WANDER WIDE

Chapter 1: Ctrl+Alt+Quit

The meeting dragged on for 87 minutes. Curtis knew because he’d counted each minute; a drip of oil from a tired valve. One eye on the Zoom timer, the other on the same cluttered slide full of tables and graphs no one would remember by lunch. Outside his Seattle window, a fine mist coated the city. Inside, his team buzzed with scalable solutions, alignment metrics, and value-added designs.

Curtis Hollander, thirty-eight, sat at his sleek workstation surrounded by a life that looked good on paper. He faced three monitors, with dual drafting tablets and a matte-black coffee mug that read I Void Warranties. Behind him, his condo was tastefully curated with nautical prints and soft gray throws. The walls were covered with reclaimed wood shelves lined with architecture books and model kits he used to love. The space was perfect, and it suddenly felt like someone else’s.

“Curtis, can you speak to the thermal dissipation concerns on the next-gen housing?” Phil’s voice came; clipped and performative.

Curtis clicked his mic on. He drug the words out, he had to do it and knew he shouldn’t. “Yeah,” he said, “I’ve got a few thoughts. I think we’ve engineered the joy out of everything. We’re spending our lives designing heat sinks for products no one loves, trying to shave half a degree off something no one will notice. Honestly? I think I’m rusting.”

He heard nothing but silence. A stunning silence, complete with blinking eyes and delayed reactions.

Phil gave a forced chuckle. “Was that…a metaphor, Curtis?”

He felt a hot pulse of clarity rise in his chest. His brain was alive with activity, with the uncertainty of his action.

“You know what?” he said. “I quit. I’m going sailing.”

Then, without another word, he clicked Leave Meeting.

A new Curtis pushed back from his chair and walked slowly to the window. Below, the streets shimmered with rain. Cargo cranes loomed over Elliott Bay waiting to form a new skyline. Somewhere beyond them, open water waited, cold, unpredictable, alive, and timeless.

Curtis pressed his forehead to the glass and shut his eyes.

Sailing. He didn’t own a boat. He didn’t know how to sail. He hadn’t even been on the water in years. But the words hadn’t come from his mouth. They’d erupted from something deeper, bone and blood, maybe memory.

On the bookshelf was a framed photo of his grandfather Tom standing in the driveway, a hand resting on the cedar-strip canoe they’d built together. Curtis, maybe sixteen, stood beside him, grinning, sunburned, proud. The boat had no electronics. They hadn’t had CAD files, or a How-To video. They had wood, resin, and time. They’d spent entire weekends sanding, shaping, listening to Mariners games in the background while Grandpa Tom told stories of the sea, his navy years, a merchant run to Alaska, a storm off Cape Blanco that nearly took them down.

Tom had died five years ago, and Curtis hadn’t been on the water since. He remembered the smell of his grandfather’s workshop, sawdust and pipe tobacco. He remembered the way Tom said,

“A man needs to know how to work with his hands and with the wind. Everything else is just noise.”

Curtis stepped back from the glass. The silence in his condo was so complete it throbbed. His phone buzzed on the coffee table with the latest message in a family text thread:

Mom: Lasagna night Friday! Bring someone fun this time.
Uncle Mark: I’m bringing me. Fun handled. Got the new fishing boat, might take it out if the rain lets up.
Dad: Don’t forget your cousin Alex is speaking at the Rotary Club next week.

He stared at the screen. The Hollanders were an old family. They built businesses and stable reputations. His dad had run the same construction firm for forty years. His mom taught three generations of kids in Tacoma.

They didn’t understand Curtis’s career of endless CAD revisions, thermal modeling, and stakeholder briefings. “Looks like math to me.” They were proud of him because he was successful and because he was family. But why no wife, no house, no truck with a winch and a Labrador in the back?

He didn’t have the words to explain the ache inside.

He walked to the kitchen, poured the last of the coffee into a chipped mug from a regatta he never sailed in, and opened his laptop. His ignored email, opened a browser and typed:

“Trimarans for sale – Pacific Northwest”

The page loaded, and the first listing was titled:

36’ Custom Trimaran – Needs TLC – A Dream With Work Needed – Liveaboard Ready

Curtis stared at it. Something in his chest cracked open just wide enough to let the wind in.

Chapter 2: The Dream, TLC Needed

The ‘dream’ was listing gently to starboard, and definitely needed work. Curtis wanted to run. The boat had decided not to stand straight, his decision to quit had been a stupid one, and he really wondered if he had come to the right place.

