Earlier this week was my birthday and that always makes me contemplative.  I turned forty-five.  I like to think I’m not even half way through my life.  I hope to live to 100.  We’ll see how that goes.  But when I think about my life that way, it’s astonishing to me that—even though Emily and I are well on our way to having raised our kids and started launching them into the world—most of my life is still ahead of me.

I would like to share one of my biggest failures.  I’ve never told this story in writing before.  The full story is not in our book, Seven at Sea.  I talked about some of it in a recent magazine interview.  Now that the magazine and book are in the world, I feel freed-up to tell it myself. Maybe I’ve just built up a tolerance for over-sharing.

by ERIK ORTON

We were sailing with two other boats, Discovery and Day Dreamer.  We’d gotten an early start that morning and the wind was good so we were leading the group.  We were all making for the same point on the west edge of St. Martin after which we would turn northeast into Marigot Bay and anchor near each other.  I was using autopilot to navigate us toward the point. We were making steady progress and the other boats were catching up.  Their boats were longer and therefore faster.  I looked at St. Martin in the distance and it didn’t look right. It looked like we were going to cut the turn too close. 

by ERIK ORTON

Emily and I did a couple interviews yesterday about our book and I found myself saying something I don’t usually say.  They were asking, how did you come to live on a sailboat with your family in the Caribbean? I said something like, “There were no big sudden risky moves.  Everything was deliberate, well-considered and incremental.”  I don’t usually say that, but it’s true.  Yes, I quit my job.  Yes, we bought our boat sight-unseen.  And yes, we flew down and moved aboard as a whole family.  But nothing was hasty.  If anything, I would say we were very pedestrian about it.  If you want to revisit the story from the beginning, click here or read the book when it comes out in a few weeks.

by ERIK ORTON

In Patagonia, the southern region of Chile, there’s a mountain range called Torres del Paine. Los Torres del Paine is one of the most beautiful ranges I’ve never seen.  I’ve never been there.  But I had a picture of it in my locker in high school.  I’m working on getting myself and my family down there this winter (summer in the southern hemisphere) because I want to climb the central tower. The whole thing feels remote and challenging.  I don’t really know how I’m going to pull it off, which brings us to our topic for this post:  Chart Your Course.