because we were depressed. Not because anything was wrong. Because the gauge said: stop.

I used to treat that feeling as a problem to solve. Fatigue was an inefficiency. Low energy meant you weren’t sleeping right, eating right, managing your time right. There was always an optimization available. I spent decades looking for it.

What I didn’t understand was that the battery doesn’t just deplete through effort. It depletes through attention. Everything I pay real attention to draws from the same account. The navigation and the meaningful conversation and the goodbye and the sunrise — all of it runs on the same currency. And when the account is low, presence becomes impossible. I’m there physically, going through the motions, but the contact is gone. I’m not actually inside the moment anymore. I’m watching it from somewhere further back.

Presence turns out to be expensive. It’s the most expensive thing I do.

We spent a couple days at Meeks Patch and then came into Spanish Wells, where we’ve been anchored for almost two weeks now. For a week we hardly left the boat. I did my morning routine. I wrote. Michele read and cooked and watched the water. We watched the sunsets. I started singing along to music I love — something I realized was a big battery charger in my past that I am not getting enough of in my present. I am hoping Michele will join me in some sunset duets soon :-).

Recovery isn’t passive. You don’t recharge by doing nothing. You recharge by doing the specific things that return energy to your specific battery.

What I know for certain now: I cannot give what I don’t have. And the ocean has made that visible in a way thirty years of a busy life never did — because on the boat, when I’m empty, everyone can tell. There’s nowhere to put the performance.

Most of the conversation in sailing is about performance. Speed. Pointing ability. Light-air efficiency. Those are real questions. They just weren’t ours.

Our questions were different: what boat will keep us safe across an ocean? And can we actually live on it — not camp on it, live on it — the way we live in a house?

We built WonderWay to answer those questions. We call it a Condomaran. A Royal Cape Majestic Hybrid 530 designed from the beginning as a sun-powered floating home that also happens to sail.

This week, instead of writing about it, we tried to show it.

The video below is two days in our life — one on anchor, one underway. It’s our first attempt at telling a story on video, and it shows. No polish, no production crew, just us trying to honestly capture what living performance looks like as opposed to sailing performance.

If it connects with you, we’ll make more and get better.

We made it because we wish someone had made it for us when we were trying to figure out if a boat like this was possible. It is. This is what it looks like.

A production catamaran built for two-week vacations is not a home. The storage is wrong, the systems are thin, the space is optimized for renters who will never push anything past its limits. We had pushed things past their limits. We knew the difference.

In January of 2022, Michele and I drove to Miami for a boat show.

We walked the docks and split almost immediately.

Michele stopped at a Royal Cape Majestic 530 and didn’t move. I looked at it from the dock and didn’t like the exterior. The lines were heavy. The design had a submarine quality — nothing of the sleek modern profile I associated with a serious sailing vessel. It looked like it belonged to a different decade.

Four boats down I found the one I wanted. Narrow hulls, modern lines, a performance catamaran built like a sports car. I stood on the deck and felt what I always feel on a machine that knows exactly what it was made for.

The next day we walked through each other’s favorite boat.

I stood inside the Royal Cape and could not argue with what I found there. It didn’t feel like a boat made to look like a home. It felt like someone had designed a home and then figured out how to put water under it. The layout breathed. The light moved through it correctly.

Michele stood on the deck of my favorite boat and said: this would not keep us safe.

Not safe in the sense of a life jacket strapped to the hull. Safe in the sense of — if the ocean sends something serious at us, this boat will not hold. The narrow hulls, the performance rigging, everything sacrificed for speed. She could feel what it would cost us in conditions we couldn’t anticipate across five years offshore.

I heard her. I understood that the only way this life actually happened was if she was fully aboard. Not present. Aboard. And she would only be fully aboard if the boat was one she trusted.

We drove home talking about the Royal Cape.

We talked about it for the next ten months.

James Felgate was at the Royal Cape stand the second day, and we stopped, and we talked, and something in that conversation became the beginning of a friendship I did not expect and have not stopped being grateful for. Royal Cape was a South African company out of Durban that had been building the same hull for twenty-five years — not unchanged, but refined. One design, perfected across two decades, with almost unlimited capacity to build exactly what the customer required. James had encountered almost every configuration that existed and had built most of them, and knew which decisions produced a boat that worked and which ones seemed like a good idea until the owner was six weeks offshore.

I became a student of his.

I had been watching sailing channels for two years — people doing circumnavigations, documenting what broke and what held, where production boats failed under real offshore use. I knew what I wanted to build. I needed someone who could build it.

The boat I was designing was not a sailing vessel with accommodation. It was a home that happened to sail. The specific problem I kept returning to was power — a normal American home uses about thirty kilowatt hours of electricity per day, and I wanted us to be able to live that way on the ocean, running from sunshine alone. I designed the system to make a full home’s worth of power every day from solar, hold three days of reserve for cloudy stretches, and as a last resort, run the engines as generators — one hour of running would replace a full day of no sun. We would not be rationing. We would not be turning lights off and watching the battery gauge. We would live the way we had always lived, and the boat would provide it.

The engineers at Royal Cape had not built a hybrid propulsion system configured this way before. They said they could build it.

Michele took the interior.

She redesigned the entire layout — no Royal Cape had ever been built the way she drew it. The bedrooms moved. The galley opened differently. Five bedrooms, five bathrooms, because our six children would come in pairs and groups across five years, and they needed to feel the boat was a place they could inhabit, not visit. She had turned a construction site in Redmond and a farmhouse on the Snoqualmie and a land boat on Tortoise Island into places that felt alive the moment you walked through the door. She brought that same intelligence here.

She shaped the soul of the boat. I built the systems.

We flew to South Africa in July of 2023 with Warnick. Safari first — a small game park an hour from Durban, a guide who could see what the rest of us couldn’t until she pointed it out, and then it was obvious. Giraffes. Elephants. Rhinos. Lions at a distance that still felt too close.

