Hats

I don't plan to disappear.

I have a life, here on solid land. Well, mostly on the internet. A pretty solid social life, good relationships with a few tight friends and a few dozen amicable aquaintences. The people I interact with every day.

(Though I wonder, because we all do, how long it would take them to notice if I stopped turning up. A few days, at least. A month, at most? But that's not the type of disappearance I'm talking about.)

I can't take the internet with me on my Cruise. Oh, it's possible, thank the technology race. There's satellite internet and a host of other options. Expensive options. Options that cost more than my little boat, more than my college tuition. So no, I will not be dragging this series of tubes with me across the wide empty expanses of ocean. For months at a time, this Cruise, this choice, will cut me off.

But I refuse to be invisible. Every port, I will bring updates and pictures and a hundred new little stories. Expect tales of sea turtles and visiting birds, of passing strange debris and chance encounters with other trekkers like myself. Even the daily minutia of a logbook, if anyone cares to read it.

June 7, 2014, 1325 || 0 0' 0.0" N / 147 40' 59" W || Wind WNW ~20kts Gusty swells and slight chop. Unlimited visability. || Crossing the equator at last! I threw myself a party and ate the last orange from Hilo, 1400 miles ago. I'll never complain about the weather back home again. I think I am going to melt to the deck. Saw one bird today. No clouds. Tomorrow will maybe be laundry day if the wind dies down. Kind of roaring along right now.

October 1, 2016, 0721 || 35 59' 31" N / 5 41' 22" W || Wind nonexistant, big queasy swells moving west, fog/rain, visib ~100yds || Think I saw Gibralter, but the rain closed in on me again. Everything's gray and wet. I just want to spend tonight in a hotel in Spain, but the wind may not get me there until tomorrow. One liter of fuel in the tank won't get me there. Sounding the horn every 3 minutes, no sleep. I think I'm on the edge of the shipping lane.

And those would be the exciting days.

I expect to write. All alone, with only my reflection and my boat to listen to the stories I know I can tell. I'll bring fiction ashore with me too. I expect stories about the end of the world to come as naturally as autobiographical fragments, made-up histories of everything I pass. It will all pass from my boat to the internet until I am trailing a flotsom raft of communication, a big banner of 'Listen to me! I still exist!' to wave proudly whenever I meet another human being out there in the blue.

I'm not going out there to disappear.

I'm going out there to write my way around the whole damn world.

Reader Participation
If you were following my blog while I sail around the world, what would you like to read?

• Log entries, like the ones above, full of trivial data and on-the-spot remarks?
• Narrative, memoir-style entries?
• Simply accountings of daily life at sea?
• Fictionalized, sensational narrative entries that make the months at sea much more exciting than they really are? (Zombies! Pirates! Sea monsters!)
• Just the highlights?
• Internal reflection a la Walden?
• Other, which you will expand upon in the comments?

[This entry was written for therealljidol, a livejournal-based write-off competition. Voting is up, so read everyone's entries here and vote for me your favorites!