Sinking at a Snail’s Pace, Still a Damn Good Day

Two kids were standing near the edge of the Main Street Bridge watching me come through.

The warning signal had sounded, the bridge was opening, and the operator had timed it perfectly. I had called ahead, he was on it, and I never even needed to slow Mearr down. I just glided through the opening, waving at the kids as I passed.

I’ve always thought there was something cool about taking a boat through an opening bridge. Maybe part of that comes from having been one of those kids. I used to watch boats go through bridges and wonder where they were going. Who were those people? What kind of lives did they live?

Now I was the boat.

Some kid could be standing there wondering the same thing about me. That was humbling. It also put a tiny bit of responsibility on my shoulders. The good kind. Maybe by simply passing through on my sailboat, I was showing those kids that this kind of life exists. Once upon a time, I had been on their side of the bridge.

I had woken around 7 a.m. to an alarm at the anchorage just north of Daytona Beach. After taking three attempts to set the anchor the night before, getting it back up that morning was almost disappointingly uneventful. I was getting better at doing all of this by myself. That felt good. Something else aboard Mearr felt considerably less good.

I had found a mystery metal rod lying in the cockpit that morning. It was about a foot long, and I had absolutely no idea where it came from. It didn’t look like something that screwed onto anything. I looked around. Looked up. Nothing obvious was missing.

No one likes finding a mystery piece on their boat, because it came from somewhere.

I’d already lost an old TV antenna off Mearr once. It fell with a loud POW, hit the deck, bounced into the water, and floated away before I could retrieve it. I could actually see the damn thing floating there, which made me feel even worse because I didn’t exactly enjoy involuntarily contributing plastic to the waterways. There’s still a wire sticking out of the top of the mast to this day with nothing attached to it.

Now another piece had apparently fallen off.

What next? The anchor light?

Finding mystery hardware on someone’s boat is, incidentally, an excellent prank. Leave an old bolt on a friend’s deck, preferably something that looks like it belongs there. Just tell them before they spend hours trying to figure out where the hell it came from.

I’m not that cruel.

The mystery rod would have to remain a mystery for now. I had somewhere to go.

It was another calm day on the watery road. Small fishing boats passed occasionally, and the water was mostly easy. The boats I didn’t particularly enjoy sharing it with were the big sportfishers. Those things make a MASSIVE wake. When one of those is coming, line up for the wave or pay the consequences. I had learned that lesson.

By around 9 a.m., the automatic bilge pump went off again. The bilge was already full. I really wasn’t liking this. The amount of water getting into Mearr had been increasing over the previous few days. The pump had first gotten my attention offshore on the way into St. Augustine. Since then I’d been watching it more closely, and there was now a pattern I couldn’t ignore. At rest, the pump might come on every two or three hours. Underway, it was happening roughly every hour.

That narrowed the possibilities considerably.

There was one very obvious thing that changed when Mearr started moving: the propeller shaft started turning.

Stuffing box.

The stuffing box is where the propeller shaft passes through the hull. It’s designed to allow a controlled amount of water past the packing while the shaft turns. A drip is normal. What I eventually saw was not a drip.

I wasn’t in a good place to investigate immediately. I was moving down the ICW and couldn’t exactly crawl around inside the boat whenever I felt like it. So I pumped the bilge down and kept going, running through possibilities in my head.

Technically, Mearr was sinking. At a snail’s pace. That distinction felt important.

The bilge pump was easily keeping up, I had a spare pump aboard, and I was reasonably certain I knew what was causing it. I figured I’d tighten the stuffing box once I stopped. Worst case, I was heading to Marathon anyway, where I planned to spend a few months and could deal with it there.

I continued south past Ponce Inlet. There was an alternate route through Sheepshead Cut, but I wanted to see the inlet with my own eyes. I had heard about Ponce before and it was one I would probably use often in future travels. Part of it was reconnaissance. Mostly, I was curious. Every stretch of this trip was new to me. I was learning the coast not from a chart or somebody else’s story, but by actually moving through it.

