John Kretschmer > Quotes

“Time is the currency of our life—how we spend it defines our existence.”
― John Kretschmer, Sailing to the Edge of Time: The Promise, the Challenges, and the Freedom of Ocean Voyaging

“crossing the Atlantic under sail remains one of the most fulfilling ways possible to spend a month or so of your precious allotment of time.”
― John Kretschmer, Sailing a Serious Ocean

“Carl’s concept of freedom had come to be embodied by a mariner in a storm, wholly responsible for himself, accountable to no one else, asking no quarter from the sea, measuring his worth by his immediate actions.”
― John Kretschmer, At the Mercy of the Sea: The True Story of Three Sailors in a Caribbean Hurricane

“I had an unbearable urge to relieve myself. “The urge will surely pass,” I thought, but then came the cramps. We were nearly abreast of the boats—I had two alternatives: to leave the wheel and dash below, which was unthinkable in the narrow cut; or to go in my shorts. Then I spotted Kayla’s litterbox in the corner of the cockpit. I quickly grabbed it, and, to the utter horror of the sunbathers on the nearby boats, I found relief. From that moment on Kayla worshipped me.”
― John Kretschmer, Cape Horn to Starboard

“I love sailboats. No other man-made object blends design, craftsmanship, passion, and pure optimism the way a sailboat does. With a good sailboat, anything is possible.”
― John Kretschmer, Sailing a Serious Ocean

“wanted to sail off with my kids, to raise them on a diet of self-reliance, salt water, and world culture.”
― John Kretschmer, At the Mercy of the Sea: The True Story of Three Sailors in a Caribbean Hurricane

“a keelboat’s theoretical hull speed—the top speed it can attain without surfing or planing—is dictated by a simple formula: the square root of the waterline length multiplied by 1.34.”
― John Kretschmer, At the Mercy of the Sea: The True Story of Three Sailors in a Caribbean Hurricane

“There is always a certain risk in being alive, and if you are more alive, there’s more risk.” —Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House”
― John Kretschmer, Sailing to the Edge of Time: The Promise, the Challenges, and the Freedom of Ocean Voyaging

“but I know one sacred place where the clock does not define time and can be disregarded—on a sailboat far from land. You have control of your days, and nights, your minutes, and seconds, you can turn off the GPS, the satellite phone, and the all the other devices that demand you get down on your knees and pray to their time gods, who extract your offerings through monthly service plans. At sea, nobody can tell you when to open or when to close shop. Your schedule is dictated by your human needs, not those of some atomic clock overlord”
― John Kretschmer, Sailing to the Edge of Time: The Promise, the Challenges, and the Freedom of Ocean Voyaging

“To thrive at sea, you must be responsible for who you are, not who you want to be.”
― John Kretschmer, Sailing a Serious Ocean

“The very idea that my time could be owned by someone else, monitored by a clock, and traded not for freedom but for money struck me as lunacy. Where did happiness factor in, and what about the desire for a meaningful life defined not by your possessions but by your experiences?”
― John Kretschmer, Sailing to the Edge of Time: The Promise, the Challenges, and the Freedom of Ocean Voyaging

“But it was the discovery of gold in California in 1849 that caused the clipper ships to dominate travel on the high seas.”
― John Kretschmer, Cape Horn to Starboard

“wanted to sail off with my kids, to raise them”
― John Kretschmer, At the Mercy of the Sea: The True Story of Three Sailors in a Caribbean Hurricane

“But there is one thing that I’ve learned about luck. It rears its head as an opportunity, not a gift, and what seems to separate the lucky from the unlucky is the willingness to take Lady Luck for a ride.”
― John Kretschmer, Flirting with Mermaids: The Unpredictable Life of a Sailboat Delivery Skipper

“One of many problems with furled sails as stormsails is that as the sail area is shortened, the lead angle changes, and even with the genoa track all the way forward it is difficult to maintain enough shape to sail upwind effectively. And, as mentioned before, the more you roll in a sail, the more you raise the center of effort and the more you reduce stability. Roller-furled headsails make terrible stormsails.”
― John Kretschmer, Sailing a Serious Ocean

“So to you, Friend, I confide my secret: to be a discoverer you hold close whatever you find, and after a while you decide what it is. Then, secure in where you have been, you turn to the open sea and let go.” —William Stafford, Tomorrow Will Have an Island”
― John Kretschmer, Sailing a Serious Ocean

“Books”
― John Kretschmer, Flirting with Mermaids: The Unpredictable Life of a Sailboat Delivery Skipper

“From Grenada we soared across the bottom of the Caribbean, staying well offshore of the now-dangerous coast of Venezuela, a once-proud country spiraling into anarchy as its experiment with a populist strongman collapses, standing as a stark warning to other countries.”
― John Kretschmer, Sailing to the Edge of Time: The Promise, the Challenges, and the Freedom of Ocean Voyaging

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.” —Seneca, On the Shortness of Life”
― John Kretschmer, Sailing to the Edge of Time: The Promise, the Challenges, and the Freedom of Ocean Voyaging