He stood on the dock, arms crossed. This is what he had just driven three hours and gone through two existential crises to see. The listing of lies was just the beginning. The hull was faded to a dull pinkish white, less “racing vessel” and more “forgotten bathtub.” A colony of aggressive seagulls had claimed squatter’s rights on the aft deck. One stared him down with the knowing, dead-eyed look of a bird that had seen too much and approved of none of it.

The listing had said:

36’ Custom Trimaran – Needs TLC – A Dream With Work Needed – Liveaboard Ready
Needs TLC. Great bones. A dream with work needed. Motivated seller.**”

Curtis didn’t know what the two asterisks meant. He had spent the last two days Googling terms like how to not die sailing and cheap boat ownership mistakes, which had mostly turned up videos of people sinking things and still smiling about it. Somehow, he had ended up here, Anacortes Marina, wearing his cleanest jeans and trying to look like someone who understood port from starboard.

The seller turned out to be a piece of leather on two legs, in his late fifties with a silver ponytail and a hemp necklace. He appeared from below deck holding two mugs of what might be coffee or bilge water. His name was Rolf. No last name, just Rolf.

“She’s got character,” he had said, grinning as he handed Curtis a mug. “Bit of a rescue, but she’s seaworthy. In the philosophical sense.”

Curtis stared into the mug. “Do I drink this?”

“Up to you,” Rolf said with a grin. “But it’s organic.”

Curtis took a polite sip and immediately questioned his will to live.

“Right,” he said, trying to sound breezy. “So… a trimaran. That’s the three-hull one, right?”

Rolf raised an eyebrow. “You’ve never sailed?”

Curtis hesitated. “I mean, not… extensively. I did a little kayaking once. In college.”

The second eyebrow joined the first.

“But,” Curtis added quickly, “I’m mechanically inclined. Engineering background. Hands-on guy. Good with tools. I learn fast.”

Rolf took this in with a squint and a long sip of his own awful brew. “That’s what the last guy said. He got her stuck in a sandbar near Olympia and left her there for two months. But hey, she forgives.”

He patted the mast like a sleeping dog.

Curtis tossed his mug’s contents into the marina before Rolf turned back. He apologized to the fish he’d just killed and followed Rolf aboard. The deck creaked under his boots. He crouched to inspect a hairline crack in the fiberglass and ran a hand along the rail. It was rough in places, but the shape beneath it felt solid. Beneath the gull poop and flaking paint, there was something quietly heroic about the boat. He felt it was a fighter with one more good round left.

“What’s her name?” Curtis asked.

Rolf grinned. “The Wanderer.”

Curtis blinked. “That’s… that’s not terrible.”

“I know, right? No weird puns. No Sea Señor or Knotty by Nature. Just simple. She belonged to a woman who solo-sailed to Costa Rica and back. Said she heard whales sing off the bow once. Then she got married, had twins, and flaked her sails for a Subaru.”

“Flaked?”

“Folded man, folded.” Rolf raised his empty mug. “You’ll learn brother. Want another?”

Curtis shook his head slowly, turning to look back at the cockpit. He imagined the ocean, the open sky, the smell of salt and fuel, wind tugging at a sail he hadn’t yet learned to raise. He imagined sitting right here at night with a thermos of real coffee and a notebook, and no inbox. No Zoom. No Phil.

Oh… Phil. He’d sent one follow-up message since the call:

Hey Curtis. If you need a leave of absence instead of quitting outright, we could maybe talk. Let me know. Phil.

Curtis hadn’t replied. Partly because he didn’t know what to say. Mostly because he was afraid he’d be talked back into the safe, rusting cell of a paycheck.

He took a breath and looked around the boat again. “So what kind of work does she need?”

Rolf pulled out a short list. Curtis read it. Then reread it. Then he laughed out loud. It felt good.

“‘Deck delamination… rigging suspect… potential soft spot in port ama…’ What does ‘potential’ mean here?”

Rolf shrugged, smiling. “It means it’s definitely soft. Just felt more optimistic that way.”

Curtis closed his eyes. “And you said she’s seaworthy in the philosophical sense?”

“Correct.”

He opened them again. “What’s your bottom line?”

“Eight grand,” Rolf said bowing a little, like he was offering a rare sword. “And I’ll throw in a box of flares. Most of them are good.”

Curtis looked at The Wanderer. Then at Rolf. Then back at the gull, who now seemed to be laughing at him.

He nodded. “Screw it. I’ll take her.”

Later that night, Curtis sat cross-legged on the boat’s bunk, surrounded by musty cushions, broken switches, and a half-eaten granola bar he’d found in a drawer labeled NAVIGATION. A dim lantern swayed overhead. The wind tapped softly at the hull, asking him what the hell he had done.

