Holy Shit, This Is My Life Now

Act Ⅵ: Owning Who I Am

The first morning in Brunswick felt surreal. I had actually left. There was no turning back.

At the same time, it felt a little like I was on vacation. To be honest, most days it still does.

I made myself coffee and sat looking through the windows at the boats around me. Some mornings I sat outside, but Georgia summer was beginning to show its face, along with the humidity, so the air conditioning frequently won.

Serendipity, a Lagoon 440 catamaran, was spacious. Much bigger than whatever boat I imagined eventually buying for myself. The main salon was surrounded by windows, giving me a 360-degree view of the marina while I worked.

I was still working full time. My job was remote, which was the only reason any of this was possible. Coaching people all day can be mentally and emotionally taxing, but there was something incredibly serene about doing it from a sailboat.

Coffee, boats outside the windows, water moving gently around the dock. Not a bad office.

I didn’t know how long I’d be living aboard Serendipity, but as long as I was there, I was going to treat her like my own. Apparently, that meant deep-cleaning the entire boat.

Over the next few weeks, I worked my way through everything. Cabinets, corners, and cubbies. Serendipity had been used and moved around plenty, but she hadn’t exactly had the benefit of someone obsessively deep-cleaning every inch of her.

I cooked most of my meals aboard too. I’d been a chef for twenty years. Of course I was going to cook. Also, restaurants cost money.

For showers, I used the yacht club. Most of the time, I used the bathroom there too. Serendipity was in the closest slip to the building.

I had no excuse.

During the workday, I’d sometimes take a break and wander over to the clubhouse. There was a puzzle table beside the laundry room, and usually somebody would either already be sitting there or pass through while I was working on it. We’d talk for a few minutes about nothing particularly important. It was just easy, laid-back human contact in the middle of the day.

Most evenings, I’d end up at happy hour. I was still pretty shy at the time, but I was trying hard to challenge that part of myself. If I saw someone I didn’t know, I’d make myself talk to them. Slowly, I learned people’s names.

Then people started walking up to me already knowing mine.

That was when I realized I wasn’t just staying at the marina anymore. I was becoming part of it.

There were people I connected with more deeply. Mike and Jen, Wendy and Christopher, Natasha and Josh, Gina, and many others. Sometimes you just vibe. It’s a feeling thing, and I’ve learned that I experience a lot of life that way. 

Happy hours turned into late nights more often than they probably should have. There were marina events, conversations about boat projects, and endless opportunities to learn from people who had already broken whatever I was currently trying not to break. I’d help where I could.

Sometimes you’d stop someone walking down the dock to ask a quick question and suddenly realize you’d been standing there talking for forty-five minutes.

That’s marina life.

I connect deeply with some people, and I grieve when they leave. This happens again and again in this life, and it’s worth every moment of it. We’re a floating community scattered across the world.

Every evening, I’d look out at the sunset and think:

Holy shit. This is my life right now.

The sunsets in the Golden Isles are some of the best I’ve seen anywhere. It’s not called the Golden Isles for nothing.

I was also slowly learning that living on a boat meant taking responsibility for things I didn’t completely understand yet.

At one point, Serendipity developed an issue with a bilge pump.

Nothing critical yet. I let Captain Dave know what was happening, but before asking anyone to fix it, I wanted to see if I could figure it out myself.

So I started investigating, and I figured it out. Not only did I solve the problem, I understood what had happened well enough to explain it to Captain Dave afterward. It turned out he’d replaced that particular type of pump several times over the years when some of them probably weren’t broken at all.

I was ridiculously proud of myself. I was starting to trust that maybe I really could learn how to take care of one of these things. There was movement up that steep learning curve.

Then hurricane season decided I was getting too comfortable.

I already had plane tickets booked to Northern California over Labor Day weekend. I was going to a men’s retreat, another place to continue the work I’d been doing on myself.

At roughly the same time, Hurricane Idalia was heading toward our area.

Perfect…

Captain Dave gave me instructions for preparing Serendipity.

Because what the hell did I know about hurricane preparation? I grew up in fucking Quebec, Canada.

The dock lines got doubles and I removed anything that could catch the wind. I strapped down the sails and made sure nothing was loose on deck.

Then I stared at the forecast wondering whether I should leave at all. I felt responsible for the boat. Part of me thought I should stay. Captain Dave disagreed. He told me insurance could replace a boat. It couldn’t replace a life.

