Some of our most memorable moments were tucked into the daily routines on Contigo. Events that might have once felt extraordinary eventually became part of the natural rhythm of living aboard. But now, outside the confines of her 43 feet, seemingly ordinary experiences have resurfaced, asking to be looked at more closely. From April 2025.
On my birthday last year, somewhere up a creek along the ICW in North Carolina, Karl and I watched the movie “Flow.” It is an animated feature centered around a cat who suddenly finds itself in the crosshairs of significant environmental change.
Most of the movie follows the adventures of the cat, a capybara, golden retriever, lemur, and heron, who one by one board a decrepit sailboat that is steadily charging forward, away from certain environmental disaster, toward an uncertain destination.
In one of the scenes, the cat attempts to give the heron some much needed rest at the tiller. Almost immediately, the cat swipes the boat against the side of the waterway. The heron, still alert, nudges the cat aside and resumes his post.
Karl slipped his hand into mine.
Even at six knots, cruising sometimes requires a brusqueness that can be softened later. The dynamic between the cat and heron felt so familiar that we rewound the movie simply to see ourselves play out on screen, finding more similarities in those animals at the helm than if the same scene had been performed by two humans.
As we intently watched the sailboat maneuver through frightening storms, soggy weather, and tight spaces, part of me wondered if it was a sign. Were we departing this adventure too soon?
But as the movie approached its ending, the boat became obsolete. The flood waters receded, and the next scene we saw was the boat hanging from a tree.
I was not yearning for more sunny days on some distant beach. Instead, I felt nostalgic for the times we overcame something challenging. While on Contigo, we scuba-dived at night, tangled with fierce currents at docks, scrubbed razor-sharp barnacles off the hull, and untangled a stubborn mooring line in the middle of a squall.
There was a familiar prickliness. I returned to one afternoon not too long before we moved onto Contigo, when I was pulling wet clothes out of the washing machine in our Brooklyn apartment. A shirt had its long sleeves inside out. As I reached down the sleeve, the cold and clammy material clung to parts of my bare forearm. I wondered if boat life would entail this same damp feeling, just all over my body, and all the time. I let myself sit with the discomfort. We were about to move away from all that which was comfortable and predictable, including versions of ourselves that felt well-established in our early-mid 30s.
With Contigo anchored in an almost stillness that is unique to the ICW, Karl and I contemplated along with the characters as they later gazed at themselves in a puddle of water. I found that more often than not, what reflected “me” moment to moment during this cruising adventure was not an inanimate mirror, but something more embodied. The wind mirrored my mood as it shifted direction and force. We noticed how playful we could be with some animals, such as dolphins and pet remoras, while being snarky with others (birds that seemingly wanted to destroy our wind indicator at the top of the mast). And, of course, the water all around us, whose color, temperature, and depth were never the same, continuously urged us to look and reflect. Indeed, the ICW waters may be murky and lack the luminousness and dazzling blue of the Bahamas, but they don’t lie. They show us what we need to see.
Flowing on a Beam Reach.
twoanchovies.com 