Mental Weather at Sea

I’m at the helm of my 51-foot classic ketch, Houdini. The sun has just shown its full face over a beautiful anchorage near Ixtapa, Mexico, on the Pacific coast. I drift in idle, slowly toward the rocky shoreline, looking for a place to drop the hook for a few days, when I notice the depth showing something massive in an area that’s supposed to be a popular shallow anchorage.

One hundred eighty-seven feet on the depth sounder.

I peer over the helm and see three other boats, all smaller than Houdini, tucked into this quaint anchorage. There’s no way they’re carrying six hundred feet of chain—which is what it would take to anchor in water that deep with minimum scope.

Confused, I look over the side, peering into the water as I inch dangerously close to shore. I can see the bottom maybe twenty-five feet down, which matches the charts perfectly.

My depth sounder is clearly broken.

Whether I succeed or fail at something I set out to do is almost 100% hinged on the way I think about it.

We all know that many competitive athletes and top performers have coaches to help them reach peak physical performance. What we don’t often recognize—or at least what I hadn’t—is how many of them also have mindset coaches. For me, my mindset is almost directly correlated to how much sleep I’ve gotten, and between having a fifteen-month-old baby and captaining an overnight offshore passage, my sleep wallet was running dangerously thin.

I drop the hook in the shallow water and Jordan jumps in. I hopefully suggest that she check the transducer for an octopus. I know we’re not going to be that lucky, and that this problem is almost certainly connected to the burnt wire loom I just discovered under the lower helm. although, I only moonlight as an electrician. I felt completely deflated like a broken depth sounder may derail all of my plans.

Two watches prior, around 1:56 a.m., I was nervously dodging cargo ships blazing in and out of port, about seventy-five nautical miles north of our next anchorage. I was exhausted. As I stared into the dark night, my heart racing, Jordan and Violet—my fifteen-month-old daughter—slept in the cabin just beneath my feet. I asked myself, why in the hell am I out here doing this?

When sailing—especially on long overnight passages—it gives you a lot of time to think. In that moment, I had the fortunate revelation to step back from myself for a brief second and evaluate exactly why I was having such negative emotions about something I love so much.

Sleep.

It’s interesting to think about. Is it that we, as humans, need that much more energy to maintain a positive mindset? Or is there something chemical that happens, something that throws us into a mostly momentary depression about our life or our current situation?

I’m pretty good at talking myself through big emotions and rough transitions. However, I cannot talk myself out of needing a nap.

Mindset is everything when sailing. It’s the difference between making good, purposeful decisions in dangerous situations—or panicking. If I’m honest with you, I don’t leave port if I don’t have the right mindset. It’s just like heading out into foul weather. If it can be avoided, it should be.

A nap fixes almost everything for me.

Before I fall asleep, I talk to myself—not out loud, but to my subconscious as if it were a friend. I ask one simple question. What am I missing? Or, what’s the next right move? More often than not, I wake up with the answer. Or at least with enough clarity to move again. It’s magic.

Uncertainty doesn’t go away out here. At sea or in life. But mindset isn’t something fixed—it shifts. It can be recalibrated. Sometimes with effort. Sometimes with rest.

And when you’re trying to do something difficult—something a little unreasonable—you learn quickly that ignoring your mental weather is no different than ignoring the forecast. You can push into it if you want an get your hair blown back. Or you can wait, regroup, and choose a better moment.

I’ve learned to do the latter.