So I reluctantly left.

I made it to the airport without flooding stopping me, but air travel was chaotic. Flights were being moved and rerouted while the storm worked its way through the Southeast. Within about an hour, I’d been shuffled around several times.

Eventually, I flew to Miami, then Austin, and after a terrible night sleeping on an airport floor, California the following day. They were literally flying around the hurricane, and the entire time I was watching Brunswick.

Of course I was.

People at the marina were posting videos of wind ripping across the water, waves pushing against the docks, and dock rods being pulled from where they belonged. One dock even had to be evacuated.

There wasn’t catastrophic damage across the marina, but watching it from the other side of the country was terrifying. A massive yacht called Sunday Money was badly gouged along the side.

I worried about Serendipity and I worried about my friends. In all honesty, I felt like a coward for leaving. They were there and I wasn’t. I knew what Captain Dave had said, and I still felt guilty.

While I was in California, Captain Dave made it down to check on Serendipity himself. She was okay. One of the dock rods had worked its way loose and ended up about six inches from the side of the hull.

Six inches.

A little farther and Serendipity could have been gouged too. I felt enormous relief when I found out she was safe.

Dave also left me a bottle of bourbon-barrel-aged honey from Detroit aboard the boat. He was happy with how I’d taken care of Serendipity and wanted to leave me something, even while I was still beating myself up for not being there. 

It was my first time on the West Coast. It was beautiful, and the weather was perfect, because apparently that’s just what California does.

The retreat took place in the mountains around Bell Valley near Boonville. After the chaos of getting there, being surrounded by that landscape helped ground me and reconnect with why I had come in the first place.

The weekend was intense. Everyone there had their own experience with it, and a lot of what we did was intentionally uncomfortable. My trip to North Carolina had taught me something about practical discomfort: going somewhere alone, doing unfamiliar things, and not knowing exactly how something would turn out.

This was different. The discomfort was intentional, and it was about facing parts of myself I might normally avoid.

We also spent time working in the forest. We learned about traditional Indigenous ways of caring for the land, and how some of those practices were being used again on the property to restore balance. Recognizing what a healthy forest looks like and when it isn’t doing well was new to me. The area we were working in wasn’t doing great.

We cut pine trees by hand, stripped them, and laid them along the forest floor to feed the earth and reduce erosion. We worked around the oaks, protecting the younger trees and trying to recreate more balance between the trees and everything living among them.

There was something about doing all that physical work in the forest while also doing a very different kind of work on myself.

It felt like I’d dug a hole inside myself and planted a big seed. That seed was confidence. It was there, but it still had a lot of growing to do. Owning who I was was how I watered it. Being open, being kind and non-judgmental toward myself and others, leaning into authenticity, and continuing to put myself in situations that challenged me would help it grow.

Everything in my life was changing, but that didn’t mean I’d suddenly become some perfectly confident new version of myself. The seed was there. It still needed water.

Somewhere during that weekend, much of the guilt I’d been carrying about leaving Brunswick began to loosen. It didn’t disappear. It just loosened.

I took what may still be the best picture I’ve ever taken with a phone while I was there, a huge sky stretching over the valley. It felt quiet and open.

I don’t actually remember coming back to Brunswick. Funny how memory works. I remember leaving during a hurricane. Bell Valley is what I carried away from it. I just don’t really remember the trip back.

What came afterward is much clearer.

That October, Brunswick Landing held its first Cruisers’ Challenge. The format was a little clunky that first year, and we learned a lot from it. It has gotten much better since. I was there for the first one, and I’ve participated in every single Cruisers’ Challenge since. 

There were puzzles, timed challenges, axe throwing, lemonade making, ring tossing on a buoy, a ride on a fan boat, and golf balls we had to chip on the beach. For the record, chipping a golf ball off a beach is worse than hitting out of a sand trap.

Afterward came the celebration dinner and my first proper oyster roast. I’d eaten plenty of oysters before. Raw. Fried. Rockefeller. This was different. Hot oysters were dumped onto long tables and everyone crowded around grabbing them, prying them open, adding whatever sauce or lemon they wanted and sending them down the hatch. There was a hole in the center of the table where we threw the empty shells.

People still had medals hanging around their necks from the day’s competition. Michael Torras, one of the marina’s owners, was cooking the oysters, something he genuinely loved doing. Whenever he pulled out a fresh batch, everyone would rush for a spot at one of the two tables. If you were slow, you might have to playfully elbow your way in.