He pulled out his phone, took a picture of the cluttered interior, and texted it to his cousin:

Bought a boat. Moving aboard. Will explain later.

P.S. How do you get seagull crap out of canvas?

Outside, the tide rolled gently beneath him. Inside, for the first time in years, Curtis didn’t feel stuck.

Chapter 3: Dock Talk

Curtis had been living aboard The Wanderer for exactly four days. He had electrocuted himself once, dropped a socket wrench into the marina (gone forever, like Atlantis), and learned that marine toilets were not designed for people who eat fiber.

The sun was just starting to burn off the morning fog as he crouched on the bow, trying to scrape off a barnacle colony that had somehow survived above the waterline. He wasn’t sure what he was doing, but he looked committed. That was half the trick. He figured if he moved with enough fake confidence, the other boat owners wouldn’t realize he’d Googled “how to use a bilge pump” three times the night before.

“Easy, Jacques Cousteau,” came a salty voice from the dock. “You’re gonna put a hole in her before you hit the water.”

Curtis turned to see a short, sun-leathered man in his seventies, wearing a faded Coast Guard cap and socks with sandals. He had the permanent squint of someone who’d spent his life staring at things far away.

“Hi,” Curtis said, pausing mid-scrape. “Just giving her a little TLC.”

“You know what that stands for, right?” the man asked. “Total Life Commitment.”

“Seems accurate,” Curtis muttered.

The man moved down the dock with a styrofoam cup of gas station coffee and gestured to himself. “Dennis. Slip 7B. I’m the unofficial harbormaster, except no one listens to me and I don’t get paid.”

“Curtis,” he said, reaching out to shake his hand and nearly dropping the scraper into the bay. “Slip… uh, I think I’m 12D?”

“Yep,” Dennis said, unimpressed. “We’ve been watching you.”

Curtis blinked. “We?”

Dennis pointed a finger like a weather vane toward the small cluster of liveaboards loitering by the marina showers, one woman in a wetsuit and ratty bathrobe brushing her teeth with what might’ve once been a toothbrush, a shirtless man organizing fishing lures on a hat by color, and a bearded guy welding something directly on his dock box with no eye protection.

“We call this end of the dock the Island of Misfit Toys,” Dennis said, sipping his coffee. “You’re one of us now. Sorry.”

“I’ll try not to let the tribe down,” Curtis said.

Dennis gave him a long once-over. “You don’t look like a sailor. You look like you run a podcast about apps or something.”

“Close,” Curtis said. “Mechanical engineer. I used to design cooling systems for high-efficiency servo actuators.”

Dennis took a beat. “Jesus Christ.”

“Yeah.”

Curtis climbed back down to the deck, legs wobbling slightly. He was getting used to the constant motion, but the boat still tilted like it was judging him.

“I quit,” he added, as if that would explain anything.

Dennis nodded. “Midlife breakdown, huh?”

Curtis shrugged. “Let’s call it a midlife redirection.”

“Same thing,” Dennis grunted. “Only difference is how much money you spend on it.”

A sudden thunk echoed from below deck. Curtis froze.

“What the hell was that?” Dennis asked, peering around him.

“I think I dropped my multimeter behind the battery housing,” Curtis said. “Again.”

Dennis looked up at the sky as he walked away. “Lord, give this man a clue.”

An hour later, Curtis found himself crouched inside the boat’s tiny engine compartment, inhaling mold, diesel, and broken dreams. The previous owner had clearly subscribed to the “electrical spaghetti” school of wiring, and Curtis was trying to replace a cracked fuse holder with a rusted screwdriver and a small flashlight clenched between his teeth.

Outside, someone was playing a Jimmy Buffett song on a Bluetooth speaker. It was cheerful in a threatening sort of way.

He heard footsteps on the dock above. A new voice called out, female, bright and aggressively friendly:

“Hey there, new guy! You Curtis?”

He banged his head on the ceiling and swore into the flashlight. It fell from his mouth and he swore again.

He popped his head up far enough to see a tan woman in her thirties wearing board shorts, a Seahawks hoodie, and sunglasses on her head. She was a human instagram reel for the Northwest. Her hair was in a loose ponytail, and he could smell her sunscreen and outperformance.

“I’m Talia,” she said. “Slip 11C. I teach paddleboard yoga and own the dog that keeps barking at your propane tank.”

“Nice to meet you,” Curtis said, sitting up and wiping sweat and fiberglass dust off his hands. “Sorry about the propane tank.”

“No worries. Coco barks at anything that smells like fear.”

“Then she must love me.”

