While sitting at the dockside bar, Sombrero Lounge, in Boot Key harbor finishing my 3rd cup of coffee for the morning and watching my dingy rub impatiently at the bar's dock. I asked the fellow next to me the Time. He thought for a minute and said, with a calm demeanor, I think it's April.
For the first time it was brought home to me the enormity of a life change I had entered. Here was a world of people that did indeed live by the rhythms of the tide and the movement of the seasons.
O' there are schedules and timetables in this life as well but they seem to rise and flow instead of jerk and stumble with the fits and starts of life's race with the Jones. Here you learn that in this life, time is circular not linear. If not this tide than the next, It will come again. It is true, time and tide wait for no man but, but you can wait for the next tide to ride.
In the work-a-day world I had just left, we lived by the clock. Jerked from my slumber by a jangling alarm, fighting off my bodies need for sleep, trying to fit my jobs schedule. By the weekend I was so off kilter that two days (if I was lucky) was just enough to set me up for the next round. A punch-drunk fighter swinging away at Mr. Jones's dancing image. I have a list of tasks, which I add to when ever I think of something that needs doing. Contemplating the list over my morning coffee, I drop some that seemed so important yesterday, not really needed, Adjusting and moving as needed.
Never start to work on a project as soon as you think of it. You will often find that it was a fluke, an aberration of your former life style trying to horn in on your present day peace.
I sleep when I tire and start each day refreshed. Soon I realized that I was usually waking just before dawn each day. I dropped from a 38-inch waist to a 34 without even trying. Not that I have ever had any luck dieting and generally feel better. I am tan in January, other than foul weather gear, I dress in shorts and t-shirts with a fishermans sweater for those cool mornings
I will try to give you new sea stories ever now and then so drop-in any time