Everyone was eating, laughing, and talking over one another. The food was great, with a bunch of potluck sides. What stayed with me most was the community.

For a while, life aboard Serendipity had started feeling almost normal. Then Captain Dave called. He was planning to sell the boat.

My heart dropped. I knew this had always been temporary. The whole point was eventually to buy my own boat, not live indefinitely on someone else’s. Knowing that didn’t make it any easier. Serendipity had become home.

I helped Dave get her ready to show. Luckily, I’d already deep-cleaned the entire boat a couple of months earlier, so most of what remained was surface maintenance. I expected the process to take some time.

It didn’t.

Within days, he had an accepted offer. Suddenly, temporary had an expiration date. I reached out to the community and asked whether anyone had somewhere I could stay while I figured out what came next.

The owners of Lulu offered me a room aboard their boat. I stayed there for roughly a month. They were aboard for part of it and away for part of it. While they were gone, I cleaned the outside of the boat so they’d come back to it looking spotless.

I even wiped the window above the galley sink because I knew how much she hated seeing dried water spots on it. Attention to detail is a curse.

While I was staying on Lulu, another boat came into the marina. Although calling it another boat feels like an understatement. It was a 137-foot, three-masted wooden tall ship called Denis Sullivan.

I’d heard through the marina grapevine that they didn’t currently have a chef aboard. The crew was young and working hard, and they were preparing to head south toward St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands.

Something in me said I should cook for them. So I found the captain and offered. He looked skeptical at first, and I don’t blame him. Some random guy from the marina had just walked up and volunteered to make dinner for more than twenty people aboard his ship. Eventually he realized I wasn’t kidding and took me up on it.

I barely told anyone about this afterward. I wasn’t doing it for praise. This was about the crew, a challenge to myself, and have fun using the skills I’d built over twenty years. That was it.

I stepped into their galley for the first time about fifteen minutes before I needed to start thinking like a chef again.

Go Go Gadget chef mode!

The galley was surprisingly small for such a large ship, and the oven was terrible. Obviously. A pirate galley always has a shitty oven. It’s how it works.

I fought it and won.

I put together a Mediterranean-inspired dinner with six or seven different things: souvlaki-style chicken, tzatziki, marinated mushrooms, chickpea stew, grilled vegetables, and whatever else my brain managed to produce that evening. Another boater helped me grill some of the chicken and veggies on the dock.

While I was cooking, I also cleaned up the galley and consolidated the multiple open jars of identical spices, because apparently I cannot enter a kitchen without reorganizing something.

By the time we were done, there was great food everywhere.

The crew treated dinner like a special occasion and put on the best clothes they had aboard. The captain was there with his wife, and the vice president of the World Ocean School happened to be visiting too. Everyone sat down wherever they could find a spot on the deck.

I felt proud and satisfied, and also a little humbled by how much the evening seemed to mean to them. At some point, the vice president told me he’d never seen the galley that clean and organized.

After dinner, they invited me to join them for a beer. They smiled and laughed, and people kept coming over excited to tell me what they’d liked. I sat there with everyone, feeling completely welcome. 

For twenty years, being a chef had been my job. That night, it wasn’t. It was simply something I knew how to do and something I could offer and didn’t need anything back from it. I was starting to understand what it meant to own who I was. I was listening to my heart and doing something because it felt right.

Unfortunately, listening to my heart did not solve my housing situation. My arrangement at the marina had drifted into a gray area as one temporary living situation became another. Michael eventually came to talk with me. He had a marina to manage and rules he had to work within. I understood that. I asked how much time he could give me to figure something out. He was gracious about not rushing me, and I didn’t want to abuse that.

I started figuring out where the hell I was going next.

Luckily, I already had plans to spend Thanksgiving with my friends John and Kym in Tallahassee and called them and explained what was happening. They told me to come about two weeks early. I was incredibly grateful.

I also hated it.

First Serendipity, then Lulu, and now somebody else’s house. Temporary place after temporary place after temporary place. I’d come all this way searching for freedom, and I still didn’t have a boat that was actually mine.

So once again, I packed the car.

Only this time, everything fit without needing to sort.

That part was easy. The harder part was driving away from Brunswick. I’d arrived there knowing almost nobody. Now I was leaving people I loved.

Once again, I had no idea exactly what came next.