As afternoon approaches, the boat, the kitty cat, and myself, have usually finished the days boaty requirements for life afloat. I’ve cleaned, checked and maintained things, the boat is still floating on the water, and the kitty?…well, he shit in a box, then slept on my pillow.
A Memory Of His Brother
I’ve done the necessary jobs—checked the anchor, cleaned the galley, written a few paragraphs that I won’t be happy with later—and the day’s temperature is cooling off for the night. This is usually when I declare it officially Bath O’Clock.
My bathing setup is a modest affair, something my dear mother calls “A Budgie Bath”, (like a small bird dipping and fluttering in a puddle of water): one bucket, one pot, and a vague belief in personal hygiene. The pot is put on to boil with heart felt anticipation, because hot water aboard a boat should never taken lightly. While it heats, I stand around playing some idiot game on the iPhone like Tetris. Eventually those lovely bubbles arrive, I fail at reaching the next level, and heated vapor wafts around the galley. Boiling water gets poured into the bucket of cold reaching that perfect temperature best described as “civilized but not indulgent.” A ratio of two parts cold and one boiling seems to work fairly often.
It Works For Birds
There is something wonderfully humbling about bathing with a bucket. No taps. No endless supply. No illusion that you can just stand there lost in thought while gallons of piped and heated water cascade endlessly down your back. Every dip of the cup is intentional. Every splash is accounted for. This is hygiene with a budget, and it keeps one honest, especially when it’s cold up on deck.
I start at the top, and with filled hands splash on my face and neck. The first hit of hot water always feels good, summer or winter. The brain gets a hit of happy, and the world is all good. Even though this wash down will be short lived it is, in fact, very good for the soul. Salt, sweat, and the general stickiness of the day gets instantly diluted and sluiced away.
After my face and neck is done, the most important is the main stank generators; BBP – Bum-Balls-Pits. Get these rinsed out well, and the rest is pure indulgence.
Washing like this has an old world feel to it. I can imagine hearing a ship’s bell or anticipating my daily rum ration. There’s a rhythm to it: scoop, pour, scrub, repeat. It’s not rushed, but it’s not languid either. You don’t linger when you know the hot water is finite, especially when the air is cold. You focus, get it done, get dried off before the chill sets in.
Probably Not This Enjoyable
If I take too long, by the time I reach my feet, the water is cooling off, and so am I, especially if the sun is getting close to the horizon. Luckily, with the boat at anchor, it always falls nose into the wind and I get a little breeze protection from the front covers. I then tip the remaining water over myself in one final, decisive act and that’s that. Clean enough. Human again.
No soap. We haven’t used soap in basic showering for twenty years or more. Soaps strip away the skin’s natural oil supply, which is what we’re biologically designed to have for healthy skin. Hot water opens pores and washes away excessive sweat buildup without leaving behind any artificial odorants. Surely the stink-pretty chemicals can’t be good for you.
What always surprises me is how satisfying this little event is. This simple, slightly awkward ritual marks the end of my typical day more clearly than any clock ever could. It draws a line between effort and rest, even if I’ve done nothing all day.
Clean and Snuggled
Afterwards, I cook my nightly meal, then sometimes hang in the hammock to enjoy the moment or stretch out on my bed to watch a movie, freshly rinsed, wearing clothes that feel inexplicably luxurious simply because I’m clean inside them.
There is no mirror involved in this process, and I think that’s for the best. This bath isn’t about appearances. It’s about feeling vaguely respectable while drifting around floating through life. And almost every afternoon, with my bucket of hot water, I manage it just fine.
When I first moved on board Curious, I was fairly certain I knew what I was doing.
Pretending Competency
Not in a competent sense—there was never any real danger of that—but in a conceptual one. I believed I was embarking on a sailing journey. A boat, nautical charts, weather, and maybe a bit of hardship, things that could be summarized neatly for other people later. Sailing, by its nature is very good that way, it gives shape to a story. It implies progress, direction, and intention. Something I’ve been missing for a very long time.
It turns out sailing has shown itself to simply be the delivery system. A way of changing the backyard scenery when the time felt right.
The Mirror
I didn’t realize this at first, because the initially the days supported those assumptions. Journeys to be plotted, to-do lists that demand attention. There is gear that must be bought or replaced, or even fixed, then replaced again. There are routes to be plotted, then balanced against weather. All of this feels like you’re doing something, and it’s all very reassuring.