Then the boatyard.

WonderWay was half-built when we walked in. Hull complete, deck on, interior structural — you could stand in the spaces and feel the proportions, but there were no surfaces, no finishes, no wiring. A house in the framing stage. We walked through it with James and his team for days, noting everything that needed adjustment. The cockpit table too small — the whole point was the family gathering there, and the family needed room. James adjusted what we asked while we were on safari. We came back and walked through it again. Better.

Then the finishing decisions. Michele held leather samples in different lights, against different surfaces, deciding through her hands the way she always had. Upholstery. Mattresses. Fixtures. Backsplash. Every surface that would determine whether this felt like a home or a boat made to look like one. James’s team wrote it all down. We flew home leaving every choice behind with people who had spent twenty-five years turning choices into something you want to be inside.

WonderWay was real now. Not in our heads. In the world, half-made, waiting.

We went back in June of 2024 with Logan and Scotty. Different safari — a tented camp this time, guides with flashlights walking you through the dark to dinner. Logan photographed everything. Scotty asked questions that produced more questions.

The boat was ready.

The christening happened on a Tuesday morning in Durban harbour. I broke the bottle of champagne on the bow — after a few attempts, the foam running down the bowsprit, the ceremony of a boat receiving its name. We went out with the delivery captain and felt WonderWay move through water for the first time with us aboard. The hybrid system ran as designed. The solar panels produced what we had calculated. The interior felt exactly like the home we had been drawing since January of 2022 — the couch leather, the galley layout, the light through the windows Michele had specified, all of it there and real and ours.

We had always called our boats SeaMonster — a half-joke play on the family name that had persisted across three boats and two decades. During the design process, one of our sons suggested something different.

WonderWay.

It landed the way the right names land — not because it was clever, but because it was true.

Next week we’ll show you what it actually feels like to live aboard her. We’ve been working on a video. It’s almost ready.

Georgetown had been home for two and a half months — pickleball courts, provisioning runs, the community of people that formed around a broken watermaker and a weather window that kept not arriving. We knew every anchorage in the area by feel. We knew where the shallow water hid. We knew who’d be at the courts at seven. Leaving it was harder than we expected, which is what this life keeps teaching us: you don’t know how much a place has given you until you sail out of it.

Cat Island is quieter. Fewer boats, smaller services, longer stretches of beach with nothing on them. We anchored in the southern bay called New Bight and exhaled.

Two boats we had met in Georgetown — from the group of long-range ocean travelers we had written about earlier — were already in the anchorage. We had spent real time with these people. We knew the shape of their stories. The next morning we reached out: we’re here, should we do something together?

They knew a place.

Hidden Treasure is a shack at the edge of the anchorage, run by a man named Trevor. Five or six tables on a porch. Trevor cooks. Trevor serves. His wife comes and goes. The sign on the wall says: Good food is not fast and fast food is not good. — The Boss.

He means it.

We sat down at one o’clock — five of us. An hour in, a couple came walking up the dock. They had just arrived in the anchorage, and a mutual friend from Georgetown had texted them: look for WonderWay, find Mike and Michele, these are your people. They sat down. Now we were seven.

An hour after that, a Canadian couple arrived — they had built a house on Cat Island a few years ago and split their time between here and home. They pulled chairs up. Nine of us now, around a table that kept expanding to make room.

The food took six hours.

Beverages arrived after one. The meals we had ordered appeared somewhere around three. Dessert came near the end of hour five. I have never in my adult life sat at a restaurant for six hours. I have left restaurants after twenty minutes when the service was slow. I have excused myself from dinners that didn’t move at the pace I thought they should. Every efficiency instinct I have ever had would have gotten me out of that chair by hour two.

I didn’t want to leave.

We were nine mostly-strangers. We had met some of them three times, some of them twenty minutes ago. But the questions at that table were not the questions people ask at dinner lparties. Nobody asked what we did for work. We asked: why are you here? Why did you build a house on this island? What were you moving toward? What were you moving away from? When did you know?

Those questions don’t get answered in twenty minutes. They need the time Trevor’s food requires.

I will never forget those people. All seven of them. I don’t know if I’ll see most of them again. But that evening is already part of me — sealed in the way that experiences are sealed when they carry enough feeling.

From Cat Island we moved north to Eleuthera, working our way up the island over two weeks, stopping at anchorages that kept delivering: cathedral caves at Rock Sound, mangrove rivers so shallow and quiet that the turtles and stingrays below us didn’t spook when our dinghy passed over them. At Hatchet Bay, caves that wind for miles underground, where people lived in the 1700s and the walls still hold the evidence of it. On Cat Island, we had hiked to a monastery at the top of the island’s highest hill — the Hermitage, built by a single monk who wanted to be closer to God, stone by stone by hand, walls no wider than your shoulders, a crucifix at the peak looking out over the sea.

You don’t build something like that on top of a mountain unless you believe, completely, that proximity matters. That where you put your body changes what you’re able to feel.

We arrived in Governor’s Harbour not knowing anyone.

Eight months earlier, in Charleston, Michele and I had played pickleball on the downtown courts with a couple named Michael and Jenny. We had talked between games — really talked, the way you do when you meet someone whose frequency matches yours immediately. When we mentioned the Bahamas, they said: we have a house in Governor’s Harbour. We have pickleball courts. Come find us.

We kept in touch across eight months and a thousand miles of sailing. When I texted Michael from south Eleuthera — we’ll be there tomorrow — he was off-island for the week, but he started a WhatsApp group and introduced us to his friends.

The next morning, a couple named Patrick and Charmaine picked us up at the dinghy dock. We had never met. They drove us three miles out to Michael’s house and we played for three hours.

Afterward, they said: do you want to come watch the sunset?

