We achieved status on top of the food chain because of this little ball of magic in our brain called the amygdala. It’s there to help protect us from going outside our cave and getting eaten by saber-toothed tigers. Today, it can be a problem. Particularly if we have to do things like give a presentation in front of a large audience and sometimes it can keep us from doing things we want to do. I like to think I’m courageous and carefree but I’ll be honest, that really only applies when it comes to ordering dessert. Everything else I sorta need my inner warrior-goddess to talk myself into. The biggest gift of the amygdala is it teaches us things like staying safe means ‘staying with the herd.’ Selling all of our crap and crossing the Pacific is not staying with the herd. So, my brain keeps me safe by putting all these mental barriers in the way that are foreign and scary and makes me work really hard to hurl myself over them. Here are just a few of the fears I am wrestling as we move closer to turning this dream into a plan.

The Pacific Ocean covers 64 million square miles and takes up 1/3 of the earth’s total surface area which is larger than all the land put together. Take a moment to look at a globe, it will take you awhile, I’ll wait. So when Stephane said, ‘Let’s go to Tahiti,’ I’m like ‘Cowabunga!,’ but then he followed it up by saying, ‘no I mean let’s sail there…we have to earn it.’ Which meant in 30 seconds flat I moved on to Retirement Plan B, buying some sinking beachfront condo in Florida; by the way prices are really coming down.

Crossing the Pacific is 3,000 nautical miles from Mexico to Marquesas or if you are interested in the scenic route you can check out Galapagos from Panama, it’s about 4,800 which is about a full MONTH at sea. A lot of things can go wrong in that amount of time, let me list a few that keep me up at night. Someone falls overboard, your water gets contaminated, you run out of food, you hit a shipping container and puncture the hull (I saw the movie), rogue waves make the boat flip, pirates can kidnap you and hold you for ransom, you get caught in the floating trash vortex, your spouse suddenly starts talking gibberish and calls you ‘Wilson,’ or my personal favorite, you discover a megalodon is following your boat.

Every experienced sailor will tell you that you don’t cross the Pacific on day 1. I mean, you could but I’m not hearing that in CruisersForum. I finally grasped the idea that it’s more like learning to train for a triathlon, you don’t just wake up one day and do the race. For me it was learning to be comfortable in the SF Bay, which can get lively. Then, we sailed outside the Golden Gate, first time was terrifying and thrilling all at the same time; like a really wet rollercoaster. Then, down the coast, then across to the Channel Islands, then a few charter vacations. Many people start in Florida, then do the Keys, then do Bahamas, Caribbean, etc. Okay, I can do that.

I’ve always been afraid of sharks. I blame my mother who took me to see Jaws at a drive-in when I was like 8-9 years old. She also took me with her to see The Shining and Alien (seriously mom really?1?). It makes me feel better to know that over half of all people fear sharks as much as I do. That’s the amygdala in white platform shoes dancing to Staying Alive on our brains.

My son, who’s 21 and is a fanboy of Sharknado, recently asked me, ‘aren’t you afraid of getting eaten by a shark?’ My answer sort of surprised me as it dropped out of my mouth, ‘well, I would rather die getting eaten by a shark than by a heart-attack behind a desk.’ I do think the secret for me on this one is to stay in the boat in dangerous waters, and if it’s my destiny to die by shark, it’s a much more interesting way to go. Stephane and I got Advanced Dive Certifications and learning about the different types of sharks was helpful. There are also good tactics here as well, like staying low, since they attack from below their prey. Or my personal favorite, only paddleboard in water so crystal clear that you can see to the bottom – bam!

2017 stats that make me feel better:

Seasoned sailors who have cruised for 20+ years, like Lin and Larry Pardey, who wrote Storm Tactics Handbook: Modern Methods for Heaving-To for Survival in Extreme Conditions, they say bad weather only happens maybe 10% of the time. Those are people also who are comfortable sailing during storm seasons, but still take a lot of precautions to avoid storms with just good common sense. Like don’t do an Atlantic Passage during hurricane season. Roger that. Yet, storms are a real thing and the weather is getting more extreme so this is a pretty serious matter.

The only way I knew to tackle this fear is to face a big storm and try the storm tactics – while cursing at Poseidon and laughing wildly at the sky like Captain Ahab. But first, I started reading as many storm tactics books and studying people’s stories. I have yet to live through a storm to tell about it, but it was helpful to understand the power of a good heave-to maneuver, 40 degrees from the wind with a storm anchor tied to your bow. It apparently creates a slick that flips the script on the breaking wave so it’s less likely to break on top of you. Now, that’s useful information. More good books, Heavy Weather Sailing, Sailing a Serious Ocean, Essentials of Sea Survival. The point is, the idea of a storm on a boat is scary because I don’t do that every day, but I do get in my car every day and my chances of dying in a car are much higher.

I’ve looked into this, and even though sinking boats make great movies, it’s not a common thing. Just in terms of boating fatalities, in the US in 2017 just 658 people died in boating accidents, versus 40,000 who died in motor vehicle accidents. The biggest danger it seems is waves, which goes back to the topic of storm tactics above.

