“Live the life you’ve imagined.”
The little wooden sign sat for years behind the barista stand at the FLounge - what the locals called the Finger Lakes Lounge here. It probably sat there for years before I even noticed it, as well. But notice it I did, during the summer of 2016. It was a time that I was at a crossroads - return to Florida, or try something new? I couldn’t imagine returning to the heat and humidity of Orlando, having been laid off after nine years with the same company, waiting to find out if the rental I’d called home for 6+ years (at far-below market rates) would sell. Maybe it was time for a change?
I had been eyeing boats up and down the coast for months, mostly dreaming, but one posted on Craigslist right here in Waterloo, NY caught my eye during my vacation. I called to inquire, just out of curiosity, but it was a little out of my price range. In the days before I was to return to Florida, though, the owner lowered it a couple grand. I called him again, and I’m thinking he recognized the number on his caller ID.
“Let me tell you three things about this boat,” he bellowed into the phone.
“Okay...”
“First off, I won’t go a penny lower. I don’t need to sell it. I’ll KEEP IT! I’ll SAIL IT MYSELF!”
“No problem,” I told him. (I didn’t mention that I would have bern willing to offer a little higher than his now asking price.)
“Second... this is an older boat. You will NOT be able to secure financing. So don’t come to me if your next trip is going to be to the bank.”
“I’d be paying cash,” I replied.
He softened a little.
“Third... it’s a LOT OF BOAT. If I had a dollar for everyone who came to look at this and left after telling me it was bigger than they had imagined, I could buy this boat and sell it again. This is NOT a small boat.”
“I am looking for a large boat, because I plan to live aboard during the summers,” I told him. 
“Well then, this is the one you want.”
An appointment was set for me to come see it.
When I first laid eyes on it, I was overwhelmed. I couldn’t help myself... the first words that popped out of my mouth were “this is a lot of boat!” He eyeballed me warily, clearly annoyed, so I quickly turned to him and said, “I’ve never driven a boat this big...”
“Most people haven’t,” he replied. “But if you’re looking for a cottage on the water, this is the boat…”
A tour of the inside showed me that this, indeed, WAS the boat. It was spacious! After taking my family for a tour of it the next day, to give them a chance to talk me out of it - they didn’t try - and ensuring that I could find insurance and a slip for a boat its size - I got the only one left that summer - I was the proud owner/inhabitant of a 36’ 1977 Trojan Tri-Cabin.
“Live the life you’ve imagined.”
Those of you who have known me a long time know that I have wanted to live on a boat since I was a little kid.
I still remember trips down the lake to get gas on summer evenings when I was still in the single digits, my father driving my grandfather’s old rivet-challenged rowboat with its now-classic outboard motor. We would putter past the beautiful, nearly-new cabin cruisers in the marina - including, quite possibly, the one I own now - and I’d look over at the boat owners enjoying dinner and drinks on the water.
“That’s going to be me one day,” I’d tell everyone else in the boat.
My grandfather, who himself loved boats, would give me a lecture on depreciation. “Boat… Bring Over Another Thousand,” and “if you’re going to buy a boat, buy an old boat… those are the only boats that might actually go UP in value.”
Still, I was sure that would be me one day.
“Live the life you’ve imagined.”
I remember in my early college years seeing a movie called ‘The Cure’. Two boys on a search for the cure for the AIDS virus travel south, and during part of the journey they hitch a ride on a cabin cruiser headed for the bayou. Watching the owners of that boat spend days mindlessly motoring through the intercoastal, evenings anchored in the sunset having dinners offshore... that spoke to me. “That’s going to be me someday,” I told my friend seated next to me.
Later in college I visited Maine with my family. We had dinner at the famous DiMillo's On The Water, and I sat at our windowside table and looked out on all of the people spending a cold, but cozy, night on their boats. I asked the waiter if any of those people lived on their boats full-time, and he told me a great many of them did.
“That’s going to be me one day,” I told my family.
For the summers in between 2005 - 2006 it was me, on a tiny scale. I bought a 26 foot Chris-Craft sailboat, and spent as many nights on it as I could. It was hot, small, and not very comfortable, but it was an adventure. I had read the exploits of Capt. Fatty Goodlander in Cruising World Magazine, cruising around the world and exploring new cultures. As I was exploring the culture of Watkins Glen, New York, I managed to go a solid three weeks without ever putting on a pair of shoes, wearing flip-flops and walking into town for groceries and food.
“This is going to be me, but for real one day,” I kept telling myself.
I moved to Orlando in 2006, and save for summer visits to the cottage and some time on the boat, I was landlocked. Every once in a while I would get out to Daytona or Cocoa Beach, where seeing other people living the dream would fuel mine. I’d look into boats for sale, but the expense of a marina slip - typically $800/month and up in Florida - and the shortage of slips allowing people to live on their boats, put that on hold.