Two strangers took us to their home and opened it. We sat on their porch and they told us about South Africa — why they left, what they were building here, what Governor’s Harbour had become for them. We told them about the boat, the circumnavigation, the year of medical near-misses that had preceded all of this. The sun went down while we were talking. We stayed until it was dark.

The next afternoon: three more hours of pickleball. The day after that: three more. We went to their coffee shop for breakfast. They introduced us to more of the community. Over a week, we accumulated six people in Governor’s Harbour who felt less like acquaintances and more like something harder to name.

Then Michael arrived.

We invited him, Patrick, Charmaine, and a boat from Georgetown — friends who had sailed north to meet us here — out to WonderWay for sundowners. Seven of us on the back of the boat, the ocean going golden behind us, and the kind of conversation that requires quiet and time and the willingness to say the things you don’t say at loud tables.

People said those things.

When I ran the dinghy back to the dock at the end of the night, all three of the shore-side guests hugged me before they stepped off. Thank you for letting us into this. Michael is already talking about Nassau, where he lives. Patrick and Charmaine are talking about Cape Town, where we’ll eventually sail. These are not goodbyes being dressed up as see-you-laters. These are real threads being kept.

We are watching something happen that I don’t fully understand yet.

Every place we have been, we have left with more than we arrived with. Not photographs. Not stamps on a chart. People. Conversations that changed the shape of something inside us. Moments that are not fading the way most moments fade.

I keep waiting for the capacity to fill. For the point where we can’t absorb any more — can’t hold another person, another evening, another six-hour meal. That point has not come. If anything, the capacity seems to be growing.

We are far from done finding out what we can hold.

We came home to our farm on the Snoqualmie River and immediately had one week before we had to say goodbye to Logan.

His mission call to Bogotá, Colombia had come in on the same day his freshman college roommate took his own life — one of the defining ruptures of his young adulthood, and part of why Tahiti had happened at all. He had deferred, healed enough to try again, and been reassigned to Phoenix, Arizona. He was going the week after we got home.

We had spent three and a half months on a boat together. We had watched moonrises and caught fish and had the conversations that only happen when there’s nowhere else to be. And then we had seven days to buy his missionary clothes, pack his bags, and drive him to the airport.

We drove home from the airport in silence.

The first week back at work in January, I asked my boss if I could work from somewhere else.

I framed it around my body, because my body was the most honest argument available. I told her: in Tahiti, I turned my spinal cord stimulator completely off for three months. I have had to turn it back on since we returned to Seattle. I need to find a place where my body feels the way it felt in Tahiti. I don’t know exactly where that is. I know it’s not Seattle.

She said: we support you.

Microsoft had recently announced full remote work support. The geographic tether that had determined every place we had ever lived was cut in one announcement overnight. I came home and told Michele and our two youngest, Warnick and Scotty: I can work from wherever we go.

We had been doing the research for months. The Carolinas, Georgia, Texas. We kept coming back to Florida — the tax structure, the winters, the warmth. We knew almost nothing about it. We had been twice for Disney World and once for a work conference twenty years earlier.

President’s weekend of 2021, we flew to Orlando to find a home in a state we barely knew, in cities we had never visited, with no job to go to and no family to move near. We were following a feeling, which is not the kind of thing that shows up well on a real estate decision spreadsheet.

The trip almost ended without finding anything.

We had spent three days driving the Atlantic coast from Jacksonville south — Jacksonville Beach, Ponte Vedra, St. Augustine, Crescent Beach, New Smyrna Beach. All beautiful. None of them right. I could feel the difference clearly and explain it to no one’s satisfaction, including Michele’s. She said: you can tell me where it isn’t, but you can’t tell me where it is.

She was correct.

Monday morning we were heading to the airport. Flight in the afternoon. Nothing found.

Warnick, sixteen years old, had been running his own parallel Zillow search on his phone from the back seat for three days. On Sunday he found a house on Tortoise Island in Satellite Beach — just north of where we had met a friend for lunch on day one of the trip, in the town where we had felt, immediately and unmistakably, the thing we were looking for.

We had an hour window from eight to nine on Monday morning that we could see the home before flying back to Seattle. The agent set it up.

We walked in the front door and Michele said this is it before she reached the kitchen.

Water less than a hundred feet from the back windows. The Banana River visible from every room on the back of the house. A dock extending into it. The sunset, I understood immediately, would land directly over the water every evening.

I had been looking for a land boat. This was a land boat.

The airline texted before we reached the airport. Our flight was canceled — weather through Dallas-Fort Worth, nothing leaving until Thursday. We were stranded in Florida for four more days, which turned out to be exactly how long it takes to be certain. We drove back to Satellite Beach every day. We walked the neighborhood. We sat on the public beach. We went back to the house twice more.

By Thursday we had made an offer. By Thursday evening it was accepted.

We flew home to a farm we now had to sell.

Before we could sell it, we had to host a wedding.

Holland and Cory Anderson had been planning their marriage through COVID’s complete dismantling of every public venue in Washington. What remained was our barn. Michele and Holland reimagined it. A friend named Kristen Tressel joined forces with Michele — the same instinct that had turned every broken space they’d ever touched into something alive — and together they disappeared the walls behind Bohemian drapery and hung the ceiling with lights until the barn stopped being a barn and became the room it had always been meant to be.

Sixty people. Thirty Andersons, Thirty Seamons. The people who mattered most.

Logan came home from his Phoenix mission three months in. COVID had quarantined him in an apartment with two other missionaries for most of three months, and the combination of continued grief and isolation had undone what Tahiti had done. He flew home in time to stand beside Holland on the most important day of her life. Holland and Logan have always been twins in everything but birth year. Him being there was everything.

We killed the fatted calf — literally. Blackberry, our American Dexter, the last animal on the farm, fed everyone who came to celebrate our daughter. Our bishop was the chef. Kristen & Michele made the space. Tucker lit fireworks at the end of the night to send the newlyweds away. We stood in the driveway and watched the sky.

