Logbook

Personal notes shared with an inner circle of co-travelers pursuing their own frontiers.

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Logbook

Is that it?

Last week, I reached Victoria. It felt like a failure.

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Logbook

Good Night

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Logbook

Running Home

In Yakutat, refueling was the easiest it had been since New Caledonia. Insert a card, fill the tanks, leave. It should have been a relief. Instead it felt like something ending — and the ending had started long before the dock, and it had started in me.

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Logbook

The Uncertainty of Others

Other people expose us to uncertainty. We usually think of that as a risk to manage. But the same uncertainty that makes disappointment possible may also be what allows a relationship to transform us.

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Logbook

It's Lonely

Somewhere between a glacier and a bridge in Alaska, I met a rancher from Montana. He asked what the project costs me. I said it's very lonely. He asked, 'Are you writing about that?' So here I am.

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Logbook

Silence

Logbook

We're a Couple

"We're basically a couple now," Charly said. "Not that kind of couple." After months crossing the Pacific from New Zealand to Alaska, I began to think he was right. Offshore sailing may be the fastest course in long-term relationships — compromise, repair, and paying attention before the alarm.

Logbook

Frontier State

For 45 days, Alaska was a point on the map: the place where the boat would stop and we could finally sleep. Then we anchored in Makushin Bay, and the miles stopped being the problem. The closer we got, the more the place expanded, and every mountain asked the same question.

Logbook

Landfall Exhaustion

After 45 days to cross the largest ocean. The shore should feel like relief. It doesn't. The engine is whispering, the body wants stillness, and the Aleutians don't welcome anyone.

Logbook

The Uncertain Cost of Commitment

Starting a company, raising children, getting married, or sailing across an ocean all share something in common: their true costs cannot be known in advance. Commitment begins where transactions end.

Logbook

Exodus

I wrote this years ago, on a different journey. It came back to me crossing a different kind of desert, at six knots.

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.

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.

Logbook

The Boat Is Great. The Sailor Miserable.

Two days into my first offshore passage, the boat is performing beautifully while I struggle with seasickness, exhaustion, and doubt. A reflection on uncertainty, resilience, and simply getting through the next watch.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Logbook

Aleutians - Insurance - Health

A possible detour through the Aleutians, an unexpectedly successful LinkedIn post, a tense moment with the insurance underwriter, closing the GenoFAB chapter, and a health check before departure

Logbook

Hope in the Air

Four hours. Seventeen kilometers. One song on repeat. Hope in the Air is not a song about hope, but about responsibility when illusions fall away.

Logbook

Waitangi Day

Standing in Paihia, next to the treaty grounds, I encountered a national day shaped by remembrance, restraint, and an unresolved shared history — one that quietly challenged the triumphalist narratives I’ve grown used to elsewhere.