There’s magic in the return of spring, especially for us boaters. After months of napping, I find something in me awakens and a fresh yearning sets in to spend long afternoons in the cockpit breathing in air that has weight. As the sun sets a little later each day and summer gets its footing, I get an itch. Something buried in my soul yawns and stretches and looks for trouble to cause.
I write this on the vernal equinox, the astronomical start of spring, which is odd this year as a veil of bonkers weather creeps over the nation chucking a blistering heat dome at one part of the country while deep freezing another. Temperatures aside, we’re wired for spring, and its sense of hope and renewal. There’s a momentum and a lifting of mood as we anticipate all the joy that shorter nights will bring.
But spring is a nonlinear progression, and anticipation is both friend and foe. It’s hard to plan when dynamic weather is afoot. There’s rain one day and sun the next, so it’s hard to schedule anything, but one thing’s for sure—I can’t ignore the boat chores and long list of commissioning tasks ahead. Like me, the boat needs a glow up, and I have much to barrel through before I wake up the dormant diesel. Each year, I struggle to meet my own expectations of varnishing and polishing, and I dread finding another bird nest in the folds of the mainsail cover. I relish the idea of watching drops of morning dew chase each other down the dodger, but I shudder at the thought of wiping mildew out of dark corners. It’s definitely a beast with two heads.
Spring is change, and change is exciting but also anxiety-producing. It’s a terrible joy, an inevitable paradox that presses the reset button and lures me out on the water faster than I can get the necessary jobs done. It’s also the time I realize I’m way behind in lining up this year’s charters, so I scour the Internet for last-minute, shoulder season deals to sail after the winter crowds leave the Caribbean and before the summer hordes descend on the Mediterranean. How did I fall this far behind?
The inevitable challenge rears its head: where to go that’s fresh and new, but also popular enough to attract a crew? That rhymes well enough to serve as a charter tagline, I think and then quickly refocus on the task at hand.
Will others be up for long flights to exotic Thailand or will airport security lines dampen the travel bug? I settle on Greece, which can support a lifetime of chartering without ever becoming tedious or remotely repetitive, and maybe something closer to home like the San Juan Islands in the Pacific Northwest that don’t require a passport. With fresh targets identified, I take the next steps. I’ve done them hundreds of times from contacting companies to rallying troops, creating crew lists, and planning provisioning. It’s muscle memory and it’s my comfort zone, a familiar touchpoint in the newness of this season. Winter is already a fading and fuzzy memory.
Spring is a time when I’m not sure where to jump next, but the sheer energy of not knowing is electrifying. By next fall, I won’t remember this chaos, which will have been pushed out of my mind by silky summer nights at anchor with falling stars and the moon as a nightlight.
Maybe it’s best to savor these helter-skelter days of preparation, communication, and endless trips to the chandlery. But maybe I should also think about getting those charters set up a little earlier next year…
This article was originally published in the June 2026 issue.