You can tell people you’re “out cruising,” which sounds purposeful and romantic , even if you’ve only gone ten miles and anchored up in a bay that you’ve been to dozens of times before and know like the back of your hand.
In the beginning, live aboard, full time sailing does what all new projects do: it keeps you busy enough that you don’t ask inconvenient questions.
Those questions arrive later.
They tend to show up once boat-life is no longer novel, once the basic mechanics of daily life have settled into known, predictable, sequences and processes. And once you’ve spent enough time staring at the same piece of water that it stops feeling like scenery and starts feeling like manicured back yard.
Coming Home
That’s when I started to realize that this was never really about sailing at all.
Sailing, as it turns out, occupies very little of the time.
I don’t mean this metaphorically. I mean it in a very literal way. The actual act of moving the boat under sail; adjusting sheets, tweaking sail shape, enjoying the sense of free movement. It makes up a surprisingly small percentage of life aboard. Most days don’t involve sailing. Most time is spent at anchor. Waiting. Fixing things that were fine yesterday. Making small decisions that feel unimportant in the moment but somehow determine the shape of the entire day.
If this were truly a journey all about sailing, I would be sailing much, much more.
Instead, I spend an unreasonable amount of time with the boat dancing on the anchor, doing nothing in particular, and thinking thoughts that have no obvious connection to boats.
Living in a Dream
At first, I assumed this new reality was a temporary thing. A lull. The calm before the next leg, a new destination, the next chapter where something would happen. Sailing culture certainly encourages this belief. There’s always an implied horizon, even when no one is quite sure what’s on the other side of it. I suppose the mystery is a huge part of attraction and romance.
However, the longer I stayed out here, the harder it became to pretend that the actual sailing was the point.
The sailing is more like the excuse, a means to an end.
It’s the socially acceptable wrapper for a way of living that would otherwise be difficult to explain. “I live on a boat” is a complete sentence. It satisfies curiosity, and generates dreams. It prevents follow-up questions, most imaginations explain the why. It implies competence, even if that implication is wildly optimistic.
What it doesn’t explain is why I’m perfectly content to sit at anchor for days, even weeks, just watching the sun rise and set, watch the creatures of this world do creaturely things, and nothing else.
Different Anchorage, Same Delight
Or why I’ve stopped comparing time to distance traveled.
Or why the moments that stay with me have nothing to do with wind direction or boat speed.
Somewhere along the way, the journey has quietly changed character.
I honestly didn’t notice when it happened. There was no announcement. No dramatic moment where I realized everything I thought I was doing was counter to the original dream. It was more like discovering that the background noise I had been tuning out was actually the main story.
The boat stopped being the subject and became the condition.
And once I realized this, the questions changed.
Instead of asking where I was going next, I realized I felt no urgency about going anywhere at all. Instead of worrying about whether I was “making progress,” I began wondering why physical progress was a defining attribute.
This is an uncomfortable shift for me, because a sailing journey comes with built-in validation. You’re doing something, going somewhere. You can mark it out on a chart. You can summarize it in a way that sounds active and adventurous.
This quieter, internal journey offers no such evidence.
No one claps because you stayed put and thought about something, or nothing, for three days. There’s no logbook entry for realizing that you don’t actually want the original dream. No nautical term, that I’m aware of, for spending an afternoon doing nothing and finding it completely okay.
Apparently, Nothing is Just Fine
If anything, this kind of journey can look suspicious from the outside.
It can resemble indecision. Or laziness. Or failure to “make the most” of an opportunity. Sailing is supposed to be dynamic. Romantic. Full of sunsets and motion and meaningful hardship. There’s a script for this, and nearly all who read it, and are not actually living it, believe it.
But real life aboard is mostly quiet, and that quiet has a way of dismantling those scripts.
When you remove the constant input of life on land—errands, obligations, casual social noise—you’re left with a lot of unstructured mental space and time. That void doesn’t automatically fill itself with wisdom, or clarity.
Sometimes it just gets filled with boredom. Sometimes with mildly troubling questions. Sometimes with nothing at all.
And, if you give it long enough, it reveals that the journey you thought you were on was misnamed.
This isn’t just a ‘Sailing Journey’.
It’s a journey of tolerance for stillness and extended time.
Beyond The Dreaming
Of discovering how much activity, and input, you actually need.
Of finding out what remains when you remove the pressure to optimize every moment; in thought, or action.
