living aboard is very much a marginal lifestyle in so many senses of the word. i must point out that liveaboarding is not the same as the cruising lifestyle.  cruising is a middle-class privileged lifestyle-it takes a lot of scratch to earn enough to purchase a yacht, outfit it for cruising, and put enough aside to live on while you take off for mexico. most folks i’ve met that embrace this kind of life on the water were generally well educted professionals on early retirement. the rest of us seem more like people enjoying simplicity and often solitude. most seem to be bachelors. i have no idea how most live economically.

after 19 months of this, i can say that it is marginal-it’s can sometimes be cold, noisy and unsettling when the wind blows strong from the southwest. the galley is tiny and cramped. and it’s expensive. although the actual rent isn’t bad, the cost of the boat (this boat) is high, there are ongoing maintenance costs. and what’s more, i find we spend more getting out and getting off the boat, especially in the winter time. i refuse to spend all of my time huddled aboard, so i spend several hours in coffee shops.

at one time if felt rather proud about lessening my carbon footprint. i saw it as a moral good. and it’s nice not to have space to put stuff, so we don’t buy junk, lessening our consumption. of course if everyone did that the economy would tank. like about now.

old lefties/envirogeeks like myself tend to decry our civilisation’s wasteful, consumptive ways, but i’m starting to question the wisdom of that approach. while there is no doubt that we do consume too much and a lot of the world’s environmental degradation comes from that consumption, it’s important to realise that everything we consume – and that includes social services – is only posible due to the economy and the wealth it generates. moving aboard and the small hardships we face as a consequence of that, is nothing like waht we would face without modern conveniences. how many of us could survive a hunter -gatherer or primitive agrarian lifestyle? there is not an aspect of our lives that isn’t touched, that isn’t made profoundly easier as a consequence of the flow of money, even among the most disadvantaged of us.
in my last book i did a lot of research on peasant lifestyles of the early 19th century, and i cannot begin to imagine living with that kind of hardship. perhaps i’m just getting old.

to be sure consumption alone is focused too much on. it has become a value ingrained in too many people. while it is good to have junk, junk in itself is essentially meaningless, not a good in itself like some people think. as religion has faded, consumption seems in part to have taken over as a locus of morality, and a selfish one at that. there’s no way that story can have a happy ending.

fortunately we know that happiness and contentment have little to do with wealth, and so junk falls back into it’s rightful place. but that doesn’t mena that i still hold onto that older belief that consumption in itself is bad, or materialism for that matter. the more i look into the world the more i start seeing shades of grey and the less i feel like taking a stand for an ethic or value, because too often these things are contingent rather than absolute. people love to take stands, and god bless ‘em for their passion. but the guy ion the left is just as convinced he’s right as the guy on the right, and the corporate exec believes in what he does as much as the protestor that condemns his business.
sometimes things might really be black and white, but too often i think that just reflects the limits of my own thinking rather than a reflection of reality. adn imagining that i’m doing a good by living simply might just be a lot of antisocial hogwash.

i heard an interesting quote from the poet Shelly:
to be greatly good we must imagine clearly, must see ourselves and the world through the eyes of another and many others.
basically, what others – especially the downtrodden and poor from around the world – would say to us, what is expected of us is the prime determinant of whether we live justifiable and legitimate lives. there may be something to that. but then again, if i was condemned by a hungy man from Senegal – i would have to ask him “how do you know you wouldn’t do the same, or worse, if you were in my shoes?”

i see that the weird weather of the last month is finally moving on and we are getting back to seasonal normals. the forecast shows showers, then clearing followed by showers then clearing again. the usual pattern of warm fronts and cold fronts, warm fronts and cold fronts. the wind is from the southwest again and we are probably in for a bumpy, noisy night.

i can’t believe i’m saying this but it’s finally starting to dawn on me who much everything we know and understand about our culture is predicated on consumption. i’ve never taken an economics course, was never much interested in the economy beyond being a consumer, and then after i repudiated consumption, as a critic of consumerism.
The economy was this big, vague idea that had a brimstone whiff to it, in that it seemingly could bring down people faster than WMD, and had a taint of greed and corruption. basically it was no good and yet we were hooked to it like crystal meth, and wall street and the banks were the dealers.
but every day in the papers i read the cry of buy, buy, spend, spend, as if our lives depended on it. and maybe they do.
but what about the knowledge we now have that the economy cannot continue to grow forever, that we are burning far too many fossil fuels, that we are fouling our planet, and that by consuming we widen the gap between the rich and the poor.

is it as simple as the buy buy is out there because the rich and powerful need it? i’m not sure. i know that the more we consume the more jobs for those who provide what we consume, but how does that work if the providers are mostly in china? how many canadians manufacture stuff that canadians buy? everyone i know is in some kind of service.
and does that make antimaterialists like myself burdens on society?

i really wonder if the sky would fall if we stopped buying stuff. i’m not talking services, but junk. it seems to me that it’s the junk that is responsible for so much environmental damage, both in manufacture and disposal.

i may be off base here but hearing all our glorious leaders exhalting us to buy, buy, buy, is disturbing to me.

there are times that victoria drives me nuts. politically there is a lot that is troubling about this city and how it is run. but for me, it’s a keeper, and today was one of the biggest reasons. we went sailing this afternoon on a beautiful sunny winters day, with a skim-milk blue sky and a  sun that did it’s damnedest to make us all think it was a couple of months later in the season than it really was. the wind was from the north, blowing 15-25 knots or so. because it was an offland breeze it wasn’t able to generate any kind of chop and the sailing was superb.

we were making almost 8 knots on a broad reach before the admiral cleared her throat in that “way” of hers and we put a sinlge reef in the main (more for show than anything else), adn proceeded to make our way out to race rocks.
it was stunningly lovely out and we all took turns stretching our carcasses out on deck and soaking up the sun as we hummed along at 7 knots, gently pushing aside the tiny swells.
this is january for god’s sake. there was some kind of flottilla happening off esquimalt  and a few other sailboats off Pedder Bay. but other than that we were alone but for a few big freighters that made their ghostly, silent way in and out of the strait.
we made race rocks and then came about as it was getting late.
after the sun dipped blow the horizon the coulers cahged to the most sublime of palettes; photographers call that thick, rich light right after sunset “yummy light”, and this evening it was delicious, it was a buffet of the richest, creamiest, most delicate puff pastries of luminescence- colour and light more solemn and enigmatic than the sound of a 3AM freight train. it was stunning. and by that time we were completely alone out there, watching as venus made her dazzling entrance onto the evening stage.

this is why there is no better place to live in this country. keeping the schaedenfreud to a minimum, this is what the rest of the country is dealing with:

this was our experience. this is why i love living here. i just wish i had brought out the camera sooner; it was quite late by this time and we were heading home:

this is a crummy old digital camera and it just could not get the colours down right at all. still, it’s nice to have the pics anyway.

i got this email the other day.
Hey just wanted to say hello and thanks for awesome posts on sailnet.com. I found your blog via your profile on sailnet after enjoying very much your insights on living aboard.
Glad to see you are still living on the boat.
I’m here in US of A in Florida and will be getting a boat hopefully in the next couple of months. Nothing bigger then 30 feet and probably around 10 grand. Seems like this is a good time to get one, since lots of people selling their toys.
After reading your posts I confirmed my position on not spending too much on the boat but I still want to get something that I will be able to take out and hopefully make it one of this days to Bahamas, lol.
Anyways, thanks again
 
Max aka Kommy

your welcome max, and good luck. i would like to spend more time on the blog, but in a long list that makes up the day, the blog tends to fall last. oh, well, i guess some folks still appreciate it.