I don’t have adequate language for what I felt that night.

The farm sold within three days of listing at above asking price. We had bought it for $900,000 in 2013 and sold it for $2.5 million in 2021. Logan and Scotty ran the liquidation on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace with the efficiency of young men who have found something they’re excellent at. A 26-foot truck came for the rest. We staged four pods. We drove away.

Eight years. We arrived with six children, four horses, a grain silo, and a plan to be farmers and ranchmen. We left as people the farm had specifically made. I did not look back after the first turn of the driveway because I couldn’t afford to and still drive.

We drove east — Mount Rushmore, the St. Louis Arch, Nashville — and arrived in Satellite Beach on a warm evening in May.

The dock behind the house on Tortoise Island became what Tahiti had been.

I built chairs specifically for the position I wanted to be in when the sun went down over the Banana River. I sat in them almost every night. The dolphins came daily. Manatees surfaced seasonally. The sunsets were not modest.

I sat in those chairs and listened to music and felt the thing I had been chasing my whole life arrive without me having done anything to earn it. Just the right time, the right position, the right frequency of being present to what was already happening.

I knew, even in those evenings, that this was close but not the whole way there. The dock was not a boat. The ocean had more to teach me than it could teach from land.

In October we chartered a boat and took our closest friends to the Exumas. COVID had emptied the Bahamas — Georgetown, which normally holds hundreds of boats at anchor, had three. We had the islands to ourselves. Two weeks of conversation and water and the specific confirmation that what I felt on a boat was different from what I felt beside it. The hull mattered. The water needed to be under you.

In December, we took the whole family to the British Virgin Islands on SeaMonster, our Lagoon 42. Eight of us — Tucker, Holland, Cory, Logan, Warnick, Scotty, Michele, and me. Two weeks of moonrises and starfields and the ocean working on the people I loved most.

By the last night of that trip, the plan was no longer a feeling. It was a direction.

SeaMonster was not the final boat. The final boat needed to be built — not a production vessel adapted for blue water passage, but a purpose-built floating home. A university. The circumnavigation, which had been living in my body since Tahiti, became, in the British Virgin Islands in December 2021, a plan. It would take more time to convince Michele.

I turned fifty that October. I didn’t make much of it in the moment.

But sitting on the dock in the weeks after the BVI trip, watching the water go gold, I understood something about the accounting of a life. The feeling I had been chasing since I was twelve years old — since the Milky Way at Hilton Lakes, since the warmth that my grandfather called alignment with God’s energy — it had not been reliably located in the places I had most systematically tried to locate it.

It was in the water. It was in the campfire with Holland before she left for college. It was in the barn on the night we fed everyone Blackberry and danced. It was in the six a.m. calls with my team in India, half work and half: let’s just get to know each other. It was on the dock at sunset.

I was fifty years old and learning how to access the thing I had been reaching for my whole life. Not through systems of performance and obedience. Through presence. Through the water. Through stopping long enough to receive what was already being offered.

My second half was going to be organized differently.

The ocean is waiting. It always is.

We were returning in the dark, three miles from WonderWay, threading shallow water we didn’t fully trust. Our system that night was improvised: Michele at the bow with a spotlight in one hand and a phone in the other, pointing the beam at where the chart recorded our outbound track, while I drove. Waves were running two to three feet. They kept coming over the front. She was getting soaked. The spotlight would move, I would move, the course would shift — a feedback loop that worked badly in theory and worse in practice. Both of our anxieties were rising, for obvious reasons: dark water, shallow bottom, waves in our faces, directions that kept sliding off target.

We made it back. But as we tied off, Michele said simply: we need a better solution.

I spent the next day building one. A fixed spotlight mounted at the helm, a phone holder bracketed right next to it, so the driver has the light and the map and controls both. No more two-person handoff. No more moving beam.

The solution worked exactly as designed.

Two weeks later, coming home in the dark with our friends Scott and Brittany Porter aboard — their last night with us — I turned the new spotlight on as we approached WonderWay. The beam hit the boat cleanly. Michele moved to the bow with the dock line, ready to jump off as we came alongside.

She was wearing a white shirt.

The spotlight hit her shirt and threw the light straight back at me. I was blinded at the exact moment I needed to see. I heard her before I understood what had happened — not a scream, just a sharp intake of breath, followed by “I’m OK”. When I got the dinghy secured and came around to find her, she and Brittany were in the cabin, lights on, staring at her left hand. Her ring finger had caught on a metal D-ring on the lift platform when I reversed to ease the approach. The finger had been pulled out of its socket and twisted.

It was dislocated. Visibly, unmistakably, pointing the wrong direction.

She called our son Cameron, who’s a physician. He walked me through it over the phone. I had trained as an EMT a long time ago, but that was a long time ago. I put traction on the finger, gently, and she didn’t cry out — the adrenaline was doing its job. I bent it down and heard three small pops. The knuckle went back into place.

We splinted it with what we had. Michele took ibuprofen and we went to sleep.

By morning, the pain had arrived. Scott and Brittany left for home. We walked to the only clinic in Georgetown that advertised X-rays. It cost $350 cash. The X-ray was taken by the front desk clerk. The doctor reviewed it briefly, in the hallway, and told Michele it wasn’t broken.

We sent the images to Cameron. He called back within the hour after showing it to his radiology associates. She had a clear fracture at the base of the knuckle. Possibly a second hairline fracture above it. She needed a proper splint and time.

We did the best we could.

Three days later, my sister Megan arrived.

She came the way the best visitors come — not expecting a charter, just wanting to live our life. She had ten days. She didn’t need an itinerary. She needed to get off the mainland and breathe, and she was willing to slot into whatever we were doing.

