The essays here are written alongside two longer books that share their voice and concerns:
The Missing Witness — fiction on solitude and observation.
Dead Reckoning — long-form work on navigation and judgment under uncertainty.
All essays · Three series · 19 pieces
These essays are written from within experience — not as instruction, and not as conclusion. They're attempts to notice what changes when conditions get real: offshore, under pressure, and in the places where clean models stop matching lived reality.
Longer work
The essays here are written alongside two longer books that share their voice and concerns:
The Missing Witness — fiction on solitude and observation.
Dead Reckoning — long-form work on navigation and judgment under uncertainty.
Series · 7 essays
Essays on solitude, attention, identity, and the quiet mechanics of keeping a boat — and a mind — steady when no one is watching.
Why the story that draws people toward solo sailing often explains the beginning better than the continuation.
How freedom changes once constraint disappears — and why it eventually stops providing direction on its own.
The quiet cost of being the sole authority in an environment that never fully powers down.
How identity softens and sharpens when feedback, reflection, and witnesses fall away.
Why moments — beautiful or difficult — can feel lighter without shared presence.
The point at which isolation stops producing insight and begins to repeat itself instead.
How connection can return without undoing the clarity solitude created.
Series · 5 essays
Essays about prediction, planning, and the subtle ways simplified representations change our decisions — especially when reality stops cooperating.
A concrete physical example of model decay in practice.
Generalizes the problem beyond tides into a broader modeling pattern.
Explains why these failures persist at the interface layer.
A common operational failure caused by hidden assumptions.
How operators adapt when tools don't expose uncertainty.
Series · 7 essays
Modern weather tools and the handoff from prediction to judgment — where models stay useful, but stop being in charge.
How forecasts become stories — and what gets lost when the screen becomes the reference point.
Long-range certainty, early commitment, and the quiet way a "window" turns into an obligation.
Consensus feels like closure — until it changes your posture and the weather starts testing commitment.
Models describe conditions, not consequences — and your body often notices the missing variables first.
The moment prediction stops helping and attention takes over — watching what is happening, not what was promised.
When the plan is already moving and responsibility returns — margins, inertia, and the discipline of responsiveness.
A closing handoff: forecasts stay useful, but stop being in charge — what remains is attention, humility, and judgment.
Practical guides
Separately from the essays, the Bahamas Sailing Guide collects seven practical pieces for sailors planning the Florida-to-Bahamas crossing — weather windows, Gulf Stream timing, what to bring, whether you need a captain, and how to think about safety.
If there's a through-line here, it's this: tools are useful, but they're never the sea. The work is learning where the model ends — and staying awake in what follows.