Wintertime Blues Brings Harsh Truths

I’m looking at a lot of goal-achieving and dream-building materials and videos and one of the stories of the people was talking about getting stuck in something that wasn’t what they wanted. The part that hit me was this “at the end of each year we found excuses to stay.”

I feel like we have been doing this since summer 2014. We should have been sailing on the river that whole summer and we had enough time to get everything done. We may have needed help from time to time, but to be brutally honest, it should have gotten done then so that we could set sail in 2015.

But we didn’t do that. I was a complete no boat experience having novice so I didn’t know what I didn’t know – meaning I had no clue of the totality of my own ignorance to even have an idea of what could be done and how. We didn’t hit the ground running and even when we got a better boat we didn’t just sail the new boat for a while before moving onto it (hindsight being 20/20).

So at the end of summer 2014, I decided to take seamanship courses at the community college so that I could learn about chart navigation and get some time on the river even if it was on a power boat. In order to get financial aid, I had to sign up for a certification program which put us out another year. Which at the time seemed reasonable because we needed the summer months for prep. An honest assessment of our skills meant that the likelihood of pushing it out in one month in the spring was highly unlikely. It was a bummer, but it gave us time to get things done… right?

Not so much. Summer of 2015 came and went without any sailing time and only one motor from the slip at all. We only have ourselves to blame. Even with my school and work, we still could have gone out more. Plus we STILL didn’t even tackle any of the tasks on our list of things we have to do before we can leave. BOOOOO!

School ended for me in April of 2016 and the PLAN was to haul out and GIT-ER-DONE… Um… not so much. We didn’t have enough money to haul out since we had to dip into the savings for car expenses. I figured we could still get most of the stuff done and the only thing we REALLY needed to haul out for is the bottom work and the through-hull fittings. Get ready for a BIG PUSH of work! Aaaaaaand GO! … Still nope.

We are championship level procrastinators, apparently. Summer 2016 passed much as the prior two summers did – with near total inactivity on our part. It’s true some of the projects we were waiting for help from someone more skilled, but I think we should have still gotten SOMETHING done instead of nothing. I have to admit that I have been beating myself up about it quite a bit since summer ended.

I keep trying to comfort myself with the fact that other people who are much more skilled at this kind of thing have had the same plan for the same amount of time and they haven’t set sail either. It’s only a small comfort, though.

Now it’s 2017… plans are to start doing the list(s) once weather permits and when we have everything done that we can do on the water, then we will haul out and do the bottom. Really hoping this goes as planned this time! Wish us luck! ^_^

Thanks for reading!
~ Niccolea