I didn’t set out to learn any of this. I certainly didn’t plan to write about it. If I had been more honest with myself at the beginning, I might have admitted that I just wanted a different set of problems. Preferably ones that involved wind and water instead of whatever was waiting for me on shore.
Sailing was supposed to be the solution.
Instead, it turned out to be a very effective mirror.
A simple boat has an irritating habit of reflecting things back at you. Not dramatically. Not in a self-help way. Just quietly, over time. You notice how you react to inconvenience. How you deal with uncertainty. How you fill—or avoid—long stretches of unclaimed time.
You also notice how little you actually need to be moving to feel alive.
This realization doesn’t arrive as an epiphany. It creeps in slowly, like a tide creeping over the sand flats. One day you realize you haven’t checked what day of the week it is, because it doesn’t matter. Another day you realize you’re more interested in the quality of your mornings than the distance you covered last week.
A Great Place To Hang
Eventually, you realize that the next anchorage will be not meaningfully different from the current one. The change of scenery will be welcoming different, but essence of the moment remains the same.
That’s when, for me, the idea of a sailing journey really took on a different personality.
Because journeys, as we tend to define them, require specific destinations. Or at least milestones. Some sense that the movement itself is the story. But when movement becomes optional, the narrative evolves.
What’s left is not a journey in the traditional sense, but a way of inhabiting time. Reading over this while editing, I realize it sounds a bit wanky, but it makes sense at the time.
Living aboard has taught me that most of life happens in the margins—between plans, between movements, between the things we are trying to achieve.
The Days Get Lost
To be perfectly candid, this wasn’t what I signed up for.
I was looking for wind and water and romantic inconvenience. I signed up for the idea that movement would carry meaning with it, the way it does in books and stories and other people’s carefully edited lives.
What I got instead was slower, less intense. Not easily summarized, nor productive or particularly impressive.
But it does feel accurate.
Accurate to the pace at which things actually changed.
Accurate to the way understanding tends to arrive—not in breakthroughs, but in small, unremarkable adjustments. Accurate to the realization that you can live quite fully without going very far at all.
So no, this isn’t a sailing journey.
Of course the sailing happens. It keeps the boat from becoming a very small, floating house permanently stuck in one place.
But it’s not the main point.
The point, if there is one, seems to be learning how to stay—physically, mentally, attentively—without immediately reaching for the next thing. To let days just do their thing and slowly pass by. To accept that not everything needs to turn into a story with a clean arc.
Of course I still sail. There’s an undeniable joy to it. But I’m also just as happy to motor somewhere. Simply moving around and living on the water.
But I no longer mistake that motion for meaning.
The Golden Hours
What this journey has shown me so far, is that a lot of the fondest memories have happened mostly while the anchor is down.
And that’s taken me much farther than sailing ever has.
After around two years of living aboard my James Wharram Design – Tangaroa 35, I’ve come to a couple of realizations.
A Fun Lifestyle ~ For Warm Climates
Not revelations exactly—nothing dramatic or lightning-bolt in nature—just the slow, inevitable kind that sneak up on you when you’ve spent enough time with a thing that also happens to be your house. Kind of like when you’ve been sitting around the fire drinking with a mate for a few hours…then get up to take a leak and find yourself with a little stagger. It’s comes as bit of a surprise.
The first realization is fairly obvious: I genuinely love this design concept. I love the simplicity of these boats, their honesty. I’ve spent many years of my life teaching sea kayaking, canoeing, and general outdoor education. During this time I either lived out of my off-road van, or out of a backpack, or dry bags and canoeing drums. I always dreamed that the next logical step was to live on a Wharram catamaran, which in a true sense, is like living in two really, really big canoes.
These early, classic designs feel less like consumer products and more like tools. They’re basic in the truest sense of the word—unpretentious, functional, and, especially the early designs, they’re built like tanks. There’s nothing fragile about them, nothing fussy. They feel like boats that expect to be used, not living in a marina, but be parked next to empty beaches.
In Its Proper Environment
The second realization took longer to articulate, but it’s probably the more important one. These boats are extremely lifestyle-specific.
Now, what I mean by that is this: in most modern catamaran designs, a 35-foot boat is reasonably big. You can live on it comfortably. You get a proper salon, a protected center deck, a table you can gather around with five or six people, and a space that functions as a real interior room. You can enclose your world when the weather turns cold, wet, or miserable for days at a time—and when you live on board, that matters.
