Life tied up at the dock

My sister Kim has been living on a boat by herself in Gibson, British Columbia, for fourteen years now. She has worked as a web designer the whole time. Other than the occasional trouble with internet connectivity, her life tied up at the dock is enviable. To stay anchored in the safety of the harbour, then have the freedom to toss the deck lines at any moment and sail through the islands and along the coast, who wouldn’t want to live like that?

There were a few times during the year I took a sabbatical to sail from Scotland to Grenada when I stayed on board Tiempo for weeks or even months on my own. Sometimes the boat was waiting for Dave and a new crew to arrive for the next stage of the voyage. Then there were the two and a half months I spent waiting out the hurricane season in Puerto Mogan in Gran Canaria. Being tied up at the dock is a whole lifestyle in itself.

The joy for me was being as much on my own as I liked. Below deck, it felt a bit like living in one of those forts I built as a child. Even on deck or sitting in the cockpit reading, the occasional nod or hello from someone passing by hardly disturbed my sense of solitude.

If I did want some company, sailors were generally a very friendly lot. Knowing this, I could always decide how neighbourly I wanted my days to be.

Then there were the people who worked at the marina, a hodgepodge group of locals. They became a trusted source of information about the community I was loosely part of for as long as I was there. They gave me the name of a decent mechanic (high praise), told me where to find a new set of washers for the balky bilge pump, or invited me to a community event on Saturday evening at the firehouse. If I stayed in one place long enough, it was quite something how some would give me The Nod when I passed them on the street, a small gesture of belonging that always felt surprisingly moving.

For me, living on a boat in a marina was always a way to keep life temporary. I liked knowing we could leave whenever we wished. This sense of impermanence heightened, rather than lessened, the pleasure of whiling away time while tied up at the dock.

My sister, who’s spent years tied up at the same dock, sees it differently. She finds comfort in returning to the same slip, greeting familiar faces, building a kind of permanence I never reached. Maybe that’s the gift of living this kind of life: it lets each of us find what we most need, whether that’s the ease of leaving or the joy of staying put.