We leaned towards a Catamaran, two hulls and airtight crash boxes make it pretty tough to sink. They have positive buoyancy and while it may capsize once it is no longer at its maximum stability, unlike a monohull, they don’t have a one ton ballast to weigh them down so while it might not be able to self right, it won’t sink straight to the bottom right away either. The idea would be to stay with the boat, as it gives search parties a better chance of finding us. Plus, a catamaran just has so much SPACE!

2017 stats that make me feel better:

So one more lesson would to be to put your life vest on in anything other than lemonade sipping conditions.

This is chapter two to chapter one above on the boat sinking. I have a love/hate relationship with this fear because as I write this, no access to video conferences and death by PowerPoint sounds worse. I’m a repressed introvert so being alone on a boat is sort of the whole idea, but not if it’s a rubber life raft or a floating piece of plywood surrounded by sharks.

What helped me on this one was total and complete desensitization by taking a deep breath and submerging myself in non-fiction. I started with Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, by Alfred Lansing, then moved to Adrift: 76 Days Lost at Sea by Steven Callahan (not to be confused with the movie based on the book about Tami Oldham), Red Sky in Mourning Tami Oldham's actual book, then, I graduated by reading my all-time favorite survival story 438 Days: Extraordinary True Story of Survival at Sea by Jonathan Franklin. No, the title is not an overstatement. It’s the amazing true story of Salvador Alvarenga, a fisherman from Mexico lost at sea after his engines malfunctioned and drifted for 9,000 nautical miles – in a small, 25 foot, open fishing boat! Read that book, it’s of a similar genre to Life of Pi but packed full of practical information, and it will blow your mind.

Survival is a mind game! The thread through all these remarkable true stories was the importance of resilience, resourcefulness and the will of the human spirit to survive. Not only is our amygdala helping us out, our brain does things to create alternate realities to protect us and help us overcome unthinkable situations. After binging on all of these sea survival stories, I found fascinating parallels to my experiences as a woman in high-tech. I’ve also downloaded Navy Seals Survival Guide: Surviving Disaster. I am also planning to sign for a Sea Survival Certification Course next spring. No, I'm not a Prepper, the only thing I'm stockpiling is 350 different shades of eyeshadow.

I have to repeat the quote by Mia in one of their podcasts on 59 North. When referring to how she and her husband do it, she says ‘it takes both gas and breaks to drive a car both fast and safe.’ I could 100% identify with that. When I first met Stephane in a coffee shop, (cliché I know), I was enamored by how brave he was to do a double-handed race 14 days through the Pacific in a 24 foot boat. Did’ya catch that last part? So when we started sailing together I was the passenger, gleefully sipping my lemonade and adjusting my sunhat, blind to the 32 other things going on all at once.

Over time, I started to understand the dangers involved, although he fooled me for a while with his calm demeanor and nerves of steel. To this day I still get a little hot when he demonstrates his special talents with sail trim and he’s never once raised his voice on the boat….ahhh...where was I? Anyway, the more I learned, the more I realized how treacherous the ocean is; there’s a reason people like land masses and snow skiing. So I started questioning him, because a really awesome trait of a wife is to second guess your husband on something he has infinitely more experience on than you do. That’s how to get tossed overboard like a gasping flying fish in the morning. What I have come to appreciate is that on land, I am the gas and he is the breaks. He’s French and like the turkey on thanksgiving day or waiting for your boat to be commissioned, he’s ready when he’s ready. He’s an engineer so he’s more methodical about certain things, where I’m more take charge (read: impatient) and highly intuitive (read: make shit up as I go along). On water, our roles reverse so he’s the gas and I’m the breaks. So this is when I started second guessing everything in my neurotic desire to keep myself alive. I’m not for everyone. What I came to realize is he’s not the one who I can’t trust, I’m the one he can’t trust of we both aren't on the same page.

Stephane and I could be happy alone in a broom closet playing cat’s cradle with a piece of brown string. However, much like raising kids, boat things have a way of surfacing everyone’s character defects, and we’ve definitely faced our share of challenges over the years.

Step one to not losing my marriage was not losing my husband while underway. I wanted to learn everything I could about Man Overboard procedures because if I fall off, he will come and get me but if he falls off, we both die. That was my main motivation to go through all the classes to get bareboat certified.

Learning to sail of course leads to the next twelve thousand decisions you have to either agree on or work through all your most personal relationship baggage real time shouting over the wind in a packed anchorage. For this, I think it comes down to really knowing what matters. As with risk management business practices, in sailing you can make a list of the top things that could go wrong and rank them in order of how big a deal it is. Then you also rank them by likelihood of it happening. If you multiply the numbers together, you get a risk ranking of scenarios that you both agree on. Those are the things that matter on a boat. Everything else is insignificant IMHO.

The worst possible situation isn’t fighting over someone’s crappy anchoring techniques, it’s whether or not we can work together in a high-stress, time sensitive situation. Our approach is to start at the top of the list and talk through each scenario to agree to either the procedure, the possible course of actions or what would be required in that situation. Then, we either have to learn it, practice it, pack it or laminate it and put it in a binder. I truly believe that having this down and having this perspective makes it much easier to ask yourself in the heat of an argument, ‘does this really matter?’ and ‘do I need to be right?’

"Waves are not measured in feet or inches, they are measured in increments of fear." -Buzzy Trent