Letting go

Very quickly on many adventures, you realize the best you can do is to try to be prepared. You accept that you cannot control everything nor every outcome. In fact, at times, it feels like you control nothing. There is an endless list and mental litany of things to worry about. For our sailing trip to Alaska, we were operating in remote stretches of the earth with a single-engine, limited (sometimes no) connectivity, and relatively aged but maintained equipment. Early in the trip, the fear list swirled round-and-round in my head. What happens if the engine breaks? How long will we be able to start the engine if the alternator breaks? What is that noise? What if we run out of fuel? propane? What if we go aground? What if the anchor gets stuck on the bottom? What if the black-water tank is overfull? What if we run out of water? ... and the list went on. I almost worried myself sick early in the trip as I thought of more and more things that could go wrong. But, then, a magical thing happened. I started going through the list of "what ifs" and answering them. Thinking about and somewhat planning what I would do. Sometimes, it wasn't perfect and the outcome may not be great, but the questions started to feel less scary. After a few minutes of planning, I could let the "what if" go.

I remember a distinct conversation with my Dad during about week 5 of the trip. "What if we run out of fuel"? Our fuel gauge was unreliable (aka it really just didn't work). In fact, there were few to no tank level indicators on the boat, which was a whole other painful problem. Due to extreme heat and weather, we decided not to travel up the routine Inside Passage route (through Grenville Channel) in order to head further along the outside and hope for more wind and relief from the damp heat. What we hadn't really thought about was the timing and fuel usage if wind didn't materialize at all. It ended up that there was a lot of motoring during this part of the trip - in fact, motoring against wind and heavy currents. We tried to time the tides to have the assistance of the current, but due to prevailing patterns we were often beating into the current. This slowed progress and increased fuel consumption. By about day 8, we were nervous. We had previously agreed to using a ratio of 1.25 gallons of fuel usage per engine hour... and by those standards, we had already used about 75 gallons of a 97 gallon tank. This ratcheted up nerves and stress on-board; we were now all calculating and re-calculating fuel consumption. We'd use a range to calculate the consumption; minimize usage of other systems on board that used fuel, and really just hope for the best.

Finally, during a heated debate about the ratio we should really use, my dad just said "ok, enough. What's the worst that happens? WE JUST SAIL". I had a million "...but", "what ifs...", etc... but the simplicity of the answer and the confidence we had built in our sailing and boat gave me a level of ease that I could handle. It wasn't complicated. We might not be able to go in the right direction, but we could work together to sail and get ourselves to a safe place. Further, if there was no wind, we could push the boat to an anchor point with Snowy (our little dinghy) if we couldn't sail in / out.

This is one example. There were so many similar questions and, sometimes, not so simple answers. However, accepting what might be and running through some potential game plans eased my mind and stopped the mental spinning. I finally learned or just accepted that sometimes in life, you have to just let go of expectation and control. I gradually accepted that I could embrace uncertainty, adapt, and find a way forward.

In this example, the good news was that we didn't run out of fuel before arriving in Ketchikan. We did, however, fill up with about 90 gals of fuel... 😮‍💨 ... we had just made it.