Jean Peccoud

Former biomedical engineering professor exploring how humans make responsible decisions under irreducible uncertainty—when stakes are existential, and outcomes resist prediction.

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Logbook

Exodus

Letters from the Dock

Shrinking to Endure

A few hours after leaving Majuro for Alaska, life offshore contracts to the essentials: eat, rest, stay safe, and make it through the night.

Letters from the Edge

Ethics at the Edge of Uncertainty

When the Pope and an AI company stand together to address the ethical risks of artificial intelligence, something has shifted. Irreducible uncertainty transforms technical problems into ethical questions — and ethical questions, ultimately, are personal ones.

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Logbook

Traveling Light

Moving aboard a sailboat meant deciding what truly needed to come along. The harder question was what parts of a previous life I was still carrying.

Letters from the Dock

Adak: Video Tour

Just before leaving Opua, I filmed a tour of Adak while she was still empty and legible. The refit was finished, the interior had not yet disappeared beneath daily life, and it felt important to record the boat before we moved aboard.

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Logbook

Revisiting Vanuatu

A night watch between New Caledonia and the Marshall Islands brings back memories of a young man, a place he hadn't chosen, and a debt he has never fully settled.

Letters from the Dock

Thrown in Jail

Sailing across the South Pacific sounds like living your best life. Five days in, the season is already contracting, the invitations have been withdrawn, and the to-do list is out of control.

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Logbook

The Boat Is Great. The Sailor Miserable.

Letters from the Dock

Farewell Opua

Over 51 days in Opua, New Zealand, an entire community helped transform Rosemary from a recently purchased sailboat into an offshore-ready expedition vessel. This is a reflection on the people, craftsmanship, uncertainty, and effort behind preparing for departure into the Pacific.

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Logbook

Thresholds

Moving onto the boat means more than unpacking. It means transitioning into a different life — confined, bounded, and terrifying. People say I'm living the dream. Mostly I feel I'm living the loss.

Letters from the Dock

Moving In

Before I could plan passages, I needed to be able to plan menus.

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Logbook

The Resilience Lab

Boat work is exhausting and uncomfortable, but it reveals something deeper: resilience is not about control, it’s about learning to live with uncertainty.

Letters from the Dock

The pre-purchase survey

Yesterday, I reluctantly decided to replace Rosemary's anchor. It never came up in the survey. That decision helped me understand something I had missed at the time: interpreting a survey may be the most challenging and least understood part of buying a boat.

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Logbook

A Deep Dark Hole

Every task completed seems to create two more. At some point, the checklist stops feeling like progress—and starts feeling like the ground giving way beneath your feet.

Letters from the Edge

Attu — Where the Frontier Withdrew

A straight line north from New Zealand leads to Attu Island—the westernmost point of the United States, located in the Eastern Hemisphere. A place where geography contradicts mythology, and where the frontier quietly turned back.

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Logbook

Not Experiencing the Climate

A winter that never arrived. A snowpack collapsing below anything on record. We experience weather, not climate — until something breaks. And by then, it may already be too late.

Letters from the Dock

Invitation to Alaska

Join the Ice Frontiers for parts of the 2026 Alaska expedition — not as passengers, but as contributors to the project.

Logbook

The Calm Before The Storm

Trump said it. He was talking about something else. But the words landed differently — after Artemis, before a cyclone, standing alone on a beach at the edge of the Bay of Islands.

Letters from the Dock

The Boat is Up. The Mast Down.

On March 30th, Rosemary came out of the water at the Bay of Islands Marina. The hull was dirty, the rigging had to go, and the mast ended up below the keel. The world felt upside down — but then again, we are in New Zealand.

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Logbook

Seeds

Listening to people talk about climate—their fear, confusion, and lived experience—may be more than storytelling. It may be a way to rebuild legitimacy where institutions have stopped listening.

Letters from the Edge

The Postcard Experiment

I asked hundreds of climate scientists one simple question: what is your personal experience of climate change? The campaign statistics were strong. The silence was deafening.

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Logbook

Kerikeri — Storm — Resonances

Between a tropical storm that derailed the refit schedule and the slow work of convincing people to speak honestly about climate, this dispatch is about what it takes to keep going when the weather is hostile and the silence is louder than expected.

Letters from the Dock

I Got a Boat. It Feels Like a Mistake

Closing day on a used sailboat isn't what you'd expect. No boardroom, no keys, no instant gratification. Just a 50-page survey report, 108 items to address, a 60-day deadline to leave New Zealand.

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Logbook

Downsizing — Packing — Long Flight

The Pacific Expedition begins — not at sea, but in a storage unit. Clothes to Goodwill, a truck handed off, 170 pounds of luggage on a scale. Some departures happen before you ever leave the dock.

Letters from the Dock

How Big is The Pacific?

A 6,000-nautical-mile voyage from New Zealand barely reaches Alaska — a distance that spans Two maps reveal the true scale of the Pacific.