Talia laughed. “You settling in okay?”

Curtis glanced around the boat. A bolt rolled slowly across his cabin floor as the tide shifted. He just didn’t know.

“I think so. No. Maybe. I haven’t burst into tears yet.”

“That’s promising,” she said. “Let me know if you want help learning how to not die. Everyone here sort of adopts each other. Even Dennis, though he pretends he hates it.”

“Already met him. He told me I look like a podcast.”

She grinned and walked away with a wave. “That’s actually pretty generous for him.”

By evening, Curtis sat on deck with a cold beer and his legs dangling off the side. The sun was melting into the water, and the marina had taken on that strange evening hush. It felt peaceful but full of life with the sounds of halyard ropes tapping, water slapping gently against many hulls, and the smells of someone in the distance burning dinner. He watched a gull land on his solar panel and considered asking it for advice.

So far, he’d:

• Shocked himself four times, in four different ways.
• Learned that “holding tank” was a lie.
• Learned the value of a bilge pump.
• Met a man who welded with his eyes closed.
• And somehow, still, felt better than he had in years.

A shout echoed from the next dock.

“Curtis!” It was Talia again. “Tomorrow morning! Six a.m. yoga on paddleboards! You’re coming! See you there!”

He blinked. “No, I’m not.”

“Bring a towel!” she called, already walking away.

Dennis appeared from behind a piling. “Just say no, son. That’s how they get you.”

Curtis raised his beer in a mock salute. “Thanks for the warning.”

Dennis returned the gesture with his coffee cup. “You screw up and flip into the drink, I want video.”

The wind picked up slightly, and The Wanderer creaked in reply, as if waking from a long nap. Curtis leaned back against the boom and closed his eyes.

The boat was a mess. He was a mess. His hands were blistered, his bank account was much lighter, and he was nowhere near ready for the sea. But for the first time in a very long time, he felt like he was moving.

Chapter 4: No Instruction Given

The sky was a perfect promise of bright blue, soft breeze, seagulls coasting like they were on a Disney payroll. Curtis stood on the dock staring at The Wanderer with a mixture of pride and mortal dread. The sky was taunting him.

Today was the day. She was going sailing. So was he. Sort of.

He’d spent the last week repairing rigging, patching soft spots, and watching YouTube tutorials with titles like Sailing Basics for the Suicidal. The boat was technically seaworthy. The insurance agent had used the phrase “minimal exposure to risk,” which felt generous, and also vague enough to haunt him.

Dennis appeared carrying a thermos of what he claimed was coffee but probably contained diesel and spite. He stepped aboard without asking, eyeing the sails like they owed him money.

“I’m not teaching you anything,” he said flatly. “Just along to make sure you don’t kill someone.”

“Noted,” Curtis said, trying to coil a line and creating what looked like a very organized bird nest instead. “I appreciate the moral support.”

“This,” Dennis muttered, “is insurance fraud prevention.”

They cast off without ceremony. The engine coughed to life with the enthusiasm of a smoker on a treadmill, and Curtis slowly steered The Wanderer out of the marina, trying to avoid sweating through his shirt or running into any docks.

“Wind’s out of the west,” Dennis offered, sipping from the thermos. It was just another Tuesday.

Curtis tried to act like he knew what that meant. “Cool. So… we sail… into that?”

Dennis didn’t reply, except for a raised eyebrow.

Curtis cleared his throat and reached for the mainsail halyard. He tugged. Nothing happened. He tugged again. The sail lurched halfway up the mast, caught on something, and became as much use as a flailing bedsheet.

“I see you read Sailing for Idiots,” Dennis said. “But only the cover.”

Curtis scrambled to adjust the line, pulling too hard and managing to thwack himself in the face with the boom.

Dennis winced sympathetically. “Ouch. Better learn quick. The boat doesn’t care about your feelings.”

Curtis gritted his teeth and tugged again on the halyard. After several tangled attempts, a brief detour where he accidentally clipped the sail to his own sleeve, and some truly creative profanity, the mainsail finally lurched upward and caught the breeze.

The Wanderer shifted, creaked… and then, miraculously, moved.

Curtis stood at the tiller, stunned. She was sailing. Not gracefully and not efficiently. But she was sailing.

“Holy crap,” he whispered to the breeze. “We’re actually doing it.”

Dennis didn’t lift a finger. Instead, he stood at the edge of the cockpit and began to clap, slowly. Sarcastically.

“Congratulations,” he said. “Only took you fifteen minutes and three near-death experiences.”

“Appreciate the support,” Curtis muttered, brushing sweat off his brow. He was breathless, feeling his heartbeat and the breeze against seawater on his skin.

