Pretty much every single person I talked to before buying my boat told me not to do it. All I needed was that one person to tell me that the adventure of boat life was worth the hard work that came along with it.
I bought the sign for the back of my boat 5 months ago with so much eagerness, yet just now found the time to put it on. Admittedly, boat life has been harder than I had anticipated. Even though living on a boat means you get to see the most glorious of sunsets that instill within you a new sense of peace every single time, and that the cutest seal named Rufus will come splashing up to the back deck, it also means having windows that leak so much that it causes wood rot. It means having an invasion (or two) of bugs, the water pump giving out, leaking decks, a dinghy that no matter how many times you patch and re-fill with air still won’t stay filled, and a disheartening plethora of repulsive smells.
When you are trying to figure out why the bilge is suddenly filling with water, something as small as putting the name on the back becomes frivolous, and thus moved to the bottom of the list of things to do.
So, the fact that the name is now on the boat feels tremendous to me--as if I made it through that initial hard part that everyone was so quick to warn me about. I still don’t know what I am doing most of the time and I still have a million things to figure out, but I have never been so happy to come home every day.
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