Title: resilience and the international house of pancakes

Subtitle: May 7, 2024 - IHOP & somewhere off the coast of California

It’s 2:56 in the morning and I’m sitting at IHOP with friends who also thought this was the proper way to be welcomed into America. 24hr service, terrible decor, worse lighting and very average overpriced food. I’m just happy to be somewhere familiar and the boys I’m accompanied by are soaking in the novelty of this fine dining establishment they’ve only seen in American film/TV.  We debrief our pacific crossings over stacks of pancakes and french fries. We’re sleep deprived but we share stories and rant about our jobs and dream of what comes next. After a month at sea, any food we get to choose for ourselves is good food and the presence of friends is nourishment to the soul. I sit there thinking about how lucky I am to have found these friendships along the way and contemplate taking what’s left of my chocolate chip pancakes for the road.

Another race down and life has taught me its greatest lesson of letting go once again. This time it came in the form of what I like to call “The North Pacific Tech Tragedy”. Somewhere around day twelve with over 2,500 miles left to sail, all of my equipment decided it was time to break. It started with the drop in temperature and the damp conditions onboard effecting things like charging ports and batteries, but soon my laptop and both cameras were out of commission. I won’t bore you with the details but to sum it up: I was left without the tools I needed to do the one thing I was onboard to do and zero control over any of it. The best (and only) thing I could do was to let go. Let go of the frustration, the disappointment and the new financial burden that awaited me in Seattle. A couple tears were shed as it all went wrong but I troubleshot my way through the next two weeks at sea and managed to keep doing my job with the little equipment I had left. Sometimes using various crew members’ iPhones to tell the story and editing on the dinosaur of a laptop the boat carries which turned a one hour task into a six hour task. If I wasn’t wet and cold and normal day to day tasks didn’t take three times the energy onboard, I might have been a little less discouraged by these setbacks.

Letting go of what I could not control made space for a new perspective to form, energy to adapt and a surprising amount of laughter during those last two weeks. The silver lining in this “North Pacific Tech Tragedy” was getting a glimpse of how this whole experience has changed me for the better. I saw sides of myself I was able to be proud of this month. Turns out all the discomfort and challenges along the way have built up more resilience within me this year than I predicted. And somehow I’m coming out the other side more motivated than before. Even after paying to keep my job.

I decided to take the pancakes with me. After the best decision I’ve made all month my time in Seattle was packed with prep/repair jobs and some very sweet moments tucked in between. Now I’m headed south for Panama and tomorrow we’ll be sailing past Santa Barbara. Past the one place I think of when someone mentions home. I’ll be 100 miles offshore but will be waving to you all and day dreaming of sunny slow days spent with friends in the city that is tucked so perfectly between the mountains and the sea. This time last year I would sit at Devereux wondering what it would feel like to sail down this section of coast if I ever got the job. Wondering if I would make it this far and if I did, how would it feel like to have sailed more than halfway around the world by this point?

three months to go

-meredith rodgers