“I said I wasn’t gonna help,” Dennis replied, settling back onto the bench with the thermos in hand. “Watching was the educational part. For me.”

They glided past a moored fishing boat where a man wearing a Seahawks poncho raised his coffee in salute. Curtis nodded back, feeling, for a fleeting second, like someone who belonged out here.

Then the wind shifted.

Curtis panicked and yanked the tiller the wrong way, causing The Wanderer to veer wildly. The boom swung across with a WHOMP, narrowly missing Dennis’s head and knocking a winch handle overboard.

“Jesus, warn me before you jibe!” Dennis barked, ducking.

“I don’t know what that means!” yelled Curtis.

Dennis rubbed his temple. “Did you even read a glossary, son?”

“I bought one!”

The boat tilted as much as a trimaran can. Curtis scrambled to adjust, tugging random lines like a panicked marionette.

Dennis finally stood up and sighed the sigh of a man who had sworn he would not get involved.

“Alright. Fine. Step aside before you invent a new way to sink.”

He took the tiller and corrected their course with the practiced grace of someone who had yelled at many other sailors in his lifetime. The boat leveled out. The sail became smooth with wind. The Wanderer steadied, then glided forward like she remembered what she was. Curtis sat on the deck, breathing hard.

Dennis didn’t say anything for a long time. He just steered, feeling the waves through the boat. He felt the wind on his face and watched the sails.

Finally, he muttered, “She handles better than she looks.”

“So do I,” Curtis said, still panting.

Dennis snorted. “Debatable.”

They sailed in silence for a while, Curtis watching, learning, absorbing. Dennis didn’t offer lessons, but he made subtle corrections and he made sure Curtis was watching. When Curtis grabbed a line wrong, he got a grunt. When he adjusted it right, he got no comment at all. Somehow, that felt like progress.

After another hour, they turned back toward the marina. Dennis handed him the tiller.

“You bring us in.”

Curtis blinked. “Are you sure?”

“No. But I’m old, and this coffee’s turning on me.”

Curtis took the tiller like a sacred object. He steered gently, scanning the water like a hawk for crab pots, debris, or misplaced confidence.

As they approached the slip, Dennis stood, arms crossed.

“Drop sails, let ‘em lie there. Go in nice and slow. Don’t bounce us off the dock. This ain’t bumper boats.”

Curtis focused. He released halyards. He lined them up. Drifted in. The boat bumped softly against the fender with a forgiving thunk. He threw a line over a cleat and tied the sloppiest bowline known to man.

Dennis checked it, then muttered, “That knot wouldn’t hold a sandwich together.”

Curtis beamed. “But we didn’t crash.”

Dennis grunted again. “You got lucky kid.”

He stepped off the boat and walked a few feet before turning back.

“You want to do this for real,” he said, pointing, “you better start learning on purpose. Can’t just survive by accident.”

Curtis nodded. “Fair.”

Dennis narrowed his eyes. “You know if you screw this up out there, you don’t get a second try. Ocean’s got no undo button.”

Then, almost too quietly to hear, he added, “But she’s got something in her. That boat. So do you. Maybe.”

He turned and walked away, thermos in hand, muttering about how paddleboarders were ruining everything.

That night, Curtis sat in the cockpit, legs up, a fresh knot guidebook open in his lap. He flipped to page one: “Knots Every Sailor Should Know.” The first one? A proper bowline. He grinned, tied it three times, and swore only once. The Wanderer bobbed gently beneath him, just waiting.

Curtis, for the first time, felt like he’d cracked the surface of something vast and quietly, immensely beautiful. Tomorrow, maybe he’d even try paddleboard yoga. But probably not.

Chapter 5: Wanderer’s Wake

Curtis had a fresh bruise on his shin, new blisters on his hands, and, possibly most alarming, a guest arriving in twenty minutes.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Dennis had grunted that morning from his perch on a milk crate beside Slip 7B, watching Curtis scrub grime from the companionway like he was preparing for an inspection from Poseidon himself.

Curtis had nodded with forced confidence. “Yep. I’m ready.”

“You’re not ready,” Dennis said. “But fine. Just remember, the sea knows when you’re trying to impress someone. That’s when it starts throwing elbows.”

Curtis had waved him off.

Now, as The Wanderer bobbed gently in her slip, Curtis straightened the cockpit cushions for the third time and checked the dock again. His guest, Jamie, was a graphic designer he’d met once at a mutual friend’s barbecue. They’d recently reconnected after she commented on a photo he’d posted of his boat with the caption “Still floating. No idea how.”