Plus you work for a company, and you get stuck in the corporate rut. I had a job, friends, and a decent home in Orlando. I was alright for a while.
(I won’t lie though: friends who visited me can tell you it took me more than a year to buy living room furniture for my new place - doing so felt like defeat, as if I was surrendering the life I’d imagined.)
In late 2015 my entire department was outsourced, and I received a severance package of a decent enough amount. In 2016 I looked at slip prices during my annual trip up to New York and realized I could live for months here on what two months in Florida would cost me. My boat coming up on Craigslist, and the availability of the cottage during the off-season, made it all come together. I almost named her “Severance” - that means “a state of being separated or cut off”, which I really liked, and would also be how I paid for her. When I was peeling off the final lettering of her former name, “Eagles Wings III”, I somehow wound up with three letters remaining: “WIN”.
“Hmm,” I told my friend. “I think I just saved $150 on new vinyl lettering. (I’d call that a ‘win’ hehe).
The boat would become mine.
And later, when the FLounge closed down and sold everything at clearance, the little sign, too.
“Live the life you’ve imagined.”
This is my fifth year as caretaker of M/V WIN.
And over those years, it has become so much more than just a boat. It has truly become my home. And, more importantly, it has become a gathering spot for so many of my family and friends.
My family has visited many times. My father loves to do projects on it, and my mother enjoys shopping for it - although she'd a worrier, and I haven’t gotten her to go out yet. (“I don’t see why you need to take it out at all,” she says. “Can’t you just enjoy it right here at the dock?”) My brother helped me set up a webcam on the canal earlier this season, although that effort has been put on hold. And when we held a 50th wedding anniversary party in 2018 family from around the country couldn’t wait to take the tour.
In my first week of boat ownership I’d be joined by Jesse and Chris and Jared for a bachelor party. A week or so later Jesse and Danielle would visit the boat for something of a honeymoon cruise. And it would be a place they, and Dee would join me, for most of the major holidays, right up until this year. Fireworks from the boat every year? Yes.
My friend Bill would be closely behind them, visiting the boat so often at the beginning that my boat neighbors for a while believed that he was its owner, and I was visiting him!
Chad would make several visits to the boat - including one in a body cast lol - along with Roxanne, Caden, and Ashleigh.
Chris, whose family has a cottage near ours, would visit from year to year, and so often repeat "I still can't believe you live on a boat."
Erin and Zeth would join me for my first-ever “I’m the captain now” voyage, and Erin would be my grocery bitch, and good company, after my hospitalization when I was too weak to go to the store.
My only remaining friend from high school, Chris, too, would step up his visits, coming out often after my diagnosis. Even before, boat rides (on his boat) with he and his son, Justice, were a summer highlight. They and Chris’s wife, Heidi, gave me my captain’s hat for Christmas. Justice would ask me "What if you've convinced yourself that you are living the dream, but you're really just one step above homelessness?" Hmm lol.
Robin, who would come out to spend the weekend fishing and relaxing with me in what he’d later tell me was the most relaxed he’d been in a long, long time. (Boats just hit different).
And Cam and Kaysie, their daughter in tow, would come out from NH July 4th last year. Cameron would take his own life in November, and I've wished ever since that I'd actually had the nerve to take the boat out that day...
And, in 2017, 2018, and 2019, just waking up, rolling out of my berth, and sauntering over to the start of the Musselman? (Why didn’t I think of that the previous 10+ years?!) Many of my Mussel committee friends would swing (or kayak) by for tours, as well. One joked that the boat was so big we could have our entire organizing committee meeting on it if we wanted to. That was fun.
And my marina family… I’d meet so many amazing people at the marina through these years as well.
John and Janet and Joe, who would welcome me to the neighborhood before I’d even formally secured the slip. John passed in 2017, but he spent the summer of 2016 going out with me, Joe, Janet, and Bill, and teaching me how to drive my boat, with Joe arguing with him on the key points and Janet handling the lines and enjoying the ride up front.
“That’s a beautiful boat,” John would often say. I’d look around the marina to see what he was talking about, and he’d shake his head and point to mine. “That one. Yours. That’s a beautiful boat. You made a good choice.” That was especially reassuring that first year as I wondered WTF I had done.
I’d later relocate to my current slip, where I’d meet Jack and Carol, and Ovid and Bobbi. They’d often invite me to join them for breakfast on the weekends, and feed me deliciousness without so much as an eye roll that I never had anything delicious to offer in return.
Lisa and Mike, who’d offer countless invites to their fabled marina-side fires - I still have to make it over for one of those.
Mike with the Viking was always good for a story or five, and he and his wife Tammy, as well as Jim and Nora, my across-the-canal neighbors, would shout out encouragement once I finally got the hang of driving the boat by myself.
“You’re taking it OUT???!! Oh, look, Chris is taking it OUT!”
(Encouragement, or amazement?)
