Our morning routine while at anchor or moored in a marina seems to be: stay in bed for as long as possible, so until I can’t stand staying in bed any longer. This time is often made longer by reading the news on my phone. We usually also have one or more cups of tea while in bed. Then we get out of bed and depending on our mood, and how much our tummies are growling, we have breakfast or do our morning breathing exercises. We sometimes (too often really for our budget) go to shore and have breakfast at the yacht club. The excuse is that either our dog Coco or I need to use the bathroom and neither of us like to do that on board because having a real toilet is just so much nicer. Then depending on wether we are on land or still on the boat we either do land things such as going to the shops for food, get stuff to fix things in the boat or drop off or collect laundry or work on laptop. We try to make these decisions before heading to shore. If we stay on the boat we try to get to one of the many tasks on the never ending to do list of repairs, fixes, and improvements that come with owning a boat.

Today we are still on the boat, had pancakes for breakfast and having another cup of tea before doing anything else. There’s a fine line between enjoying the cruising life and early retirement on the one hand, and aimless procrastination on the other. Anyone who’s had the privilege of taking a sabbatical or stopped working for whatever reason will probably recognise this: there’s a feeling of dread or even guilt of not doing anything “productive”. Both Kay and I have felt this way at various times, either after being retrenched and not searching for another job right away or after deciding to stop working all together. This morning I’m trying to feel fine about not getting to any of the tasks on our todo list.

Yesterday we went to the yacht club here in Walvis Bay and I tried feeling productive by rearranging our Tropical Dawn blog (where you are reading this right now) and updating our portable GPS with the latest charts. The first was successful: check the menu on the top right and our About and Contact pages and our very own Link in bio page. The second wasn’t: I had to abandon the download as the WiFi at the club is so sketchy that it might have taken till well into the night to download the chart updates. But in any case we were quite productive as we had glued the rubbing strip back onto our inflatable dinghy and were waiting on shore for the glue to cure. So sometimes even procrastinating can be productive.