She replied: “Honestly? Impressive. I’d love to see it sometime.”

And because Curtis was a man of newfound boldness (and also poor impulse control), he had replied: “How about Saturday?”

Jamie arrived exactly on time, in jeans, sunglasses, and an orange rain jacket that made her look like she might actually belong on a boat. Curtis, on the other hand, had changed his shirt three times and was wearing deck shoes that were painfully reshaping his feet but looked convincingly nautical.

She stepped aboard with the kind of grace that made Curtis deeply aware of how many times he had tripped over his own lines.

“Wow,” she said, looking around. “She’s… cool! Retro. Kind of like a floating treehouse.”

“Thanks,” he said, trying not to beam like a golden retriever. “She’s got, uh… character.”

Jamie peered into the cabin. “It smells like a hardware store had a baby with a wet sock.”

“That’s the teak oil,” Curtis lied. “Totally intentional.”

He cast off and slowly motored them out of the marina. The engine coughed once but held, because it knew it had an audience. They drifted into the harbor, the sails not yet raised, and Jamie leaned back on a cushion, coat off, soaking up the sun. Curtis glanced over at her, then at the mast, then back at her.

It was going too well. He stood and grabbed the rope, or halyard, hanging lazily from the top of the mast. “Want to see her under sail?”

Jamie smiled. “Only if I don’t have to do anything. I’m more of a spectator than a sailor.”

Curtis saluted. “One hundred percent cruise mode.”

He began pulling on the halyard, which hoisted the sail up. Despite all odds it went up smoothly. The Wanderer caught the breeze, tipped gently to port, and came alive.

Jamie laughed as they started to glide forward. “This is actually kind of amazing.”

Curtis grinned. He was doing it. He was sailing, in public, with a witness. And it was working. He pulled on another halyard, raising the jib sail, and tied its rope sheet to a cleat on deck. Two for two so far. Dennis was going to be proud, maybe.

Naturally, that’s when the boat decided to make a point. Without warning, the newly-tied jib sheet whipped loose from its cleat and snapped like a vengeful rope demon, slapping Curtis squarely across the back.

“OW, Jesus!”

Jamie jolted upright. “Was that supposed to happen?”

“Nope!” Curtis lunged for the flailing sheet, tripped over the tiller, and managed to both grab the rope and simultaneously steer the boat in a wild, circling arc. The Wanderer heeled hard to one side.

Jamie clung to her railing, eyes wide. “Are we… turning?!”

“Nope! I mean yes, but I didn’t mean to!”

The boom swung with malicious glee. Curtis ducked. Jamie screamed. A nearby sailboat blared its horn.

“Oh my god,” Jamie yelled, “is that boat honking at us?!”

“Yes,” Curtis said grimly, yanking at the tiller with one hand while trying to tie the jib sheet off with the other. “It’s the maritime version of flipping someone off.”

The sails luffed loudly. They lost speed. Curtis managed to get the boat back on a semi-stable heading while panting, but still feeling good about it. He bent over, feeling his back for open wounds.

Jamie blinked at him. “You okay?”

“I think my kidneys are in a different place than they were ten minutes ago.”

Jamie burst out laughing. “That was insane.”

“I call it freestyle sailing.”

“Good one, looked more like wrestling an octopus with a personal vendetta.”

Curtis groaned. “She doesn’t usually act like this. I think she’s just jealous I brought company.”

“‘She?’”

“The boat.”

Jamie raised her eyebrows. “So she’s the jealous type.”

“Very.”

They drifted for a while under an obedient sail, the boat now behaving as if nothing had happened.

Jamie pulled a protein bar from her jacket pocket. “So. Why’d you do it?”

Curtis looked at her. “Do what?”

“Leave your job. Buy this boat. Move aboard. It’s not exactly… normal.”

He took a breath, watching the water slip past the hull.

“I was rusting,” he said finally. “Inside, you know? Good job, good apartment, great friends. But it felt like I’d climbed a ladder only to find out it was leaning against the wrong wall.”

Jamie nodded slowly. “So now you’re out here. Trying to build a new ladder?”

“Maybe,” Curtis said. “Or just seeing what happens when you stop climbing anything for a while.”

An easy silence settled.

Then Jamie said, “Okay, but that metaphor just completely fell apart at the end.”

He laughed. “I’m new at this.”

“Clearly.”

They returned to the marina without incident. Curtis accidentally fumbled the docking maneuver and Jamie had to leap off and tie the line herself, which she did with frightening skill.

“You sure you’re not secretly a sailor?” Curtis asked.