Eventually I entered Mosquito Lagoon. The lagoon is wide, almost two miles across in places, with trees sitting far off in the distance. It looks open, but for a sailboat like Mearr it isn’t really. The surrounding water is shallow, and there’s one channel cutting through it deep enough for boats with more draft.

It was calm enough and empty enough that I finally had an opportunity to leave the helm very briefly and inspect the stuffing box while Mearr was moving.

Yep. There it was.

Water wasn’t dripping out around the shaft. It was coming through in one continuous little stream, like a faucet opened just enough to create a thin ribbon of water instead of individual drops. It wasn’t gushing into the boat, but it was considerably more than should have been there. At least I knew.

There wasn’t much I could do about it while I was on the move, so I kept going.

There’s something vulnerable about Mosquito Lagoon. Some of that is physical. You’re exposed to the weather with land off in the distance, even though you’re constrained to this narrow channel through a huge expanse of shallow water.

For me that day, though, the vulnerability was mostly internal.

I wasn’t wearing a shirt, and at some point I looked down at the horse tattoo on my chest. It honors my brother, who died in 2009.

I’ve mentioned his death before. It was traumatic, and the loss changed the direction of my life in ways that took more than a decade to fully understand. Standing there aboard Mearr, moving quietly through Mosquito Lagoon, I found myself thinking about the whole arc of it: from the moment he died, through everything that followed and all the changes I made, to eventually finding my way into mental health work.

Tears welled up.

One of the things his death eventually taught me is that we don’t need to wait until everything becomes terrible before making a change. I love the idea of helping someone pivot their track just enough that their life begins moving toward improvement instead of waiting until everything gets worse. It’s also part of what made me so passionate about suicide prevention.

Yes, sometimes my brain gets a little coachy. Professional deformation.

Then a huge sportfisher came my way with no intention of slowing down.

Great.

I watched helplessly as the wake rolled off its bow and headed straight toward me. I was trapped in the channel with nowhere useful to go, already bracing for what was coming.

Apparently, two dolphins disagreed with my assessment of the situation.

They appeared in the wake as I watched the soon-to-be chaos heading my way. They would accelerate alongside the boat, swim up the wave, and launch themselves out of the water, then circle back and do it again. And again.

I had never seen dolphins play in a boat wake like that. The wake was inconvenient for me and apparently the greatest amusement park these two had encountered all day.

I just stood there mesmerized as it all came closer.

I didn’t even reach for my phone. Normally there’s that reflex to grab it and capture something, but I knew immediately there was no way a video was going to capture what this felt like. I would spend the whole moment staring at a screen trying to get a mediocre video instead of actually experiencing what was happening right in front of me.

So I watched. The playfulness of it was enchanting, especially after where my mind had just been. If the Universe isn’t telling me something… I’m not religious, but I am spiritual. I don’t need to know exactly what something means to let it mean something to me.

I snapped out of my daze and looked at the wave, forty feet from me. Hard to port! Holy shit that wake was massive and I had to take it on the nose if I didn’t want another disaster of a mess down below. Some curse words were gracefully shared over the VHF.

The dolphins, and the hell boat, eventually disappeared and I continued south.

Later, I looked up and noticed vultures circling above Mearr. Not one or two. At least fifteen of them. There wasn’t much around me, and they stayed overhead for fifteen or twenty minutes. What exactly were they looking at? There was water everywhere. Not exactly prime vulture dining territory.

Wait. Am I the snack?

They eventually moved on, apparently deciding I wasn’t dead enough yet.

The rest of the afternoon was mostly uneventful, which suited me just fine. The bilge pump continued to cycle. Every time I heard it, I became a little more aware of the stuffing box, but I still wasn’t overwhelmed by it. The pump was doing its job, so for now I kept moving.

I had originally intended to stop around the Max Brewer Bridge in Titusville, but I still had daylight. Going another hour today meant one less hour tomorrow, and there was another reason to continue.

I had a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch on my calendar for that evening.

So I kept puttering south toward the NASA Causeway, right beside Kennedy Space Center. I found an anchorage with the launch area visible in the distance and prepared to set the hook. 

