Live Aboard (Part 2 - The Boxes)

"What about all your precious belongings?"

These were the opening words to the questions that many people asked us when we told them of our decision to downsize and live aboard our yacht. It is true that in deciding to downsize and alter our current lifestyle we were going to have to give up a huge amount. In coming to our decision we had agonised over how to do this and whether this was the best thing to be doing in the first place. Through each of our lives we had accumulated many treasured possessions that we both felt very attached to. Like anyone else, we had keepsakes that we held onto as reminders of important people and events in our lives. Invariably these keepsakes were stashed away in the myriad cardboard boxes that cluttered our spare rooms, hidden from our conscious memory until such time we had cause to search these boxes and we came across them. Only then did they serve their purpose of fleetingly reconnecting us with the person or event they signified.

I had so many boxes full to the brim of these kinds of physical reminders. I knew what the contents of these boxes were and I knew that if I wanted to look at something specific, I could find it without any problem. The thing is - I didn't ever look for these memories - they were just there - in the cardboard boxes. Over the years and through countless house moves, I have carted these boxes around with me, hiding them away in the spare space of every house or flat that I lived in. All the while of course, every year, I would accrue new keepsakes that eventually would find their way into their own cardboard boxes.

I wouldn't say that I'm a hoarder, but I think I was reluctant to throw things away that contained the slightest hint of holding a worthwhile reminder of a special person or event. In the last twenty years I have kept just about anything that my two children had made for me, painted, drawn, or given to me. Christmas and birthday cards, postcards, letters, a faded cardboard Santa Claus, a stone found on a holiday beach, a pressed flower, a poem, photos (thousands of them), and so much more. All these things found their way into the cardboard boxes from their places on shelves or windowsills - stored for perpetual posterity.

A Christmas card from my Daughter when she was six.

Like all my keepsakes, there was no definitive reason why I chose to hold onto these physical reminders. What eventual purpose were they to serve? Was I planning one day to open a private museum of my life where these things would become key exhibits? Would I suddenly become famous and this personal memorabilia become immeasurably valuable? Would I in my eventual old age, place these items around me to remind me of times gone by?I had no answer - I just held onto these things. It wasn't just stuff linked to my children and my family, it was memorabilia from my school days, my time living and working in Africa, my time with Outward Bound, notable holidays, employment and work through the years, newspaper cuttings, letters from friends, art work I had created, previous pets possessions, my complete collection of photos and slides, teddies from my infancy, pamphlets about sea kayaking kit, hundreds of outdoor equipment bits and pieces (mostly broken), odd natural items like pebbles and sticks, stashes of copper coins, clothes by the bag full, hordes of CDs, and tonnes of books - so many books! There was so much junk - stuff that would mean nothing to anyone else but me. Why did I keep it all?

Certificate from my primary school residential

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I studied the psychology of attachment when I trained in psychotherapy, so I have an understanding of the deeper process of our human need for attachment. For me, these physical memories provided a tangible link to my past, a link that I knew I could reach, touch, feel, read, and look at if I chose to do so by opening the relevant cardboard box and finding them. For example, I might seek to look at the map of the Chimanimani Mountains on which I had marked all the caves that I used as shelter on my mountain expeditions to remind me of the good times I had shared with my Zimbabwean friends on our extensive mountain trips. The things is, I never once did this - but the map has been there in my Zimbabwe box along with the pile of other Zimbabwean keepsakes that I have carefully held on to - the memories from the time when I worked out there in the 1990s. My time out there, though short lived, was an intensely happy period of my life. Living in the UK, I found myself sometimes longing to be there again, in the mountains, in the community, with good friends, and especially the country of my birth. I think it was for this reason that I did not let these physical keepsakes go and why I held onto them for so long.

Despite my apparent deep attachment to these things, I knew that I had to get rid of them. The boxes were in fact a burden - not only physically in that they were bulky and required storage space, but also emotionally in that they helped keep me locked into my past. I would forever hark after the glory days of my younger years without truly living my life fully in the present. I would look to previous events in my life as more important to each one I was creating - whatever that may be. If the truth be told - I understand now how at times my tendency towards a depressive outlook was fed by attachment to the past - the memories lurking in the cardboard boxes in the spare rooms upstairs.

