Communication at Sea!

I'm honestly torn about the idea of having internet aboard my boat. Expense aside, I'm an addict. As much as I adore and have gained from the internet, I can't deny that it's also affected my life in major, negative ways. Without it, I'd probably have graduated Uni years earlier, with a higher GPA and in my original majors. I'd eat better and read more and spent more time outdoors. I would socialize more often with people in my own time zone, go out more with friends. So me getting satellite internet to take along would be like an alcoholic packing a wine cellar aboard. This is a powerful chance to break myself free of the obsessive need to check the mood of the internet at all hours of the day.

If I check my friends-list just once a day, it takes me anywhere from one to four hours to catch up. I see every single post on customers_suck and wtf_inc, every Metaquote, every dear_mun. I have to maintain a special filter just to keep track of the journals of people I actually know. (Neil Gaiman's on it, because the internet has fooled me into thinking he's my personal friend.)

I check a dozen webcomics every day, and my facebook, and the forums at www.geocaching.com. I get depressed, actually depressed if my posts go little-noticed. I check my email accounts constantly, all day long. Even then the internet is boring me to sleep, I can't go do something productive if I think someone I know might sign on. In the next few hours.



My vision of this cruise is one of an idealized existence. I imagine waking up two weeks out to sea, climbing out of my cabin to greet the sun as it rises over my bow. I'd take my sun sight, mark the night's progress on my chart, and make breakfast. The day, given placid weather, should be a tranquil progression of small shipkeeping tasks, made charming by their scale inside the confines of my hull. It was like this when we lived aboard Offbeat. When I could get my shipmates out of the way, I loved the motions of miniaturized housekeeping. It's playing house in paradise.

Now, I'm no idiot. I'm going to get tired of drying out my salty clothes, of stubbing my toe on the companionway, of the awkward way the door to the head swings out into the cabin. And there will be days of endless tedium wrapped around days of endless terror, all at the whims of the wind. I am going to struggle into port and kiss the dock, thanking God for my life. But between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, peaceful weather outweighs the opposite, and I will weigh my weather windows carefully to improve those odds.



I don't want internet drama to find me when I could be curled in my bow pulpit on the spare sail while I run wing and wing before a fresh breeze and a becalmed storm gull drowses on my masthead. I don't want to be worried about the state of Livejournal when I could be writing in my bunk, listening to the rhythm of the self-steering vane. Why would I want to know about someone's customers_suck experience in a gas station when I'm lounging in the shade of my sail, half a day south of the Equator and escorted by a dozen bottlenose?

On the other hand, you guys are my friends. I'd give anything to take you with me, most of you, or to have you waiting at port to rescue me from the solitude that drove Robin Lee Graham just a little bit mad. So, as I said, I'm torn. You're all worth some internet drama.



Maybe I should just write letters. Dozens of letters. But I already have so many writing goals for this Cruise; magazine articles, letters to which I'm already committed, a book or two. Would I burn out, run out of ink?

So maybe I don't know what to do just yet. I want to talk to people who've sailed this path before, ask them what they would choose. And mostly why.

(But wouldn't it be awesome to be in the chat and go "BRB GUYS! SEA TURTLES!")