Trawler Life

All Good Things

• Personal Essay, Trawler Life • 12 Comments

After five years of amazing adventures aboard our Nordhavn trawler MV Indiscretion, we’ve decided it’s time for a change. We are coming off the water.

We didn’t plan on this. We dreamed for decades to be at this very spot in our lives — casting off the bowlines to explore the world under our own keel at the unhurried pace of seven knots. But life doesn’t always work out like you hoped.

On September 27th, 2022, our son Connor was killed in a motorcycle accident in Colorado Springs. A car pulled out in front of him on a busy street a half mile from his apartment. He was just twenty years old. …

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Shilshole Marina — The Voyage Home

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Kicking back in the cockpit of Indiscretion on this fine May evening, I’ve been thinking about how life has a way of circling back on itself in strange, unexpected ways.

We’ve been settled in our new slip at Shilshole Marina in Seattle for a month now as we finalize the sale of our Vashon Island home. After all the frenetic activity involved in readying a house to sell, it feels good just to be still and observe the hustle and bustle that surrounds us here, in what surely must be the very center of the trawler universe. …

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The Gales of November

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We’re in the middle of a wet, windy month here in the Pacific Northwest. A weather phenomenon known as a “bomb cyclone” brought sustained winds of 30 knots and gusts up to 50 knots earlier this month. Since then, successive weather systems, aptly called atmospheric rivers, have pummeled Puget Sound, bringing rain and high winds almost every day. Today is no exception: a new storm has knocked out power to our entire island, so we’ve added the steady hum of our noisy generator to the whistling of 40-knot winds and the percussion of rain strafing the windows. …

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Fall Cruising on Hood Canal

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The crew of Indiscretion achieved a matrimonial milestone this month — our 25th Wedding Anniversary. This is remarkable, not only because our marriage has lasted far longer than the statistical average, but also because our friends all expected this spur-of-the-moment marriage to dissolve within six months of our elopement in Greece. There had been a large quantity of Ouzo consumed the night before we wrote out marriage vows on a rocky outcropping on Skiathos, so even we wondered early on how this would all work out.

We decide to celebrate our anniversary at Alderbrook Resort and Spa on the southern end of Hood Canal. We could have driven to this beautiful resort from our home on Vashon Island in about an hour, but what would be the fun in that? Instead, we would travel there by boat, which requires voyaging about seven hours north to the entrance of Hood Canal, and then heading south for another seven hours. Such is life at seven knots. …

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