We had made the decision that everything had to go - we were only going to keep absolutely essential precious items - nothing more! This meant that the cardboard boxes and their seemingly precious contents would have to go. I have to admit that it took me a long time to begin to sort through these boxes and recycle what I could from them. I procrastinated until time was against me and there was no other option but to get stuck in and deal with them. Even then I worked slowly though each box - unpacking the contents with reverence and reading every scrap of writing that I found, or lovingly holding trinkets, turning them over in my hands, remembering when I acquired them, the shelf they had stood on in the various places I had lived, who had given them to me.

I adopted a three stage process. First, I would go through the box in its entirety, taking everything out one at a time, reading, touching, looking and remembering. This would create a neat pile of the box's contents. The second step was to sort through this pile and put into the recycling pile the things I obviously did not want to keep. This would leave a reduced pile of things to sort through again. Knowing I couldn't keep all of these. stage three took on the ruthless approach where I would whittle the pile down until only a few essential precious items remained. These would lie there and I would look at them, then without a second thought, I would consign even these most precious memories to the recycling bags. This was the process for all my boxes until they were all dealt with. At the end of the process I realised that I had kept only a couple of things out of the piles of stuff I had been hoarding. In working through my memories I had reconnected with them, given them due attention and thought, and then moved them on. In doing so I moved on too.

There was sadness. I didn't always enjoy the process of letting my precious stuff go but it does feel much better not to be burdened with the physical memories that I hoarded for so many years. The boxes have gone and we live an unencumbered life. Whatever we find we have little use for we pass on to someone else or a charity shop. We now think twice before buying things and invariably we choose not to buy them because we realise that we would be loading ourselves with more stuff. We no longer hold on to things that in the past may have served as keepsakes. We simply keep what we have a use for. We no longer have boxes stored in secret corners with their contents gathering dust. It doesn't mean I value the importance of fond memories any less than before - it just means that I do not need cardboard boxes to store them for me

Live Aboard - The Move (Part 1 - The Nuts & Bolts)

I think humans have a brilliant way of discounting necessary information if it means we don't have to worry about what lies ahead. I certainly think that this was true for us when we bought Strandbo and decided to move aboard her - we conveniently put to the back of our minds the enormous task of downsizing and decluttering our lives. The excitement of buying our very first yacht and indeed our new home overwhelmed the reality of what lay ahead for us.

We bought the yacht in November and intended to be out of our house and aboard her by the beginning of February the next year. This gave us eight weeks to declutter our lives - divest ourselves of a jointly accumulated ninety five years of lifelong belongings! If you take a moment to look around your own home, in every room, in every cupboard, wardrobe, chest of drawers, under every bed, on the window sills, behind the curtains, in the bathroom, the kitchen, the loft, the garage or shed, the cellar, the porch, the conservatory, the garden, and the car - you may understand why we had not fully comprehended the enormity of the Herculean task that lay before us.

It goes without saying that in making the decision to move aboard a yacht we had spoken at length about what we were going to do with our belongings. We knew that we had to get rid of almost everything because there was no way that we could expect our respective families to accept the burden of looking after the things we were not able to take on board our yacht. Moreover we had come to the conclusion that we did not want to store any of our belongings because this would seem like cheating - you can't downsize and declutter if you're merely going to put stuff into storage. There is no point to the exercise.This meant that we had to find ways and means of emptying our house of everything we owned.

We set ourselves some parameters with regard to divesting ourselves of our belongings. These were:

• We would sell as much as we feasibly could - furniture, paintings, books, electrical items, etc.
• We would give family and friends any special items that we thought they would appreciate.
• We would advertise extensively on our local Freecycle website.
• We would make full use of the plethora of charity outlets in Inverness & Dingwall.
• We would only use the council recycling centres (land fill dumps) as a last resort.

We very briefly talked of hiring a house clearing firm to come and do the job for us - the kind of process that is employed when an aged relative dies and their house needs to be emptied. We did not choose this option because we wanted to take responsibility for our own stuff!

Both of us hoped that we would make quite a bit of money from selling our property because after all, we had quite a bit of good quality stuff to sell. We had some lovely pieces of furniture, we certainly had some lovely paintings and pieces of artwork, and there were useful electrical items that we had in our cupboards. We also believed that we owned some passable quality bric a brac that would sell well at various car boot sales. With the run up to Christmas in full swing we were confident that we would shift a considerable amount.

As things turned out, all our furniture went in a flash. We totally underestimated the demand for second hand bookshelves, wardrobes, beds, and white goods (fridge, dishwasher etc). We could have sold these things three of four times over. What surprised us was how difficult it was to sell our art - the paintings and ornaments that we had accrued through our lives. We actually owned a few valuable pieces and in our minds we believed that these would hold wide appeal. We sold only two of our paintings.