What we were doing, as it turned out, included Michele’s left hand being almost entirely non-functional. You don’t fully understand how much a boat depends on two working hands until one person has one. Grabbing dock lines. Attaching the snubber to the anchor chain. Steadying yourself when the deck tilts. Catching yourself in the companionway when a wake rolls through. All of it requires two hands. Michele had been managing with one, which meant she was doing less and compensating more, and the boat was carrying the cost of the shortfall.

Megan absorbed it without being asked. She took the two-handed jobs. She managed the anchor. She worked lines. She didn’t make it a favor; she made it invisible.

We went north, sixty miles, to pick up a replacement coupler for the watermaker — the second repair, because the first coupler had been the wrong size, a small mismatch that created a wobble that eventually sheared through the housing. The watermaker we had nursed through most of Georgetown with water deliveries was still not working. We went to get the part, fixed it, had the watermaker running by the time we anchored at Cambridge Cay.

The anchorage there was one of the most extraordinary things we’d seen — blues that you can’t describe to someone who hasn’t been in the Exumas, and probably can’t fully describe to someone who has. We hiked the islands, swam in an aquarium full of live coral, snorkeled next to a sunken plane in the sand. Megan brought the kind of energy that notices everything. She would sit in the hammock chairs at the stern and watch the water change color as the light shifted and not need to say anything about it.

One morning we found sea turtles at Rudder Cut Cay — a family of them we had visited before. Last time, we saw three. With Megan on the boat, we saw ten. They didn’t spook. They just swam with us, close enough to touch if we’d wanted to. I don’t know why there were more that day. There were just more.

We took Megan back to Georgetown for her flight home, played pickleball the next morning with friends we hadn’t seen in a week, and that was when Michele slipped.

She went for a backhand, lunged on the sandy court, lost her footing, and hyperextended every finger on her left hand — including the one with the fracture. She didn’t break down on the court. She came off, found me, and told me quietly. But her middle finger, index finger, and thumb had gone numb. Her ring and pinky were throbbing. The finger we had managed carefully for two weeks looked wrong again.

That was the beginning of the low.

I didn’t take it seriously fast enough. That’s the honest version.

She stopped being able to do the things she does. She couldn’t crochet. She couldn’t sew. She couldn’t play guitar. She couldn’t garden, obviously, but she also couldn’t cook the way she cooks — with precision, with two hands moving together, with the confidence that comes from a body that knows what it’s doing. She was stuck on the boat with one functional hand, waiting for a weather window to leave, and we couldn’t leave because the crossing to Cat Island was fifteen degrees into the wind and neither of us wanted to do that passage with her in that condition.

So we waited. And in the waiting, she shut the door to her cabin and didn’t come out for a full day.

I went to land to find a better brace. The doctor we had talked to on the phone told us she needed the finger braced in a flexed position — not straight, but slightly bent, so the two fracture surfaces could meet and begin to knit together. What she had wasn’t doing that. I walked to every store I could reach on foot. Nothing.

I was heading back to the dinghy when a car pulled up behind me and honked.

Niska and Reno. Our Bahamian friends, the couple we’d played pickleball with for six weeks, the people who showed up on the courts every morning and stayed after matches to talk about anything. They rolled down the window and said they’d been looking for me.

I told them what I needed. They drove north to the pharmacy we couldn’t reach on foot, found the brace, and brought it back.

I took it to Michele. We got it on her hand in the right position. She sat with it for a while and then looked up and said she thought she could actually feel the difference.

The next morning, we went to a different clinic — Doctor’s Hospital, on the island — and paid $250 for an X-ray done by someone who clearly knew how to take an X-ray. The doctor sat with us for twenty minutes. He showed us the fractures on the screen, explained what was happening, put the finger brace and a wrist immobilizer on together, and said what we needed to hear: there was no surgical intervention for this, it just needed time, and it would heal.

She would be okay.

That was enough. I watched something release in her. Not dramatically — she didn’t cry or say anything particular. She just breathed. The fear that had been underneath the depression, the version that wondered whether a broken finger was telling us something larger about what this life might cost — that fear found somewhere to go.

The next day, the weather turned.

We said goodbye to Brett and Jessica on Cowabunga, to Mike and Sarah on Rondo, to Niska and Reno. Two months in Georgetown, three watermaker repairs, a broken finger, and more pickleball than I’ve played since Tortoise Island. The friends we were leaving had become the kind you don’t forget — not because the circumstances were dramatic, but because the circumstances had been real, and real had been enough.

We raised the anchor and pointed WonderWay toward Cat Island.

We moved onto the farm in 2013 because we wanted our kids to feel that what was outside the house was more interesting than what was inside it.

Michele and I had watched the gravitational pull of devices reorganize our family from the inside — teenagers retreating into phones, younger ones following, dinner table conversations shortening. We tried rules. The rules didn’t hold. We decided we needed to change the alternative.

We found thirteen acres in Redmond, close enough to Microsoft that I could keep working, far enough from everything else that the outside became unavoidable. We had never farmed before. We jumped anyway, the way we had always jumped — with the confidence that the door would open and the thing would become what it needed to become.

For Michele, it did. She grew fruits and vegetables at a scale she had never attempted, built a farm stand at the top of the driveway, went to school to learn to grow cut flowers, and planted rows of dahlias and zinnias and sweet peas with the focused intensity she brings to everything she decides to master. She and our daughter started RiverGrown Flowers, got contracts with local high-end grocery stores, and built something real from soil and early mornings and the stubbornness of someone who decides a thing is going to work and then makes it work.

For me, the farm was different.

A full-time job at Microsoft intensifying every year. A church leadership responsibility covering ten congregations — twenty-plus hours a week of meetings, counseling, and the emotional labor of being responsible for other people’s spiritual lives. And the farm, which did not care about any of that. If I was sitting on the porch watching the light change over the pasture, I was also aware of the fence that needed repairing and the irrigation line losing pressure and the project I had promised myself I would finish before the weekend. The enjoyment and the anxiety existed simultaneously, the anxiety always slightly louder. I didn’t understand how close to the edge I was.

