How to stay motivated? Good question. On Tuesday, I'm taking the day off to go up to Bellingham to move the boat we keep up there to the Travelift for it's third haulout in the continuing effort to find and fix a problem with the starboard packing gland. This sort of thing can get discouraging and cause one to start thinking that maybe boating isn't all that it's cracked up to be.
At the same time this has been going on I had a major shoot to direcct with some of the Seattle Seahawks and a new 747-8F, a project with a ton of cost and pressure attached to it. It's been a good lesson in how challenges that aren't too difficult to deal with individually can combine to create a very stressful and, in the case of the boat, somewhat depressing situation.
The hardest thing for me--- be it working on one of our boats, vehicles, the house, you name it--- is not the work itself but thinking about the work before I start. The "I have to do this and get that stuff together and crawl underneath this and I just don't feel like doing all that again" thing.
But one thing I've learned over a bunch of years is that no matter how intimidating or worrysome or I-just-don't-want-to-do-it an upcoming project seems--- be it a film shoot or a boat project or changing the oil in a vehicle--- you just start in and then you're doing it and then it's done even though "being done" seemed an impossibly long way off before you started.
When we bought our old cabin cruiser it had (and still has) a number of things that needed doing to it, most of them cosmetic. And right after we got the boat to Bellngham a number of challenges we'd never encountered before as we were new to this kind of boating cropped up. It was easy to wonder if we'd bitten off way more than we could chew.
The shipwright who at the time was the lead maintenance person on the big Grand Banks charter fleet in the harbor gave us a great piece of advice which we have fairly successfully adhered to during the last 17 years. And that is don't let all the jobs that have to be done get you down. Don't try to do everything at once; it will just get you frustrated and you'll end up hating the boat. Pick one job, do it to completion, then pick anohter job, do that one to completion, and so on. And don't fret about the other jobs while you're working on the one you've selected to do.
I was inspired to move to this area from Hawaii whild riding the Queen of Prince Rupert from Prince Rupert to Vancouver Island at the end of a six-week vacation to the Yukon with a friend. I'd shipped my Land Rover from Hawaii to the mainland for the trip and would be shipping it back at the end of the trip.
I had never seen the Inside Passage before and it completely blew me away as I watched the mountains and glaciers and waterfalls go past. It was while standing on the aft deck of that ferry that I decided this was where I wanted to live the rest of my life.
Two years later I made the move and immediately set about exploring the whole region, intially by floatplane and later adding boats. Being out on (or over) the water here is why I made the move in the first place. Working on our boats is what allows us to do what we want to do.
While it doesn't make crawling around in the engine room of our cabin cruiser changing 24 quarts of oil any more delightful of a task, and while hauling our boat three times in a row to deal with a problem is a pain in the ass, it's what it takes to let us contnue doing what brought me here in the first place 35 years ago.
So we do it and when it's done and we're out in the islands somewhere the work it took to let us do this becomes pretty insignificant by comparison.