At the car boot sales we found that what we thought was pretty good quality bric a brac was not favoured by the hordes of folks who wandered past our table and who poked and prodded our once treasured possessions. We managed to sell usable kitchen items, crockery, childrens' toys, and flower pots - all our flower pots! We ended up almost giving away our stuff - buy one get five free (please)! We came to the sad realisation that even if we had six months to sell our stuff that very little of it was of value to people - certainly not worth paying for. In the end we decided to give our things away. We set up two tables on the pavement by our front gate and kept them loaded with books, CDs, ornaments, in fact just about anything that we were getting rid of. As it turned out this move became one of the most satisfying experiences of our decluttering process. I took a huge a mount of pleasure of watching friends, acquaintances, and strangers excitedly picking through the items and taking them away. Some folks were obviously unsure about the whole thing - should we pay - should we make a donation - is this for real? Others, who knew what we were doing, would come by on a regular basis to see what we had put out on the tables.

Time passed very quickly. Christmas came and went. The New Year was ushered in with the customary Scottish enthusiasm and with it, a gnawing realisation that we had less than a month to clear our home. Despite our successes in shifting a lot of our stuff, the house did not look any emptier - in fact the situation appeared even more daunting. Stuff filled every room and seemed to be spread across the floors, from wall to wall! It was quite dispiriting. However, the looming deadline spurred our energies and we applied ourselves to ridding ourselves of our accumulated detritus.

All the usable items out of the way, we had to get stuck into the remains. This entailed the physically demanding process of lugging boxes and boxes of items out of the house, into the car, and driving them to Dingwall where I would leave it at the door of the community recycling shop. I have to admit that I never stopped to ask if they wanted our stuff - I just left it there. We didn't leave junk - it was all usable but maybe not marketable. As we began to clear the floors and shift stuff out of the house it became clear that there was a considerable amount of our stuff that we would not find any alternative home for, and sadly this meant that the only place left was the municipal dump.

They are not called dumps anymore - they are now recycling centres. The Highland Council recycling centre at Dingwall was the quietest where you didn't have to queue to get rid of your rubbish. It was a simple task to drive in and empty the car, taking the items to their relevant recycling units - electricals, wood, cardboard, clothing, carpets, and metal. Not everything could be recycled and this stuff very sadly ended up in the machines that squashed the rubbish down for loading into the trucks to be taken to the landfill site. I disliked this part of our decluttering because if the truth be told, a considerable amount of our stuff ended up in these landfill machines. It saddened me to know that in our attempt to live a more simple life we were adding to the landfill problem.

Things took an unpleasant turn when our Landlady came to the house to check it over. She arranged her visit a good week before we were due to formally vacate the property, and as such our packing was far from complete.This for a start put her in a bad mood and she went on to castigate us for the terrible state we were leaving her property in. She proceeded to detail a long list of things she expected us to do before we left including it seemed returning the garden to the condition it was in when we took on the lease. We didn't put up a fight and assured her that we would be returning her keys to her with a house that would be as clean and tidy as when we had taken it on five years earlier. However, this meant that I would have extra work to do in the garden as well as what was needed to be completed in the house. The pressure was on.

The final days of our tenancy saw us working long into the nights, clearing out the rooms, packing boxes for the various charity shops, and making piles of rubbish for the recycling centre. Then each day I would fill the car to the gunwales and make a number of journeys to Inverness and Dingwall with stuff and rubbish. We borrowed a trailer for the last few days to shift the larger items from the garden. I have to admit that I was banjaxed each and every night.

The last two days arrived - the house was empty. What had been our happy and cluttered home was now a shell, ready for its new occupants. We had managed it! Our belongings had been sorted and distributed. All we possessed now were the things we had moved onto the boat and the few precious items we had asked family to look after. Now came the last big push - the steam cleaning of every room, every carpet, every wall - we were determined to leave the house in a better state than when we had moved in. By the evening of the last day we stood at the front door, the floor of the entrance hall gleaming and smelling of fresh pine. Daring not to smudge it with a dirty footprint I closed the door carefully and in so doing brought our house living lifestyle to a close. We walked across the road to our local pub and celebrated, me with a beer and Karen with a glass of wine, before heading back to Inverness Marina and our new home - our wee yacht Strandbo.