My son Logan had always been the easy one — deeply connected, willing, endearing. He moved through our family like water.

His senior year of high school, one of his friends got to a place so low and so dark that he decided to leave this life. Logan carried that. You don’t put it down. He kept going. He graduated. He went off to college.

Second semester, freshman year — the same week he received his mission call to Colombia Bogota, a moment he had been building toward his whole life — his college roommate got to the same low place and made the same decision.

I didn’t have words. My framework for suffering had been built since I was a boy and confirmed by thirty years of faith. It had held through everything I had thrown at it.

It had nothing to offer Logan.

He kept a smile on his face but there was something behind his eyes that I recognized as the weight of a person who has absorbed more grief than they know what to do with. Before that summer was over, two more young men from our community — boys Logan’s age, boys whose families we had prayed with and loved — were also gone. One memorialized on our farm, because his family needed somewhere to put their grief and we had somewhere to put it.

Four young men. Two years. Logan’s age.

The only thing I knew how to give him was a door that opened somewhere else entirely. Somewhere the sky was big enough to breathe under.

Patient zero was in Kirkland, Washington. We were in Redmond, the next city over.

Within weeks, all six kids came back to the farm simultaneously — medical school, university, high school, junior high, all closed. Nine people in a house that had been running with four. We loved it and it nearly finished us. The internet was a DSL line now being asked to carry everything. We made schedules. The router became a shared resource negotiated like a limited natural supply.

Michele came inside every evening exhausted and limping from the flower farm. I said to her: something has to change.

I had been carrying a Microsoft sabbatical for two years — three months, full pay, job guaranteed. I had earned it and not used it because the thing I wanted to use it for wasn’t possible. A colleague had explored the Inside Passage on a boat and come back changed in a way I recognized and couldn’t stop thinking about. I wanted that for my family.

Michele had said: we can’t. The farm. The summer. The kids’ school.

COVID dissolved both constraints in one motion.

I drove to Bellingham, got my sailing certification over a three-day weekend, chartered a boat with an instructor for a week in July. Nine days of training total. Then I started making calls. We bought a forty-two-foot catamaran in the British Virgin Islands and negotiated three months of access in the first year.

We booked the Mediterranean. Jerusalem in the middle. The British Virgin Islands at the end. We bought the flights.

A week before departure, the agent called. Athens was closed. The British Virgin Islands were closed.

I asked: where in the world can I put my family on a sailboat from September to December?

She said: Tahiti.

I said: done.

The marina at Raiatea smelled like salt and diesel and the humidity of a place that has never been cold. Getting here took the best of my logistical planning skills. Vaccines, documentation, health visas, covid testing 24 hours before the flight, covid testing 24 hours after the flight.

We sat at the dock three nights before anyone was ready to leave. Michele had said we weren’t going until we were ready, and I deferred to her the way I had learned to — not out of obligation but out of thirty years of evidence that her instincts about readiness were more reliable than my instincts about momentum.

On the fourth day, we dropped the lines.

We motored to the first anchorage, dropped the anchor with no instructor watching, and watched the sun go down over water somewhere between green and blue and lit from underneath. That night I woke up every hour to check it. I did this until the sky started to lighten and I was too tired to check anymore.

Over the weeks that followed, we put the sails up, made our way around Raiatea, then north to Taha'a. I continued serving as a church leader virtually, joining meetings and services through a cellular signal from the boat. But something was shifting. Every sunrise, every moonrise over the lagoon, every hour underwater in the reef — they kept delivering the feeling I had spent my whole life going to church to find. The ocean had become our sanctuary. I wasn't sure yet what to do with that.

Scotty was thirteen years old, had spent his life teaching us how to be better and more patient parents, but was also teaching us what it felt like to be fully in a moment. Warnick, fifteen years old, was the most adaptable crew member on the boat — willing, uncomplaining, ready for whatever the day required.

Halfway through, Holland, twenty-one, flew in with her boyfriend Cory, and one golden evening on Huahine, he asked Michele and me for her hand. Tucker, twenty-four, arrived for the final two weeks and immediately started catching fish — consistently, purposefully — and taught the rest of us what we’d been doing wrong. The last meals of that trip were the best ones. Only Cameron was absent, we felt it then and have felt it since, but medical school provided no mercy.

Logan thrived. He stood at the bow on the first sail, the wind came up, the boat accelerated, and he held the rail and didn’t say anything for a long time. I watched him and said nothing either. He would end up spending a lot of his time rebuilding on the inside — five YouTube episodes he filmed and produced called UnderWay, deep dives into our experience woven with the stories that shaped us, including his own grief. Those episodes will always be part of his healing. You can watch them here.

Michele’s experience was more complicated. The farm had given her personal space and autonomy, the boat took it all away. While her body healed from the toil she put it through the previous season, her soul became her focus of transformation. The farm had taught her how to feel a deep connection to the power that is all around us, she would teach us all how to feel that on the ocean.

I had a spinal cord stimulator in my back — a device interrupting pain signals from a spine that had been failing since I was eighteen. I charged it on a wireless pad every day.

In Tahiti, I forgot to charge it. Because the pain wasn’t there. I noticed its absence the way you notice silence after a sound has been going so long you stopped hearing it as sound.

I lay in the cockpit one evening watching the stars appear and thought: I cannot go back. Not back to the pain. Not back to the farm and the twenty-hour church weeks and the project anxiety and the feeling of being split at the seams. The framework had filled my life until there was no room in it for the feeling I was feeling right now — lying in the cockpit with the Southern Cross overhead and no alarm set for anything.

Something had to be different when we went home. I didn’t know yet what. But I knew that.

