> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://icefrontiers.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Going off trail - URL: https://icefrontiers.com/going-off-trail/ - Published: 2026-09-25T05:02:40.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-06T21:48:21.000Z - Description: On a mountain above Dutch Harbor, I realized I had lost the trail. I had spent months doing the same thing with my sailboat, looking for a way to build a business around it without operating it commercially. There wasn't one. On the unexpected relief of accepting a problem with no solution. - Author: Jean Peccoud - Tags: Letters from the Edge In July, I hiked Mount Ballyhoo, a beautiful pyramid standing over the Dutch Harbor airport. The geometry is simple. It's covered with tundra, and the trail to the top is legible from anywhere in town. Going up was easy. Going down was a different story. The trail was harder to read. It crossed patches without vegetation, where there was little contrast between the path and the ground around it. And it didn't go straight down. It wandered to avoid the steeper slopes before eventually connecting with a road. I did not pay much attention when I started the descent. I followed the track that looked easiest. Gradually, I noticed the track had vanished, and I was just walking on tundra. The slope got steeper and steeper. Then I saw a few eagles flying below me, between me and the Coast Guard station 1,000 feet down. That's when I realized something was off. A closer look at the map showed I was getting dangerously close to a cliff. I was in the wrong place. I was still close to the cliff, but I had stopped walking toward it. Recognizing that brought some relief. I no longer felt the pressure to keep pushing through terrain that made me increasingly uncomfortable. I spent most of this year on a track like that one, looking for a solution that didn't exist. Admitting that didn't solve anything, but it made a surprising number of problems go away. I spent most of this year looking for a solution that didn’t exist. Admitting that didn’t solve anything, but it made a surprising number of problems go away. I was trying to find a way to build a business around Adak, the 53-foot sailboat I purchased in March. I knew it was going to be challenging, but I like challenges. My motivations were partly financial and partly strategic. The financial motivations are obvious. A business can generate revenue, and it creates opportunities to deduct expenses from that revenue, reducing tax liabilities. The strategic motivation was more subtle. I wanted to build an organization that could eventually outgrow what was possible with the boat I had. I saw Adak as a way to prototype services that could later expand onto a larger vessel, and possibly other vessels. Using a boat in a business triggers all sorts of compliance requirements. Maritime regulations are complex and vary across jurisdictions, but boats used commercially have to meet very different safety standards from private pleasure vessels. They also need permits or licenses in the countries where they operate. I came to this problem with the mental model of aviation. In aviation, there is a fairly clear distinction between carrying passengers for hire and doing work with an aircraft. Aerial photography, for example, can often be conducted under essentially the same operational rules as private flying. Carrying passengers or cargo for hire is another matter entirely. I assumed the sea must have its own version of that line, and I spent months looking for it. Instead, I discovered that a boat can sit at the intersection of several jurisdictions: where it is registered, where it operates, and where the business behind it is located. Within each jurisdiction, different agencies may have different definitions of commercial activity. I sought professional help to navigate this regulatory maze: accountants, tax advisors, attorneys in the United States, solicitors in the United Kingdom. But the help did not come in the form I expected. "You are looking for a simple answer to a complex problem," one person told me. "We would not be able to advise on this," said another. I ignored the first response, but after a few more rejections I started seeing a pattern. Nobody told me there was no solution. In a very polished and professional way, they were telling me they did not see one. And when enough qualified people don't see a solution, that is itself a kind of answer. Still, plenty of people run businesses of various sizes from boats that do not meet commercial standards. Attorneys mentioned enforcement policies and the discretion officers have in interpreting regulations. I could have kept pushing, looking for the interpretation or loophole that would make my plans work. Instead, I ran a thought experiment. Imagine an accident. An insurance claim is filed. The bill is large enough that the insurance company has a strong incentive to investigate. Its attorneys start digging through what I was doing with the boat, how people came aboard, who was being paid, and what the voyage was intended to accomplish. What story would those facts tell? I didn't like the answer. That was when I decided there was no solution. More precisely, there was no solution I could see, and no amount of additional searching seemed likely to produce one I would be comfortable relying upon. Nobody told me to stop looking. It was a moment of reckoning. I resisted that conclusion for as long as I could because its consequences reached surprisingly far. The financial implications were obvious. The boat instantly