Denny and Marsha, Jim (I had to look his name up even today even though he always greets me by mine) and Lisle… I couldn’t ask for better boating neighbors. I have truly been blessed.
Last, but certainly not least, my community friends, who have traveled from near and far to join me for boat voyages.
Ryan, from Cornell; Jeff, who actually visits me everywhere; Evan, who joined us for a weekend all the way from CT; David, who took the train in from NYC; Javier, who flew in all the way from Miami; Brad, from Washington DC, James from Taiwan via Albany; Adam, who came out from Buffal; Zein, who as a local student made the boat his weekend study spot one fall; and of course Tyson, who made it out two years in a row all the way from Iowa, both times with plans to get into the engine room and give her a tune-up - but both times we were just so relaxed…
Michael and Robert, who would become my go-to crew, handling the lines on launches and gas runs, and entertaining my neighbors with their love for wine in the process. And Will, who could often be found pouring the wine, with varying degrees of success.
Mikey, who basically becomes the life of any party.
Tommy, whose trips out to “Lake Geneva” were often a lesson in astronomy or science.
Matt, whose experiences as a kid with his grandfather’s boat would help us in an emergency docking situation.
Dave, who later confided to me that trips to the boat changed everything about the way he saw himself and sparked some real changes in his life.
And Nick, and Patrick, and… too many to name, really. This boat has truly become a social gathering place for so many of us.
Anyone who read all of that, and is still reading... you are the real ones lol.
Last month I went to the emergency room with stomach pain and some other symptoms. My blood pressure was off the charts. They ran a battery of tests before coming back to tell me they had found a tumor inside my digestive tract. I had a consultation with a surgeon later that week, and he informed me that the tumor was in a high-risk area “wrapped in blood vessels and resting on an artery.” Oh boy. He also told me that I had lesions on my liver, and those would need to be tested first to see if they were related.
After the biopsy results came back I was informed that the tumor(s) in my liver were cancerous. A consultation with a surgeon specializing in cancer of this area was set up. I met with her last week, and she told me that I have Stage IV carcinoid cancer, and that while it had spread to my digestive tract and liver, it had likely started in another organ. Tests had also shown positive for two other cancers - those results are being analyzed now.
The prognosis for my type of cancer is dependent on how far it has spread. In my case, it has already spread a lot. Still, it’s a slow-moving cancer, and there’s no set timeframe in which it could worsen, etc. In fact, if the various surgeries are successful, it could get better.
As of right now it looks like the surgery on the tumor could be difficult, but my doctor seems very positive about that part and says that, while there are certainly risks, she has performed similar surgeries successfully before.
Surgery on my liver, too, shouldn’t be difficult - once they ascertain where the cancer is. As of right now they can’t see it on the scans; they guessed during the biopsy, and got it right, but my surgeon tells me that she can’t afford go guess during surgery, so I will be going in for a PET scan in the next week or so to try to get some GPS information on that one.
The third - and what I hope will be final - area is an organ in which surgery could be tricky. If they take too little out during surgery the cancer will remain or come back. If they take too much, the rest of my life could be filled with medical complications. And because they really aren’t able to determine how far the cancer has spread until they actually do the surgery, they often decide not to DO the surgery right in the middle of it. (Even when the surgery can’t be done, I’m told, my doctor has “had patients go on to live as long as ten years!” So there’s that.)
As for right now, I’ve been told that my number one focus needs to be on staying positive, and on staying as healthy as possible.
Lucky for me, I’m in a place where it’s hard not to stay positive. When I got the call to inform me that I’d received results for cancer, I hung up, turned and looked down the lake, and realized how lucky I am to be here. If you have to get bad news, I 10/10 recommend receiving it on a boat.
Live the life you’ve imagined.
For the time being, I’ve taken time off from my job, and from each of the events that I was still involved with. I am going to try to take a break from social media for a bit, as well. My only focus, for now, has to be on trying to relax, continuing to think positive, and - unfortunately, bad timing - avoiding the Coronavirus.
(Thank you, those who have not visited or stopped by with masks on, for your help with that part.) 😷
For me the ultimate dream would be doing this live aboard boating thing year-round. Maybe in South Carolina, or Florida, or San Diego, or Seattle. Or maybe Sicily or Amsterdam.
Barring COVID-19, cancer complications, or other health issues, that is still the goal.
But today, as I write this, I feel the need to express that I am especially grateful to have been able to live this life at all.
I have talked to people who, upon receiving a cancer diagnosis, came to the sudden realization that they'd had a dream that they'd never taken the time to realize.
Not me.
To all those who have joined me on M/V WIN, thank you for being a part of this. I am hopeful you'll be able to join me when things are better... see you back on the boat soon.
Until then, keep me in your thoughts. And, whether your own dream is a lofty one or just one step above homelessness... do whatever you can to live the life that YOU'VE imagined. 🛥
