Across the bay I saw a boater watching me and chuckling. I knew that look. It was the same look I had given hundreds of other boaters over the years—the look that says, What the hell is this idiot doing?
I could almost hear him thinking, Obviously a new guy. Probably his first season.
I wanted to wave at him and yell, “I’ve been doing this for twenty-five years!” But somehow that seemed to make the situation worse. Because there I was, sitting on the exact same pile of rocks I had found a quarter-century earlier, proving once and for all that experience is not necessarily the same thing as learning.
Experience, I have discovered, is merely having more stories about the things you screwed up. The advantage is that after enough years, you get pretty good at telling those stories. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can even make them sound intentional.
I eventually backed off the rocks, checked the bottom, checked the boat, checked myself, and decided the best course of action was to pretend the whole thing had never happened.
This is another important cruising skill: selective memory.
Every cruiser develops it. You remember the spectacular sunset but forget that you spent forty-five minutes trying to get the dinghy engine started. You remember the perfect anchorage but somehow forget the night the wind shifted 180 degrees and your anchor alarm went off at two in the morning. You remember the beautiful little fishing village where everyone welcomed you with open arms, but conveniently forget the fuel dock that charged you enough money to make you consider taking up rowing.
And you definitely remember the time you sailed through a storm with perfect seamanship, while conveniently editing out the part where you were hiding below deck wondering whether the mast was supposed to make that noise.
Cruising does that to you. It takes all the little disasters, grinds off the sharp edges, and eventually turns them into stories. Maybe that’s one of the reasons we keep doing it. Because if you spend enough time on a boat, sooner or later you discover that perfection is not really part of the deal.
Boats leak. Engines quit. Anchors drag. Lines tangle. Charts lie—or at least seem to lie at exactly the moment you need them to be telling the truth. Weather forecasts change. And skippers make mistakes.
Lots of mistakes.
The trick is to make sure they’re survivable mistakes.
That may be the biggest difference between the experienced sailor and the beginner. The experienced sailor isn’t necessarily the one who makes fewer mistakes. He’s the one who has learned which mistakes can be laughed about later and which ones require immediate attention.
And there’s another thing you learn after enough years at sea: the guy in the boat next to you probably knows something you don’t.
That new sailor with the funny-looking anchor arrangement may have been anchoring that way for ten years. The guy who comes into the anchorage and drops his hook somewhere you wouldn’t even consider may know something about the bottom that you don’t. The old guy with the beat-up boat may have crossed more oceans than the guy with the million-dollar yacht.
And the person who appears to have absolutely no idea what he’s doing may, in fact, know exactly what he’s doing.
Or not.
That’s the beauty of it. You don’t know. Neither do I. The difference is that after a hundred thousand miles, I’ve become comfortable admitting it.
There was a time when I thought cruising was about learning everything you needed to know. Now I think it’s about learning how much you don’t know.
Every anchorage teaches you something. Every passage teaches you something. Every broken fitting, missed tide, fouled propeller, dragging anchor, and badly chosen restaurant teaches you something. Sometimes the lesson is important. Sometimes the lesson is simply, “Don’t do that again.”
And sometimes, twenty-five years later, you find yourself sitting on the exact same rocks wondering if maybe the universe is trying to tell you something.
I suppose it is.
Maybe the universe is telling sailors that we never really learn. We just become more experienced at making the same mistakes. The difference is that now, when I do something stupid, I can usually explain why I did it.
That’s progress.
Or at least that’s what I tell people.
The boater across the bay was still chuckling, so I finally waved. He waved back. Then he started his engine, pulled his anchor, and promptly ran his dinghy into the stern of his own boat.
I watched him for a moment.
Then I started laughing.
He looked over at me, and for a second we just stared at each other. Neither of us said a word. We didn’t have to.
We were sailors.
And sailors understand.
There is always somebody else who is doing it wrong—until, of course, it’s your turn. Then it becomes experience.
And experience, as every sailor eventually discovers, is just another word for having survived long enough to make the same mistake again.
Tomorrow morning, I’ll probably move the boat away from those rocks.
Probably.
And if I don’t, well, there’s always somebody across the bay who can tell me what I’m doing wrong.
That’s what cruising is all about. You never really learn. You just keep going.
And every once in a while, if you’re lucky, you get to laugh about it.
