Reading Deeply

• Reading • Leave a Comment

I spend a lot of time with my nose in a book. Last year, I read 61 books, and I’m on track to read that many again in 2021. Yet, as fast as I read, I can’t seem to make a dent in my To-Be-Read pile. So many books, so little time. Sometimes it feels like I’m running on a treadmill with an ever-increasing speed.

Lately, I’ve been questioning whether this strategy of gulping down so many books is wise after all. When I scan down the list of the books I’ve read so far this year, a few stand out, but many are already a blur. I hover over a few on the list — wait, did I actually read that? …

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Writing Things Down in a Paperless World

• Technology, Writing • 3 Comments

For the past ten years, I have been on a mission to eradicate paper from my work and home life. I can now access information more quickly and from anywhere, whether at sea or at the Apple Store where I need to produce the invoice for a dead MacBook Pro. And yet, one hold-out refuses to go gently into that dark night of paper annihilation: my Field Notes notebooks. These pint-sized memo books with their quirky designs and durable paper still travel with me just about everywhere. I sometimes wonder at the irony of using a $1,000 iPad Pro as a lap desk to scribble in a $4 notebook.

With everything else in my life so digitally focused, why do I still fill one of these 48-page Field Notes every three or four weeks? …

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Organizing the Tool Shed

• Family, Personal Essay • 1 Comment

In my office, I keep an old photograph of the Buckaroo Tavern in the Seattle neighborhood of Fremont. The photo truly captured the character of the place: two chrome-festooned Harley Davidson motorcycles parked up on the sidewalk out front, bright orbs from the lights hung over the pool tables, and an outstretched arm and pool cue of a patron poised in mid-shot. I spent many nights at this dive bar as a young man. My eyes burned from the cigarette smoke, and the rough-looking biker crowd that congregated at the bar would often chuckle over their beers at this clean-cut accountant toting a pool cue case, but I loved the place. I had the photograph framed when we first moved to Vashon Island. It hangs between a picture of Mark Twain standing before a pool table considering his next shot and a signed photograph of Jack Dempsey in his famous boxing stance. But, it’s the tavern picture that has caught my attention lately as I think back on that long ago life before kids. …

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Water, Water

• Trawler Life • Leave a Comment

On a boat, the most basic conveniences of life — like running water — require forethought and attention. In this post, we explore how we manage water aboard our Nordhavn 43 trawler.

Ample fresh water aboard Indiscretion is one of the many extravagances we enjoy aboard this expedition trawler. Our Catalina sailboat had just 50 gallons of fresh water, which we stretched to six or seven days of cruising with careful dishwashing and quick cockpit showers for the kids. The trawler holds 300 gallons of fresh water with onboard water-making capability that, in theory, provides us with an infinite supply.

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Boat Problem? Think Horses, Not Zebras

• Trawler Life • Leave a Comment

One of the great joys of anchoring out in a beautiful bay is the free time you have to focus on lingering boat projects. When you’re away from the boat, these issues seem to stack up until a later day. But here in Hunter Bay in the beautiful San Juan Islands? I had plenty of time.

My focus of the day: a wiring problem lurking somewhere in the pilothouse that randomly kept flipping our Maretron system circuit breaker. This happened when I opened or closed the ship’s service panel door, so I suspected a loose wire somewhere. …

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