Live Aboard - The Decision.

At the end of January this year we left the house we were renting and moved aboard our 27 foot (9 metre) Jaguar yacht. We had purchased her in November the year before and she is the first yacht that we have owned. In fact neither of us have a huge amount of sailing experience but this did not deter us from making the choice to become yachtie liveaboards!

The decision to give up the house and to live aboard a yacht was made many months before we actually bought the boat. It was an organic decision. Over time we had many conversations about our desire to live differently and we explored the various options that we could choose from. For many years I had fantasised about buying a smallholding and creating a yurt encampment with self sufficent power and heating sources. This idea was considered to be one step too far down the alternative living path. However, the seeds for a fundamental change in how we lived had been sown.

Driac sailing up the Sound of Jura

I had some sail cruising experience having crewed a friend's classic yacht on several long journeys. From this experience I knew at first hand what kind of confined space a yacht would present for living aboard. Karen did not have any experience and so could only conceptualise what this may be like. In May last year we entered the Scottish Island Peak Race with Charles, his wife Catherine, and a mutual friend, Vernon. We would sail and compete in the race aboard Driac, Charles' 1930 classic yacht. She is a gorgeous boat with the wonderful lines that one expects from a small ship of her age. Her wooden features ensure that she turns peoples' heads when they see her. She is over 30' long and she certainly feels spacious when moving around on her deck. However, down below she does feel a trifle cramped. The for'ard quarters are pretty basic with pipe cots and the caulking in the deck above doesn't quite keep the surging seas from draining onto any slumbering crew. The heads (the toilet) is an old fashioned affair within the tight confines of a space just big enough to sit down. When using the heads on Driac, it is often best to leave the door open for ease of movement. The main saloon is lovely with a redolent air of antiquity. However this too can feel confined with more than three people trying to move around. All in all, I was not confident that Driac as an example of yacht life, would be the best for Karen to encounter for her first time.

Race day arrived and all five of us found ourselves aboard. I need not have had any concerns because from this first moment, Karen fell in love with Driac and the whole concept of yacht cruising. From then on our conversations about which choice to make about downsizing centred on buying a yacht and moving aboard it.

There were other important aspects to the decision making process that we pondered over in our discussions. The primary one was our motivation for doing this. Both of us have lived fairly alternative lives - by this I mean, neither of us followed the conventional route of entering a career based lifestyle on leaving education. We had both travelled extensively and we had both worked and lived in jobs and in places that had suited us. We met in 2001 and married in 2002. During the following years we have searched for a place where we felt we could settle and call home. We ended up in the small town of Cromarty and for five years we believed that we had found the place we had been searching for; a friendly community, beautiful setting, and fairly remote at the far tip of the Black Isle. We lived in a lovely rented house with a quaint walled garden. We grew vegetables, kept chickens, and enjoyed sharing our lives with many good friends that we had made in the community.

However, deep within us we felt a growing disconnection with this way of life. Despite the pleasure of living in such a wonderful setting, we realised that we desired an element of adventure in our lives - it felt too safe and ordinary. We also found ourselves becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the expense of living a conventional lifestyle - our annual heating oil bill alone was enough to buy ourselves a small yacht! We rented our home with no hope of being able to afford to buy a house in Cromarty and truthfully, we did not want to buy a property. Although old and quaint, the house we were living in was too big for us. We only used three rooms out of the seven to actually live in - the rest were full of boxes that in turn were full of stuff. And this was another thing. We were unhappy about owning so much stuff - belongings that we had carted around with us all our adult lives. Furniture, art work, books, stuffed toys, clothes, children's stuff, stuff from our own child hoods, stuff that we had been given from our families, thousands of photos, unwanted gifts, clothes by the suitcase full, curtains, towels, compact discs and tapes, video tapes, puzzles, board games, kitchenware till it was bulging out of the cupboards, bits of tat from holidays long past, and the general miscellanea of life in the 21st Century. Paperwork! Piles and piles of hoarded paperwork. No, we wanted rid of all of this - every last item. We sought simplicity.

We gave a considerable amount of time to talking about about the impact our downsizing might have for our families and my children. We considered the consequences of not having a home large enough to accommodate them for visits, or heaven forbid, if they needed us to do so in the event of serious illness or incapacitation of any sort. We came to the conclusion that we could not live a life where we held out for these possibilities. If a misfortune was to befall either of our families and we had to step in to provide support, we decided we would be able to do this no matter where or how we were living.

