Living an Asymmetrical Life: The Sea Years
One of the Privileged Homeless
No fixed address for years at a time. Every address in the world, briefly. That’s not homelessness — that’s a technicality with a horizon.
What the Form Couldn’t Hold
Every immigration form has the same small box: Home address. For years, mine was a cabin number that changed with the contract and a horizon that changed with the watch. I learned this the hard way, filling in forms in ports where the officer would look up, look at me, look back down, and finally write something diplomatic. The truth wouldn’t fit in the box. The truth was: I live at sea. The sea does not do postcodes.
I call it being one of the privileged homeless. No mortgage, no lawn, no accumulating garage. What I had instead was motion — eight times around the planet’s waistline, a deckhand’s first calluses on American Hawaii Cruises, and later a clipboard and a title on the Crystal Serenity, coordinating a 110-day World Cruise for people who had traded everything else for time. I was surrounded by time millionaires before I knew the term. I was taking notes before I knew they were a book.
Somewhere between here and elsewhere, the arithmetic flips. Most people own things and rent their days. At sea it reverses: you own your days and rent everything else — the cabin, the view, even the weather. It is the best lease I ever signed.
Home is not an address. It’s a heading.
Life At Sea
Ships run on rhythm, not clocks. Four hours on, eight off. The bells don’t care what day the calendar claims. In places where clarity is life or death — a fire drill, a man-overboard, a fuel transfer in weather — ambiguity is the enemy and the checklist is the friend. The sea taught me systems thinking before any classroom did: simplicity scales, procedures are compassion written down, and the difference between a good crew and a lucky one is that the good crew doesn’t need the luck.
But the sea also taught the other lesson, the quieter one. Between watches there is nothing to buy, nowhere to rush, no one to impress. Just water to the edge of the world in every direction. When you slow down, the world stops shouting. The sea years were where I first heard what was underneath the shouting. Most of it, it turns out, was worth listening to.
The Book the Sea Wrote Back
The sea years were solo. Then they weren’t. Charting Love is the log of the difference.
Charting Love
Sarah & Ed’s nautical journey — a love story plotted in bearings instead of anniversaries. Two people, one Scottish Terrier, and a route that runs from the Solent to the Rock to the last inhabited island before the weather takes over. Navigation is just commitment with instruments. This is the chart.
Read Charting Love⚓ Charting Love: Sarah & Ed’s Nautical Journey
Tap a port. Read the log entry. Every waypoint is a chapter.
Portsmouth — Where the Chart Begins
Every voyage needs a first fix. Portsmouth was ours — a naval town where the sea is not scenery but employer, and where two people decided the next heading would be plotted together. The Solent doesn’t do romance. It does departures. We took one.
Gibraltar — The Rock That Doesn’t Move
Living at the hinge of two continents teaches you about thresholds. One rock, two seas, three currencies in your pocket by Tuesday. Gibraltar was where the journey stopped being travel and started being a life — work, weather, and a terrier learning her second language of smells.
Andalusia — Where Skyelark Was Crowned
The neighbors took one look at the black Scottish Terrier holding court in the plaza and settled it: La Reina. The Queen. Andalusia moved at human speed — long lunches, longer evenings — and taught us that presence is a regional dialect. Skyelark was fluent on arrival.
Fair Isle — North of Everywhere
Twenty-four miles from the nearest land, population 45, zero trees. The last waypoint was the boldest: Britain’s most remote inhabited island, during a pandemic, on purpose. The chart ends here because charts end where home begins.
The sea years didn’t end. They just changed vessels — a croft is only a ship that stopped arguing with the weather. If you want the full log, the library is open.
Travel well. And prosper.