became more expensive and harder to sustain. But the decision also constrained what I could do with it. Anything beyond "sport or pleasure" became something I had to think carefully about. I deeply resented that. It felt like an unjustified infringement on my freedom to use my own property as I saw fit. More importantly, it affected the expedition itself. It would influence where I went, what I did there, and even who I sailed with. For a few days, it felt as though the entire project I had built around the boat was falling apart. It was also embarrassing. I had bought a boat to build a project around without fully understanding something fundamental about what I could legally do with it. I briefly considered putting Adak back on the market and returning to a simpler life on land. Then something unexpected happened. Nothing had been solved, but the air became lighter. For months, I had been carrying the rapidly increasing pressure of finding an elusive answer. There had to be a structure, an interpretation, a lawyer, a jurisdiction, some clever combination of them that would make everything fit. Once I stopped believing that, a surprising number of problems disappeared. I no longer needed to spend energy and money trying to interpret maritime regulations. I no longer needed to keep elaborate records of every boat expense in the hope of someday deducting it from business income. Next year's expedition became more constrained, which meant there were fewer choices to make. And to a large extent, I no longer had to worry about sales and marketing metrics because there was nothing to sell, no clients to attract, and no funds to raise. My world had shrunk considerably. I still disliked the limitations. Acceptance did not make them fair, convenient, or inexpensive. It simply meant I stopped requiring them to disappear before I could decide what to do next. And that turned out to be liberating. In many ways, this process of reckoning and acceptance reminds me of how I have come to think about climate change. We talk a lot about climate solutions, and many of them are worth pursuing. We need to reduce emissions, develop better technologies, and adapt to changes that are already happening. But none of that gives me much confidence that we know where this is going. I have accepted that temperatures won't return to what I still think of as the normal baseline. What has been much harder to accept is that I don't know what comes after that. I don't know where the new baseline is, or whether there will be one in any timeframe that matters to us. That is what I mean when I say that climate change feels out of control. Not that nothing can be done, or that what we do doesn't matter. Quite the opposite: what we do matters enormously because the range of possible outcomes is so large. But that is different from having a solution. A solution implies that there is a path from the problem to some reasonably well-defined state in which the problem has been resolved. I don't see that path with climate change. I see choices that may make the future better or worse, and enormous uncertainty about where those choices, combined with everything we cannot control, will take us. At some point, I stopped trying to reconcile that uncertainty with the language of solutions. I don't see accepting it as giving up. It means choosing what to do inside a problem I cannot solve rather than spending all my energy looking for the way out. With climate as with Adak, acknowledging that I had wandered off trail, into terrain that grew more precarious with every step, is what makes it possible to reassess what I value. Only then can I look for a trail that will carry me forward, even if it does not lead where I first meant to go. ## Related Posts [Life Without Certainty: Existential Work Before ActionResilience and Responsibility - Part V![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/83/df/83df04cc-ccc4-44fa-aa45-4c4e7c599a17/content/images/icon/ice-frontiers-logo-60x60-39dcfe40-7f50-4501-b44e-040792cdf615.png)Ice FrontiersJean Peccoud![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/83/df/83df04cc-ccc4-44fa-aa45-4c4e7c599a17/content/images/thumbnail/joshua-earle-W3Q7ULb4vwY-unsplash-1-2ea25160-7460-408d-a8fd-a816d655d33f.jpg)](https://icefrontiers.com/life-without-certainty/) [Hope in the Air: Laura Marling and Forward-Looking EthicsFour hours. Seventeen kilometers. One song on repeat. Hope in the Air is not a song about hope, but about responsibility when illusions fall away.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/83/df/83df04cc-ccc4-44fa-aa45-4c4e7c599a17/content/images/icon/ice-frontiers-logo-60x60-60f50cab-2312-4769-9af3-d52365cc7bd5.png)Ice FrontiersJean Peccoud![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/83/df/83df04cc-ccc4-44fa-aa45-4c4e7c599a17/content/images/thumbnail/Laura_Marling_-_Cambridge_Festivals_2001-2014_-6001942672--4131cfb2-b1fb-4885-9ea4-cafd4fef32b6.jpg)](https://icefrontiers.com/hope-in-the-air/) [The Freedom of Letting GoLogbook Entry #3: Choosing to grow deeper rather than larger![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/83/df/83df04cc-ccc4-44fa-aa45-4c4e7c599a17/content/images/icon/ice-frontiers-logo-60x60-4a1c9a78-de13-4978-9902-8ac1f0fc62eb.png)Ice FrontiersJean Peccoud![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/83/df/83df04cc-ccc4-44fa-aa45-4c4e7c599a17/content/images/thumbnail/https-3a-2f-2fsubstack-post-media-s3-amazonaws-com-2fpublic-2fimages-2feae535ed-01e9-4ed7-8586-6ee5b9db71df_1021x652-jpeg-9f49bcce-c0f1-488a-abf4-ded935e607ee.jpg)](https://icefrontiers.com/the-freedom-of-letting-go/)