The Wharram designs in the 30–35 foot range, like all of James Wharram’s boats, are fundamentally different animals. They are not built to live inside. They are built to live upstairs, on deck, enjoying being a part of the environment.
Shade From the Hot Sun, and a Cold Beer
They’re elemental boats. Outdoor boats. Boats that assume you’ll be on deck, in the wind, in the sun, in the salt, in the rain squalls, in the weather itself. Their natural habitat is warm climates, trade winds, and tropical rain showers. They utilize temporary tarps for rain protection, sun shade, and still allow airflow—not sealed cabins and climate-controlled interiors. The lifestyle they imply is more beach than marina, more barefoot than boat shoes, more tarps and canvas than fiberglass furniture.
Some of these smaller Wharram owners have fitted deck pods midship between the hulls, and by all accounts, many of them are very happy with the results. A well-designed pod absolutely changes the livability of these boats.
Aqua Tangaroa with a Good Looking Pod
But this is where things get delicate.
It doesn’t take much to ruin the visual balance of a Wharram. A pod that’s a little too tall, a little too square, a little too boxy—and suddenly you’ve got what looks like a shed bolted into the middle of a boat. Proportion matters. Profile matters. Windage, matters. One of the core design principles James and Hanneke always worked to preserve was low windage profile and open decks, and it’s surprisingly easy to destroy that with good intentions and bad geometry.
Helm Station Hard Top
On my own boat, I went a more conservative route. I built a helm station hardtop that covers roughly a 6’ x 8’ area between beams three and four. From the side profile, it doesn’t really change the look of the boat much at all, but functionally it’s been a gift. It gives constant shade in summer, which, with high summer humidity and heat here on the gulf coast, is not a luxury—it’s survival equipment. And I can attach canvas and clear panels around the edges for a little wind and rain protection when needed.
Not a Complete Enclosure
What it does not provide, however, is true enclosure.
When it’s genuinely cold here from Arctic fronts that roll south through winter—when temperatures hover not far above freezing for days on end—it doesn’t create a space you can live in. It helps. It improves conditions. But it doesn’t give you a warm room. It doesn’t give you a communal refuge. It doesn’t create that psychological sense of “inside” when the world outside is unpleasant.
And that brings me to the real point of all this.
If I were starting again from scratch, knowing what I know now, I would almost certainly be living on a Wharram design in the 40 to 55 foot range.
In fact, I find myself actively daydreaming about it—about finding another rebuild project in that size class and starting over again.
Every boat I’ve visited in that size range share the same revelation: that extra length changes everything. It’s not incremental—it’s transformational. That additional length creates a massive increase in usable internal volume down in the hulls. Storage, living space, systems space, breathing room. And more importantly, it allows for a genuinely livable midship pod between the hulls that still maintains a low profile, clean lines, and sensibly low enough windage.
You can create a protected communal space without turning the boat into a floating apartment block.
And that space matters more to me now than it used to—especially under way. A protected area where other people can exist comfortably while sailing, not just endure the passage. A place to sit, read, talk, cook, and be human while the boat is moving through the world.
The other realization is more philosophical than practical.
I’ve come to see the 30–35 foot Wharrams as oversized beach cats.
A Really Big Beach Cat
That’s not criticism—it’s admiration.
They’re essentially Hobie cats that grew up, went offshore, and learned how to carry a kitchen, a bed, and a pantry. You get all the fun, lightness, and simplicity of a beach cat, but with the luxury of sleeping in a real bed, cooking in a wraparound galley, and storing enough gear, books, tools, and projects to keep yourself occupied indefinitely.
They are brilliant at what they are.
But what they are is a lifestyle choice.
And my lifestyle has quietly evolved.
I still love the simplicity. I still love the elemental nature of the design. I still love living with less, moving lightly, and keeping systems simple. But I’ve also come to realize the value of protected space, communal warmth, and the ability to hang out up on deck comfortably with friends when the weather is cold, nasty shite, rather than romantically inconvenient.
So yes—if I were starting again, I’d go bigger. Not for luxury. Not for status. Not for comfort in the conventional sense.
Islander 55 ~ Tiaré
But for livability.
For proportion.
The practicality of that extra length turns an outdoor life into a more balanced one—where you can still live in the elements, by choice, but you’re no longer owned by them.
Journey Island Style 