We also paid considerable attention to the enormity of decluttering our lives. We recognised that getting rid of all our valuable and generally well loved possessions was in all probability an irreversible decision. Once they were gone out of our lives they were gone. We would not get them back again. Were we willing to take the chance that sometime down the line we would regret our decision and seek a return life in a house and have to begin furnishing and making a home from scratch? We both came to the conclusion that we were deeply committed to taking this step, and if we were to change our minds, we would accept the consequence of doing so.

What too of our treasured belongings - those items in our lives that are essentially irreplaceable? Things that were gifts from important people in our lives, precious photos, lovely artwork, letters, family heirlooms, and possibly expensive pieces of furniture. This we realised, was going to be tough. We agreed that if we made the choice to downsize then we were to do this with no half measures. We were not going to rent a large container where we would keep all our belongings - just in case. We knew that if we rented storage then deep down we would continue to feel just as cluttered as we had been when we were in the house. We decided that we would allow ourselves to have irreplaceable precious items kept by various family members but we would not burden them with any more than these.

In reality, the decision to declutter and downsize was an extremely easy one for us. After our successful time aboard Driac (though we were not successful in the race), we set our minds to finding the yacht we wanted - in effect our new home. Karen was certain that living on a yacht was what she wanted to do - and so did I. We set ourselves the target of getting rid of our belongings by the end of the year with the aim of leaving the house as soon after the Christmas holiday period as we could. Once we had committed ourselves to this life changing course of action, things seemed to flow very smoothly. We searched on the Internet for yachts within our range of affordability. By September we had viewed a few boats and then in October we came across Strandbo - we fell in love with her the moment we went aboard. We had been told by friends who knew about such things, that we would know the boat we wanted to buy the moment we went aboard - and this was certainly true for us.

'Strandbo' - Jaguar 27

Roughly a month later with all the purchasing formalities completed, we were the proud owners of our very first yacht - our future home. Now came the task of emptying our lives with all the physical paraphernalia that we had each accrued over thirty odd years. I think deep down we knew that this was going to be a massive task, but for the moments and immediate days after acquiring our wee yacht - we both felt a level of excitement and joy that we had not experienced for many years. We could see and feel the eventual liberation from a way of life that we both felt bound by. We felt confident and proud of the decision that we had made - to totally declutter, downsize, and to live aboard a yacht.

The First Post

This is the very first post of a brand new blog. I hope this blog will serve two purposes. The first to share with you my life in the present - living on our small yacht on the west coast of Scotland, and the second, my philosophy of connecting with the outdoor realm.

As the days and weeks unfold I will be developing this website as a means for me to share with the wider world much of the wisdom I have accrued through my years. I have been fortunate to have lived a very rich life so far and I would like to share what I have learned through my professional experiences working in the outdoors as a guide and an instructor, as a facilitator, as a wilderness therapist, as a psychotherapist and counsellor, as a mental health development worker, as a jewellery artist, and as a sea kayak guide.

I turned fifty in August. This is an age where I think that I now have permission to speak of my wisdom, almost as if I consider myself an elder. In a way I have been waiting for this moment in my life where my half century of living validates all that I have acquired through personal and professional experiences. I am under no illusion that what I am willing to share is not of vital importance, but I do think that if you have an interest in the outdoors, working with people in the outdoors, wildness, and nature, then I may have insights that may be of use to you.

When I worked for Outward Bound in the '80s there were senior instructors and senior staff who would make themselves available so that junior instructors could bend their ears about activity ideas, group issues, and expedition route plans. Their depth of experience and their willingness to share their knowledge was invaluable to inexperienced instructors who were hungry for knowledge. The small tips and nuggets of advice that they gave, which they thought may have been insignificant, were actually gems of wisdom that proved to be invaluable. Through these informal interactions between the experienced and the not so experienced our profession as Outward Bound instructors flourished because the collective knowledge base simply grew and grew.

I don't work at a centre anymore and I don't have a means where I can sit with others to share, to chat, and to learn.

This blog then is my attempt to recreate as I remember it, the moments in the Outward Bound Aberdovey staff room after the evening meal. This was the time when the instructional staff were all together for the half hour before heading out for the evening activities. The moment that the senior staff would plonk themselves down next to a more junior instructor and ask the simple question - "How's it going then?"

So began the sharing of knowledge - the passing on of wisdom.