My Response to: "Why are you selling?"

This seems to be the next most popular question after are there any issues, so, briefly..

I bought Clock Work after a really good motorcycle wreck in CA (police motorcycle instructor school) brought my 25+ year run of putting in mostly 100-hr weeks to a full stop that could not be restarted. Wanted to spend more time doing fun things with the family and make up for 2M miles running around mostly solving design/measurement problems. I thought a trawler was the best choice... I was pure sailor/racer before that. The idea of exploring the northeastern seaboard with the family seemed attractive, as was doing the mission planning/engineering to CW to bring a couple of well-prepped bikes up the Hudson and into the Great Lakes to take a dirt bike riding vacation in the U-P of Michigan with a friend. That's why *I* wanted the crane:) Screw that primitive camping stuff... CW is a perfect and comfortable home base.

Turns out the family didn't enjoy boating at all and that was sufficient to take out the plan as formulated. For a several years thereafter, the fun for me with the boat became doing a wide range of mechanical/electrical projects, maintenance method experiments, and designing/building various solutions with a life-long friend/aircraft-mechanic/fabricator/Renaissance-man who taught me photography when I was 8, and THE most skilled engine diagnostician who ever got his fingernails dirty. CW was a way of continuing the sort of serious skills collaboration we'd already done together for decades. That lasted until he quickly got sick with something obviously serious, whereupon I closed my company to be their full-time wingman on the "technical decision-making", which is the core of what I do/study the past 25 years or so. From the point he got sick, there was an increasing need for what I do during my consulting (harm avoidance via detection of faulty/lazy junk-thinking/decision-making), and my interest in boating/marina "life" went to zero. After he passed, I continued going down there to close out projects and maintenance experiments we started, and try to get interested (no joy)... I finished the quick-deploy sea-anchor (tool to greatly reduce/control wind-driven horizontal slip after an engine-out to buy more time for a tow to arrive) from a military cargo drogue chute. This project was one of our favorites (he was a pilot), and some others like a correct fuel polisher (there's a subtle feature those absolutely need to be effective that I've never once seen in a yuppie DIY job). My time allocation was 90% work on/tinker... 10% short runs around the bay using it as my office for a few days and then head home for a while. Often never left the dock. My accumulation of engine hours essentially came to a dead stop, which fortunately has turned out to be a genuine selling point. Thank covid for another nice chunk of that too.. it being conveyed to me that driving 125 miles to another state was a firing-squad offense. Also just too much driving... it takes much of the fun out of tinkering to be so far from your GIANT tool collection and machine shop.. and the commute time for some reason began to climb severely too.

The straw that sank the camel was me bending over the steel step next to the transmission that you use to climb out of the engine room.. reaching down into the bilge for a suspected intermittent pump switch I believe (specifically, trying to remove the ridiculously-tough hose off the pump). After several hours of exerting in that position, I brilliantly perf'd my old man stomach lining and ended up with an abdominal bleed and in an ambulance on my way to 3 wasted days in a hospital. I promised myself in the ambulance that the next time I "get hurt having fun" it will be crashing a dirt bike out in the woods, on Earth Day, as God intended.

I liked and do still like the BOAT.. a lot.  I spent a year and a half tracking down just the right one and many seasons taking care of it to my best. But the universe beat me. I hate the constantly lengthening ride/traffic. I hate that 100% of the time THE tool you need is in one of the tool chests in the shop or garage back home. I hate having to go home so frequently to modify a tool or make a part. I would hope to add politely that I am "incompatible" with the majority of marine service providers/predators I meet and am of the supportable opinion I do vastly better, faster work than all of them put together. But predominantly, life's too short to live it choosing between family and a machine/activity. Of course, if that machine were, say, a Husky ~74 360 Sportsman, well... I'd hate how that might make me look on the more civilized docks.

The silver lining for the next owner is a greatly reduced engine-hours burn-rate the last years.

Post-"walkabout" Postscript

I very consciously did not put this part down when I initially wrote this, but an unpleasant group of multiple unhinged respondents to this site all in one week changed that instinct. So, truth be told, there was one more nail in the coffin of me choosing to end spending my heartbeats with a machine I carefully sought out, lavished with informed care done The Right Way, and loved (though not the part designed by the idiot who did the drains up on the dinghy deck... brilliantly requiring water to flow uphill to find its way out. Gravity is hard! Morons exist, and as two of the bigger stars of my book note... 1. the Gaussian is real as hell, and 2. By # 1 ALL populations, so-called professionals extremely included, are adulterated and your default setting when encountering any new potential of technical advice source on CCLS problems should be DO NOT TRUST them). Digressing... apologies.