After the three-attempt circus the previous night, I wasn’t messing around this time. The anchor went down, grabbed on the first try, and I pulled hard against it with the engine to bury that fucker. I wasn’t going anywhere. I felt a little satisfaction at that. Every boat has its own quirks, and I was learning Mearr’s. I had anchored plenty on other boats without much trouble. Mearr just required me to figure out what she wanted from me.

A Rocna or Mantus that sets immediately and resets quickly when the tide changes would be lovely. Money would also be lovely. For now, my Delta was buried and Mearr wasn’t moving.

With the boat secure, it was time to deal with the stuffing box. I climbed down and looked at the two big brass nuts around the shaft. They were about two inches across and visibly corroded.

Hmm… I didn’t have the proper wrench for that.

I had tools I could clamp onto the nuts, so I tried what I had. They slipped. Nope.

The very last thing I wanted to do was damage those nuts. A leaking stuffing box was one problem. A leaking stuffing box with a stripped or mangled lock nut would be an entirely different category of problem. I fought with it a little, couldn’t get the lock ring to move, and stopped before I made anything worse. That was the first time I felt genuinely more concerned about the leak. That morning I had been somewhere between mildly irritated and concerned. I knew what the problem was and assumed tightening the gland would solve it.

Now I knew I couldn’t easily tighten it. Each time the bilge pump came on, and each time I failed to move that lock nut, a little more doubt crept in. Still, Marathon wasn’t that far away. I figured the stuffing box could wait until then.

Or so I thought.

There was nothing useful I could do about it that evening, so I went back on deck and started cleaning up. Lines got organized. Cockpit put back in order. I glanced toward the launch pad and squinted, trying to make out the rocket. It was six or seven miles away. I couldn’t really tell.

Whatever. I had binoculars.

The launch was supposed to be around 7:15, so as the time got closer I made myself a gin and tonic with a Boreal gin I had brought back from Quebec and settled onto the deck. Setzer was nearby, enjoying being outside as usual.

I picked up the binoculars and looked toward the launch pad. It looked empty. That’s weird. I was pretty sure I should be able to see a Falcon 9 sitting there. Maybe there was another launch pad? I scanned the area. Still no rocket.

I pulled out my phone and checked the SpaceX schedule. November 18. 7:12 p.m. It was almost seven. What gives? Then I happened to notice the date on my phone.

November 19.

Gaahhh!!! Nooo!!! That was YESTERDAY!

I had spent the day moving farther south specifically so I could anchor beside Kennedy Space Center, six or seven miles from the launch pad, at exactly the right time to watch and feel a Falcon 9 launch. I was at the perfect place and the perfect time, with perfect weather.

Not the perfect day.

I knew the launch was on November 18. I just somehow failed to notice that November 18 had already happened.

That sucked, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. So I put the phone down. The evening was still gorgeous. I still had a gin and tonic in my hand. Setzer was stretched out beside me on the deck of my sailboat, and we were on our way toward the Florida Keys.

There are worse things.

Once it got dark, I went below and made dinner. I don’t remember exactly what I ate, although I believe it was lamb stew I had cooked ahead of the trip and vacuum sealed into portions for easy meals underway. I had prepared a handful of meals like that before leaving because solo sailing already gave me enough to do without cooking something elaborate every night.

Whatever it was, it was delicious.

I ate in the cabin while Setzer remained outside. The hatches were cracked open, letting a light breeze move through the boat. There wasn’t much sound besides water against the hull.

Eventually I had to bring Setzer inside. He would happily stay on deck all night.

We disagreed on that.

The stuffing box was still in the back of my mind when I went to bed. Several attempts to move the lock nut had gotten me nowhere, and every cycle of the bilge pump was another reminder that water was still entering the boat. I was more worried than I had been that morning, but not overwhelmed. Marathon still felt close enough. I figured I’d get there, stop for a while, and sort it out properly.

Tomorrow’s goal was Vero Beach. It was simply the right distance south, and if I wanted to comfortably get there before dark, I needed an early start.

I set my alarm for 4 a.m. Despite everything, it had been a damn good day. I fell asleep quickly.

Author’s Note: This story took place in November 2025. It was originally shared as a short social media post and has been expanded here with the benefit of hindsight.