I can vividly recall the first time I decided to cross “the channel” and sail, single-handed, the 23 miles from my home port of Redondo Beach, California all the way to Two Harbors on the exotic island of Catalina. I was scared!
Oh, I don’t mean nervous. I mean scared. It’s nerve-wracking trying to gather the gumption to untie the docklines for the first time for a “long voyage.” Eventually sailing to Catalina came to be even less than an afterthought. After a few years Catalina became my second home, and I got to where I wouldn’t even check the weather.
Just go. Small-craft warnings be damned! And then there was the first time I sailed across an ocean. It was beyond daunting. It was downright scary. Looking at a chart of the Pacific Ocean for the first time, I realized just how small a dot the Hawaiian Islands were when looking at charts that covers from the US to Australia.
There are a few fly-specks that are located “out there” and somehow I was supposed to find them using the same old navigation they used a couple hundred years ago. Ya see, when I started sailing, it was late in life, and the evening we left Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, for Hawaii, I was scared to death.
Of course I couldn’t let my crew know that, right? So I put on a face of bravado, and we sailed out of Cabo at sunup, heading West!. Now I guess I wasn’t so much scared as worried. I had decided I wanted to make the crossing the old-fashioned way. So I had my handy-dandy Celestaire Sextant.
Back in “The day” we had a tradition on Lost Soul. Every afternoon at sunset we’d roll a fatty. You know, Marijuana, Reefer, Ganga. Whatever you wanna call it. Now, one of the side effects of smokin’ the whacky-tobacy is paranoia. So there I lay, on my bunk in the aft cabin after partaking of a sunset joint, and all of a sudden I was scared.
How was I supposed to sleep? We were sailing off into a vast expanse, trying to hit a flyspec after about 2,700 miles, just using a sextant, a clock, and a compass. Over the years I ended up sailing back and forth between the US and Hawaii at least a half-dozen times. It got to be so mundane the last time we made the voyage Jody & I didn’t even start to provision until the day before we left, and we did it without a list. Just walked thru Costco with a couple flat carts, getting a case of this, a case of that, and a few dozen eggs. You know, just a walk-through grabbing goodies we thought we’d need.
They say that fear has stopped more voyages than any other factor. Fear of the sea. Fear of hitting something. Fear of fire aboard, or falling overboard, or a hundred other reasons. But what I finally learned over the years out there was, the more experience I had, the less fear.
Every year, for over 30 years, I found less & less things to be afraid of. One day I realized something. All my life I looked for things that I was afraid to do. And then I did em! No, I am not a brave individual. Far from it. I do try to think things thru, and in doing so I see the things that could happen. And then fear starts to rear its ugly head.
But those are not things that “will” happen. Just things that “might” happen. And once you have the experience, you start to realize that Franklin D. Roosevelt was right back then in 1932 when he said, “The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself.”
So what’s the answer?
It’s pretty simple, really. All you need to do is get past the “scared.” Once you get passed being scared, life opens up for you. New adventures. New dreams fulfilled. Fear has kept more boats tied up in the marinas than anything else. But as sailors and bikers have learned for thousands of years, once you get “out there,” it ain’t so bad!
Analyzing my life, I realized something. I’ve been lucky enough to live thru some great adventures over my lifetime. But I also realized that my most exciting adventures started out when I decided to do something I was scared to do. I realized that was actually WHY I did them. To overcome my fear.
That’s why I jumped on a motorcycle and rode all over the world. That’s why I jumped on a sailboat and sailed all over the world. It’s why I have had so many great adventures.
So the next time being a bit scared gets in your way, to get past the fear, just do it! You will find that each time you do it, you will not feel fear!