“I’m a fast learner,” she said, smirking. “Like you.”

They stood on the dock a moment longer, awkward in the way new chemistry always is.

“This was fun,” she finally said. “And borderline terrifying.”

“Thanks. I aim for memorable.”

She grinned. “Let’s do it again. After you install seat belts.”

“Deal.”

He watched her walk away, the orange jacket bobbing gently between the boats. When she looked back Curtis thought of second dates and new beginnings.

That night, Curtis sat in the cockpit with a bag of trail mix, a beer, and a bandage on his forearm where the jib line had left a mark. His back had stopped hurting.

Dennis walked by on his way back from the showers, towel over his shoulder, and paused.

“Date go well?” he asked without looking up.

“No one died,” Curtis said. “So I’m counting it as a win.”

Dennis grunted and looked at the waterline. “Boat held together.”

“Barely.”

“That’s her way of knowing if you’re serious.”

Curtis looked around at the rigging, the sails, the bruises.

“I think I am,” he said.

Dennis gave a slight nod. “It’ll get easier when she believes it.”

Then he kept walking, muttering something about how romance didn’t belong on floating death traps.

Curtis leaned back, listening to the halyards rattle in the breeze like wind chimes made of old bones. He wondered, not for the first time, if Dennis would marry a boat one day.

The Wanderer creaked softly beneath him. Still floating. Still stubborn. Just like him.

Chapter 6: The California Call

Curtis had checked the forecast, the tide chart, the mechanical systems, the supplies, and the zip-lock bag of granola bars twice. He wasn’t sure how long he’d be gone, and told Jamie so. He felt like he was about to be launched into space.

The Wanderer was ready, or ready enough. Her hull was sealed, her lines were secured, her sails patched and re-checked. She looked almost respectable. Curtis had decided to sail south, to Crescent City, California. It was only about 300 nautical miles, give or take some zigzags and panic tacking. His first real voyage. No more protected harbors. No more cell service safety nets.

He’d planned to leave alone. But then, at 5:43 a.m., just as the sun was smearing gold across the dock planks, a familiar grumble preceded a familiar voice.

“Hope you got two mugs,” Dennis said, stepping aboard with a duffel bag and his ever-present thermos. “’Cause I’m coming with you.”

Curtis blinked. “Wait, what?”

“Someone’s gotta keep your dumb ass alive,” Dennis replied, climbing below like it was already decided. “And I ain’t ready to read about this boat on the news.”

By midmorning, they were clear of the marina. The wind was steady from the northwest, and The Wanderer sliced through the chop. Curtis felt she been waiting her whole life to be let loose, just like him. Curtis stood at the helm, eyes fixed ahead. Dennis sat nearby peeling an orange with a folding knife that looked older than most sailboats.

“Why Crescent City?” Dennis asked casually, tossing a peel overboard.

Curtis shrugged. “Sounded just far enough to be a bad idea.”

Dennis nodded approvingly. “That’s the spirit.”

They sailed in silence for a while, both men watching the water, their thoughts bouncing across the waves.

By afternoon, they were thirty miles off the coast. Curtis was feeling… okay. Not great. His stomach had entered open negotiations with gravity, but he’d kept everything down so far. He’d even started to enjoy the rhythms: the hiss of water under the hull, the creak of the rigging, the constant math of wind versus heading.

Then the clouds rolled in.

“Forecast said light wind,” Curtis said, eyeing the darkening sky.

Dennis squinted. “Yeah. That’s the problem with forecasts. They don’t take the sea’s attitude into account.”

By late afternoon, the light breeze had turned to a slap in the face. Curtis reefed the mainsail with numb fingers while Dennis barked orders.

“Ease the sheet! No, the other sheet!”

“I know which sheet that is!”

“Then why are we still sideways?!”

The boat bucked like a furious mule as a gust caught the sail and shoved them into a hard heel. Curtis grabbed the tiller with both hands and fought to hold course.

Dennis grinned, teeth flashing under his hood. “Now you’re sailing, kid!”

“I hate this!”

“That’s the spirit. It’s working!”

Night fell fast.

Curtis had never known real darkness until then. No city lights. No cell signal. Just black, endless ocean and the occasional glint of a star when he had the time to look up.

The storm wasn’t violent, but it was relentless, cold rain, stiff wind, waves that slammed against the hull collecting unpaid debts. They alternated watches. Curtis dozed in twenty-minute bursts, waking every time The Wanderer pitched or the wind groaned through the rigging. He dreamed he was in some ancient sea monster while it rode a roller coaster and complained about it.

At one point, half-lucid and soaked through, he stumbled into the cockpit and muttered, “I regret everything.”

