For the past 15 years, Bob Bitchin has been one of the most recognizable voices in the cruising community. Through Latitudes & Attitudes and Living Aboard, he has spent years telling sailors what they already suspected: that there is probably no sensible reason to leave a perfectly comfortable dock, but there are a hell of a lot of good reasons to do it anyway.

His nationally televised weekly TV show brought that same philosophy to sailors everywhere, sharing the reality, humor, frustration, and sheer adventure of life afloat in the 21st century.

Sometimes You Need to Keep a Starboard Attitude is a collection of stories about what happens after you finally do the thing you’ve been talking about for years. You untie the docklines. You point the bow away from shore. And suddenly that little boat that seemed perfectly ordinary while sitting in the marina becomes a ticket to somewhere else.

And “somewhere else” doesn’t necessarily mean halfway around the world.

That’s one of the things that makes these stories work. Adventure doesn’t always require an ocean crossing, a tropical island, or a chart covered with thousands of miles of plotted course. Sometimes it’s simply the moment the boat leaves the dock and you realize you’re no longer tied to anything.

Bob has sailed more than 100,000 miles around the world, yet he still manages to find adventure in the same places the rest of us might overlook. Through his “Share the Sail” adventures, he has taken sailors into some of the world’s most spectacular cruising grounds, including Tahiti, Croatia, Tonga, Greece, the British Virgin Islands, and Thailand.

But the real subject of this collection isn’t miles.

It’s attitude.

Because cruising has a funny way of rearranging your priorities. A broken engine can become a story. A missed harbor can become an unexpected anchorage. A lousy day at sea can become the memory you laugh about ten years later. And a five-minute trip across a marina can make you feel like you’re Huck Finn headed down the Mississippi.

Which brings us to one of the best examples of what this book is really about.

We Gotta Be Nuts

There is something that happens to me as soon as I see a small gap of water between my boat and the dock when I’m leaving for a sail.

Freedom.

It doesn’t matter where I’m going.

It doesn’t matter whether I’m headed across an ocean or simply moving the boat to the other side of the marina. The instant the dock starts moving away, something inside me wakes up.

This first became obvious to me when I was taking the boat from the slip to King Harbor Marine Center to pick up my new booms.

Now, let’s get something straight.

I wasn’t going anywhere.

I wasn’t crossing an ocean. I wasn’t heading for Mexico. I wasn’t even going out to drop the hook for the night, which is something I do often enough to make my friends question my judgment.

I was going to the marine yard.

That’s it.

A five-minute motor from one part of the harbor to another.

Yet as soon as the boat started clearing the slip, I felt it.

My heart started beating a little faster.

And there it was.

That stupid grin.

I looked around the boat, half expecting somebody to catch me enjoying myself for no good reason.

As I motored through the marina, I started wondering just what the hell was going on. Why should moving a boat five minutes through a harbor produce the same feeling I get when I’m setting off on an actual voyage?

Then it hit me.

Here I was, looking back at more than 60 years of life, and I still turned into a little kid the minute I pushed away from land.

Maybe that’s the secret.

Maybe sailors never really grow up.

We just acquire bigger boats.

I can remember feeling exactly the same way when I was in grade school. During summer vacation, my brother and I would head behind the Sepulveda Dam, where, as I recall, we weren’t exactly encouraged to be.

That’s where we’d build our raft.

Calling it a raft might be generous. It was more accurately a collection of things we had managed to tie together that we hoped would float.

But once we shoved that contraption into the five-foot-wide Los Angeles River, it became something else entirely.

To us, it was a ship.

We were Huck Finn.

That muddy little stretch of water was the Mississippi.

The bushes along the bank were unexplored wilderness, and every bend in the river promised something we hadn’t seen before.

We’d push off with a couple of sticks and begin our great voyage.

We weren’t going anywhere.

But we didn’t know that.

And maybe that’s what made it an adventure.

Years later, I’ve discovered that not much has changed.

The boat is bigger. The destinations are farther away. I’ve sailed thousands upon thousands of miles and visited places I once only knew from maps and stories.

But the feeling is exactly the same.

The dock lets go.

The boat moves.

And for a little while, the rest of the world can wait.

That’s probably why sailors put up with all the things that come with owning a boat. The maintenance. The weather. The broken equipment. The endless list of things that need fixing. The occasional moment when you wonder why you didn’t take up golf instead.

Because none of that matters when the lines come off and the boat starts moving.

At that moment, you aren’t thinking about the bill from the yard.

You’re not thinking about the leaky fitting.

You’re not thinking about the fact that the wind is probably going to change the minute you get outside the harbor.

You’re going somewhere.

And sometimes, going somewhere is all the reason you need.

That’s what Sometimes You Need to Keep a Starboard Attitude is about.

It’s about the peculiar disease that affects people who look at a boat and see possibility instead of expense.

It’s about the sailors who know that the best memories rarely happen while you’re sitting safely tied to the dock.

And it’s about that little kid inside all of us who still believes that pushing away from shore means something extraordinary might happen.

Maybe it will.

Maybe it won’t.

But you’ll never know until you cast off.

So untie the lines.

Point the bow toward open water.

And keep a starboard attitude.

Because we’re probably all a little nuts anyway.

GET THE BOOK HERE: https://bobbitchinstore.com/products/starboard-attitude-book