It started with Zillow. Scotty, our youngest, pulled it up one evening looking at waterfront properties somewhere warm, half joking. It didn’t stay a joke. The next night someone else had found something. A house in the Carolinas. A place on the Gulf Coast. Something in Georgia with a dock. We started doing it every night.

Then Microsoft announced remote work. The geographic tether that had determined every place we had ever lived was cut in one announcement overnight.

We had arrived in Tahiti overwhelmed and fractured. We were leaving as something different. Not fixed exactly. But reset — the way a compass resets when you take it away from the interference long enough to let it find north again.

We didn’t sell the farm yet. We didn’t have a plan yet. We had a direction, which is different, and sometimes more honest.

We were going toward warmth, toward water, toward the life that felt like this.

We just hadn’t named it WonderWay yet.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Until it wasn’t.

Somewhere between West Palm Beach and Nassau, time started behaving differently. We crossed the Gulf Stream overnight, arrived in the Bahamas in daylight — which was the plan, because daylight is the only plan that matters on the water — checked into the country, and then dropped anchor in sand for the first time. No marina. No schedule. No reason to know what time it was.

That was the beginning.

What replaced the clock wasn’t chaos. It was something older. Sunrise tells you when you can move. Noon tells you where you are in the day. Sunset tells you when to stop. Those three markers turned out to be everything we needed. The tides told us when to enter shallow cuts and when to wait. The moon told us what the nights would look like and how the water would behave. We started tracking the lunar cycle the way we used to track our calendars — not because we had to, but because it actually told us something useful.

Within a week, Michele and I stopped knowing what day it was. Not because we weren’t doing anything. We were fishing, diving, fixing things, cooking, reading, exploring, talking. We were fully alive. We just couldn’t tell you if it was Tuesday or Thursday, and it turned out that didn’t matter at all.

What mattered was whether the wind was right. What mattered was whether the tide would be with us or against us. What mattered was whether there was enough light left to find a good anchorage before dark.

We started calling our plans “written in sand at low tide.” You can have a plan. You can intend to be somewhere in two days. But the weather will have a vote, and the weather usually wins. So you hold plans loosely, you read what the day is actually giving you, and you make your decisions from there.

What surprised me was discovering we weren’t alone in this.

There’s an app called No Foreign Lands that shows you where other cruisers are — which anchorage, which island, which stretch of water. We started using it to find people we’d met weeks or months earlier. You’d see a familiar boat name pop up twenty miles away and send a message: we see you’re in Staniel Cay — we’re heading that direction, you around? And the response, almost always, would be some version of: we think so. Depends on the weather. We’ll see.

We’ll see.

That phrase used to feel evasive to me. Now it feels honest. It’s the only accurate answer when you’re living by tides and wind instead of calendar invites. These are people who’ve opted out of clock time entirely — not because they’re unproductive or unserious, but because they’ve discovered that the natural rhythms of a day are a more truthful governor of life than the ones we invented.

When you live around people like this, something loosens. Serendipity becomes normal. You show up where you are, you make the most of today, and you trust that the people you’re meant to cross paths with will appear when the conditions are right. It’s a different kind of social coordination — slower, less certain on paper, and somehow more satisfying in practice.

Then our guests arrived.

We love having people on the boat. We want people on the boat. But guests come with flights, and flights come with dates, and dates come with hard deadlines. Suddenly we were back inside a calendar. We needed to be in a specific place on a specific day, full stop. The weather didn’t get a vote. The tides didn’t get a vote.

We made a passage we shouldn’t have made. The conditions weren’t right — seas running higher than comfortable, wind on the nose. We went anyway because the calendar said we had to be somewhere. Nobody got hurt. The boat was fine. But it was an uncomfortable day on the water that didn’t need to happen, and we both knew it while it was happening.

That’s the cost of schedules on the ocean. You make decisions based on time instead of conditions, and the ocean doesn’t care about your timeline.

I want to be honest about something: not everyone can opt out of clock time. I know that. We’re able to live this way because of choices we made over decades and a set of circumstances that not everyone has. That’s real, and I don’t want to skip past it. But if you have any version of this available to you — a sabbatical, a slower season, even a two-week trip where you deliberately leave the schedule behind — I think it will show you something you didn’t know you were missing.

Because I didn’t know there was an alternative. I genuinely thought this was just how life worked. You manage your time, you honor your commitments, you fill the calendar. I never questioned it because everyone I knew lived exactly the same way.

What I’m learning out here is that there’s a different relationship with time available — one where the day has a natural shape that doesn’t need to be imposed from the outside. Where presence is the point, not productivity. Where the question isn’t what’s next but what’s here.

Most mornings now, I watch the sun come up over the water and feel something settle in me. I don’t reach for my phone. I don’t check what’s on the calendar. I watch the light change, I think about the wind, and I let the day begin on its own terms.

It took me fifty-four years to discover this.

I’m not sure I’m going back.

What I’m only now beginning to see is that before Joy or Fear ever runs to the console, something else happens first.

Chemistry.

My body senses something. My Inner Universe interprets it. And based on that interpretation—not the event itself—my brain releases a cascade of neurochemicals. Those chemicals create the emotional state that follows.

I don’t directly control the chemicals. But I influence the interpretation that triggers them.

And that subtle distinction changes everything.

In October 2025, we were bringing WonderWay into the Annapolis Boat Show. Before I even reached the dock, I had to navigate a drawbridge that left about three feet of clearance on either side of our 53-foot catamaran, in high wind and current. My nervous system was already lit up. Cortisol and adrenaline were flowing. Norepinephrine sharpened everything. My awareness narrowed. My body was preparing for threat.

When I cleared the bridge, there was no relief. The real test was ahead: docking in a tight slip boxed in on three sides, with barely five feet of margin in any direction. Ten people on board were calling out instructions. Dozens more on the dock were shouting from every angle. The noise alone could have overwhelmed me.

From the outside, it looked like boat handling.

Inside, it was chemistry.