Reason # 1 for me to pull the EJECT handles when I did was people. Certainly, I personally flee shallow and especially performative conversation if I can do so politely... but this side of me is rarely detected. I can easily participate authentically if it is necessary to simply be polite. And it's not pain as much as feeling the lost opportunity to be doing something more useful. Still, all things equal, I simply more enjoy sitting in a hot unventilated hangar/garage discussing a repair or diagnosis with talented individuals.. or standing over a lathe in a machine shop with a 95 yr old master tool-maker/machinist who was pulled off a boat about to push off for WW2/Europe to work 2-3 jobs making shit well for his country and trying to soak up every GD detail he's trying to pass on.. listening to one of my police bikes' engines at 2am under the stars in a favorite town parking lot creaking as it cools down, while I stand in the middle of a bunch of cones looking down and trying to shake loose that next idea for shaving that fraction of an inch off of a standard pattern and convert to procedural memory by drilling it in. I especially suck at sunsets, deep discussion of sail cover colors, and wine... I just don't "get it". What I do GET is that being like me is weird to everyone, and there are always better choices available than to hang around with that mutant (me obviously) either.... but I do give it my level best when called upon.

The preceding fundamental mismatch was at most a 10 or 20% minor contributor to abandon my boat and especially once I began parking it nose in. I was handling that fine but honestly was missing life flying from one cool problem to the next, and the mostly smart guys that lined my world for those 25 years. So, absolutely not the decent-to-mutants 10-20%.

It was the marine-service providers. The used-car-salesman-reputation and ethics of "mechanics" and others. I wanted to farm out every damn detail and focus on moving up the operational skill curve. The blog series on this site more than covers the experience with the bulk of the predator class I met. The service providers were reason # 1 and obvious across my period of ownership from nearly the start.

Then a second fact equally worthy of fleeing boating... again, unlike that 10-20% mere mismatch described above. It was a small riot of arrogant, never-done-shit-know-nothings amping it up to 11.... for the crime of invoking 50+ yr of engineering/technical-decision-making. These individuals were seemingly suffering a psychiatrist-fabricated cpu failure called an "ego threat" (though I prefer the vastly simpler "engaging asshole mode"... qué será etc)... Apparently triggers when a hobby-thinker, upon encountering another party with non-trivial lived experience/education and an explanation of the universe that differs from their understanding, goes visibly unstable, and realizing quickly they don't actually have the power over reality they thought they had 2 msec earlier... whence FIRMLY demanding of the infidel that they be granted the power to instantly force the universe become more precisely aligned with their initial assumption.... you know.... like "I command your unworthy heretical ass to turn that which is less reliable but still more wonderful than anything else (according to the broker or the brochure) into that which all will again known as the epitome of reliability." There's plenty on ET on the web if this form of severely over-acted stupidity interests you, though trust me... no fun in person. However... being triggered by right answers is MUCH easier than putting the effort in accumulating a respectable system design philosophy informed by experience or significant training. I suspect this explains where concepts like karens, TDS and other trendy so-called triggers of otherwise super deep thinkers come from. I must admit though that science would sure be a hell of a lot easier if research/learning could work like that!

So while such people as just described existed in my boat ownership life since Day 1, they were stochastically uncommon, but not black swans....... UNTIL, just prior to my walk-about. The related "gone-fishing" blog was ~May of last year... but the instigating event where I experienced the privilege of meeting (email and/or phone) either 4 or 5 of them in a single week was two, maybe three, months prior as I just took off and did fun things. I had a nearly identical encounter with the Moisture Meter Fan Club after having the poor judgement to recount my own lived experience in the black arts of measurement, measurement interpretation, physics and technical decision-making. At that point, it was a one-off and I found it hilarious in a Beavis/Butthead kind of way. Fool me once............ as they say. No doubt at all there will be people who find my hostility to arrogant junk thinking en masse by those kind of guys arguing... full volume... "if it's not there, it can't fail"... to a guy who spent 30 yr researching the creation of potential harm to innocents.. 4-500 case studies.. who studied reliable system design in grad school and practiced it consultively since the 80's.. this reaction is tame. But more...why in hell to they care, that loud?

This hopefully explains the references to "a certain kind of person" in other articles. I hope further that this adequately differentiates the completely innocent "we don't fit in with each other" encounters with most, from the predator services class and the "ego-threatened" in this update. Let me part by citing a very old personal philosophy... One idiot, barging or otherwise, drags you down further and in multiple ways, than 10 high-hours high-performers elevate you... Avoid at all costs.