Gardening is safer than sailing: you won’t sink in your pea patch. It’s also more convenient. If your hoe breaks during a rugged flurry of cultivation, you can walk into your garage and fetch your backup hoe or even drive down to the hardware store to get a new one. After dropping your docklines or your mooring buoy, however, you’re on your own. This constitutes the beauty and the terror of life on the water: even a few hundred watery yards from the dock is a formidable isolation. Alone, you rely on your skill and the ability to think several shifts beyond “normal.”
Because things go wrong, and your equipment, your float plan, your weather, your good intentions will fail. But you’ll be thinking beyond normal to Plan B: what to do when (not if) simple constructs fly apart.
Plan B is not a failure but a resourceful response to change. Face it, shipmate: the broad concept of sailing is change itself. We venture beyond the safety of our pea patches to savor another, more natural, world.