Dennis handed him a mug of something hot. It tried to be coffee but tasted of despair. “Good job kid.” His coffee mug warmed his hands before he threw the liquid overboard.

By morning, the worst had passed. Kind of. The wind had mellowed but left behind a confused sea, with waves still rolling in from different angles. They smacked against The Wanderer, a bored toddler testing boundaries.

Curtis stood at the helm, hollow-eyed and soaked all through. His hands were stiff, his brain foggy from cat-naps and adrenaline withdrawal. He checked the sail trim for the hundredth time, then glanced down at the tiny GPS screen mounted near the cockpit.

It glowed with a dim, faithful blue: a blinking dot, crawling slowly southward. His tired mind saw a tired ant crossing the screen. He’d stared at it so long through the night, he was pretty sure it had imprinted itself onto the backs of his eyelids.

“Still on course,” he mumbled to himself, though the screen had only shifted a half-inch since the last time he checked.

Below deck, Dennis snored.

Above deck, a rogue wave sloshed over the bow and drenched Curtis’s last dry sock.

He sighed. “You’re doing this on purpose, aren’t you?”

The boat did not deny it. The ocean didn’t either.

Late that morning, the autopilot fritzed out, forcing Curtis to hand-steer through two hours of lumpy, stubborn water while riding a washing machine. The tiller squeaked with every correction, and Curtis muttered at it in frustration.

“Left, not that much, what the hell, okay now right, just, NO, not that much right, are you drunk?!”

Dennis eventually surfaced, rubbing his eyes. “You’re still alive. That’s disappointing.”

“You’re lucky I didn’t throw you overboard three hours ago.”

Dennis looked around at the swell. “Boat’s still up. No blood on deck. You’re doing fine.”

Curtis gestured to his GPS. “Our ‘fine’ is still four hours from Crescent City.”

Dennis raised an eyebrow. “Want me to steer for a while?”

Curtis hesitated. Then shrugged and said, “Please. I’ve argued with the tiller and lost.”

Dennis took over with his usual grim efficiency, and Curtis stumbled below to collapse onto the settee and pass out face down. When he came back up, it was afternoon, and the coast was beginning to appear. It was beautifully faint, with jagged lines leading toward secrets in the misty waterline. The sea calmed just enough to be smug about it.

Dennis stood at the helm, squinting toward land. “I thought you had an outboard down there trying to start in reverse. Did you know you snore?”

“Thanks for the feedback.”

“You didn’t die, so you deserved it,” he said, as if that were the highest compliment available.

“Felt close.”

Dennis looked around, then down at the boat. “Your bathtub held together.”

“So did I.”

They both fell silent, watching the harbor slowly grow.

After a beat, Dennis sighed and said, “When we dock, I’m finding a diner, a stiff drink, and a chair with back support.”

Curtis laughed without meaning to, without knowing he still could. “Same.”

Curtis rubbed his face and looked at the GPS again. The blinking dot was nearly there. Crescent City. It was a real port with hot meals. And probably a shower that didn’t move. He gripped the rail, still swaying with the rhythm of the sea. He felt hollowed out and refilled with salt. He felt like half of a ghost, but also sort of… full. He was here. He had made it.

They tied up at the Crescent City marina an hour later. Curtis fumbled the lines, then retied them. Correctly. Dennis didn’t say anything. Just gave a slow nod of approval and went below to dig out a dry pair of socks.

Curtis stayed above, alone now. The sky was bright, the air thick with sea smells, and his whole body ached in places he didn’t know he had. He felt tired and it felt great. He didn’t know where he was going next. But he knew he wasn’t going back.

This was 6 chapters of the book WANDER WIDE. This book is about a man with the job, the house, the career, and the burnout.

Walking away feels impossible—until he does it. His impulsive purchase of a project boat with a bad attitude and worse wiring, drops him into the scrappy world of liveaboards, dock misfits, and salty mentors who teach him just enough to be dangerous.

Curtis heads south along the Pacific Coast—through storms, silence, bioluminescent nights, tragedy, unexpected friendships, and more than a few humbling mistakes. He begins to discover what it means to trust others and himself. But the ocean doesn’t care about plans. When his don’t work, Curtis must decide whether he’s truly become the kind of man who turns toward danger instead of away from it.

Raw, immersive, and unexpectedly funny, Wander Wideis a modern sea-story. It has the reinvention, resilience, and renewal that happens when a person strips off the comfortable, with humor.

Perfect for people who loved: The Art of Racing in the Rain, The Old Man and the Sea, and The Lightest Object in the Universe.