My Inner Universe interpreted the moment as extreme risk. That interpretation triggered cortisol and adrenaline—fear chemicals designed to protect me. Norepinephrine heightened focus. Every sound felt amplified. Every movement mattered.

And then something shifted.

I realized I could not listen to everyone. I dialed into one voice—Michele’s. I consciously reframed the moment. I told myself, “You can do hard things. No one else is parking this boat. Stay here.”

That reframing didn’t magically erase cortisol. But it influenced what came next. Instead of spiraling into panic, my system recruited focus and determination. Dopamine began to edge in—not as pleasure, but as goal-directed drive. I wasn’t calm. I was engaged.

We threw a line. We pivoted. Chaos continued around me, but inside there was a steadying. When the final lines were secured and the engines powered down, a different wave washed over me. Oxytocin. Dopamine. Relief. Bonding.

The moment sealed itself into memory.

What struck me later was this: the same surge of heightened awareness that could have tipped fully into panic instead tipped into mastery. The biology of fear and the biology of awe share early pathways. Both begin with “pay attention.” The fork in the road happens in interpretation.

That pattern has repeated itself offshore.

Since leaving Georgetown, we’ve been navigating a series of aggressive western windstorms sweeping down from cold fronts in the United States. In the Bahamas, most anchorages are designed—geographically and historically—for easterly trade winds. Western winds expose you. Protection becomes scarce.

When those storms approach, my body shifts into defensive posture before I consciously decide to. Norepinephrine rises. I become hyper-alert. We reposition to the leeward side of islands. We set our anchor with precision. We activate GPS anchor alarms and radar guard zones. I scan other boats for signs of drag.

Cortisol accompanies vigilance. There’s an edge to it. A low-grade hum of “this could go wrong.”

One afternoon we watched a boat in front of us begin to drift. Fifty feet closer. Forty. I was ready to launch our dinghy to assist when the captain started his engines and reset his anchor. Crisis avoided.

But my body had already rehearsed the emergency. I felt the exhaustion afterward—the crash that comes when cortisol recedes.

Then, just days later, in the same waters, we were standing barefoot on a sandbar exposed by low tide, sharing sundowners with new friends. The sky was on fire. The tide slipped quietly past our ankles. We were talking about long-term plans—New England, Maine, crossing paths again in future seasons.

Again, norepinephrine.

Pay attention.

But this time, no cortisol. Instead, oxytocin.

The warmth in my chest. The subtle chills. The feeling of being fully present with people I had met only weeks before but somehow would never forget. The experience bonding us together.

Fear and awe start the same way physiologically. Arousal. Heightened awareness. Energy mobilization. What differentiates them is not the initial spike, but where the chemistry resolves.

Cortisol sustains threat. Oxytocin sustains connection. Dopamine drives pursuit and accomplishment. Serotonin stabilizes mood and confidence over time. Each has a role. None are enemies. But they shape how moments imprint.

This realization has forced me to revisit some of the most meaningful experiences of my earlier life.

When my grandfather died while I was serving as a missionary in my twenties, I could not return home. I remember standing in a place that reminded me of him, feeling suddenly overwhelmed. My awareness spiked. Memories flooded in. I felt what I interpreted as his presence.

Warmth. Goosebumps. Tears. A sense of connection that felt transcendent.

For decades, I described that moment purely spiritually. And I still honor it as sacred. But now I can also see the biology beneath it. Memory triggered arousal. Arousal triggered bonding chemistry. Oxytocin sealed the experience into permanence.

The same pattern showed up countless times in profoundly spiritual settings—moments of feeling connected to ancestors, to faith, to something vast and enduring. Heightened awareness. A sense of smallness and significance simultaneously. Warmth in the chest. Certainty and peace.

Chemically, those experiences and the sandbar sunset share more than I once realized.

This does not reduce them. It deepens them.

What I’m learning is that I am not a passive recipient of emotional weather. I cannot command my brain to release oxytocin or dopamine on demand. But I influence the interpretations that guide the chemistry that follows.

If I interpret a storm purely as threat, my body will live in cortisol. If I interpret it as competence-building challenge, dopamine joins the scene. If I interpret shared experience as meaningful connection, oxytocin imprints it.

This doesn’t mean denying danger. Offshore, denial is stupidity. Anchors must hold. Alarms must be set. Vigilance matters.

But I’m seeing that many of the moments I once classified as purely “stress” contain the raw ingredients of awe. The same biological ignition that prepares me to run can prepare me to stand still and witness something vast.

Fear and wonder sit next to each other in the nervous system.

And increasingly, I am aware that our modern lives train us relentlessly in cortisol and dopamine—productivity, urgency, accomplishment, comparison—but far less in oxytocin.

We are alert. We are driven. We are often anxious.

But we are under-bonded.

On the water, I can feel the difference. In storms, I am vigilant. In shared anchorages and buddy boat friendships, I am bonded. In sunset conversations and hard dockings completed well, I am moved.

And being moved—truly moved—seems to be the chemistry that most expands my Inner Universe. Oxytocin doesn’t just make me feel connected; it makes experiences unforgettable. It reinforces belonging. It softens certainty. It widens perspective.

If softening was the doorway, and wonder was the room beyond it, then chemistry may be the wiring inside the walls.

The more I understand the biology, the less conflict I feel between spiritual and scientific language. They appear less like competing explanations and more like two descriptions of the same integrated system.

My body senses. My Inner Universe interprets. Chemistry flows. Emotions move. Memory updates.

And the loop continues.

What I am beginning to suspect is that what many of us are missing in our daily lives is not more stimulation or more achievement, but more oxytocin—more shared experience, more vulnerability, more eye contact, more sunsets that we watch with someone else.

More moments of being moved.

Because when that bonding chemistry flows, fear loosens, certainty softens, and the world feels—if only briefly—both vast and intimately ours.