Boating: My Unexpected Fifth Career

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I am pleasantly surprised that my boat experience and captain’s license are paying off with some fun, often challenging gigs.

A lot of folks criticize me for (or are in awe of) the number of “irons I keep in the fire.” Simply said, I have a lot of interests and when something really strikes my fancy, I dive in headfirst and do what I need to do to become an “expert.”

That’s how teaching myself how to use computers in the early 1990s paid off with a career as a computer how-to book author, speaker, and educator, freeing me, once and for all (at age 29), from the 9 to 5 grind of corporate America.

That’s how learning to fly helicopters and eventually jumping through the hoops required to get a charter (AKA Part 135) certificate got me a third career as a helicopter pilot, which started climbing to its peak in 2012, right around the time people stopped buying computer how-to books.

That’s how accumulating cabochons at rock shows led to making jewelry which led to getting good silversmith training and setting up my own fully-equipped studio and making/selling sterling silver jewelry at art shows. When I sold the helicopter and my two helicopter businesses, I really thought silversmithing would be my fourth career (and first retirement career) and I suppose I can still count it as that.

But I never expected my boating activities to lead to paying gigs on both coasts, bringing in retirement income just as silver prices skyrocketed and the economy led to people not spending much money on things they didn’t need. After a dismal winter art show season in Seattle and the Phoenix area, I’ve pretty much set my silversmithing activities aside to better explore this fifth career as a boat captain.

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A Look Back at this Winter 2025/26 Travels

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I take a quick look back at the nearly three month trip I took to Arizona, New Mexico, and California.

As regular readers know, I go south every winter. I love my home but I don’t like winters here. It isn’t the cold as much as it’s the dreariness. So I go south, usually to Arizona and the desert southwest, although I did spend two winters on my boat on the Great Loop in mostly Florida a few years ago.

This year, I left on November 27, 2025 (Thanksgiving Day) and returned home on February 12, 2026. I have an excellent winter housesitter, which takes a lot of the worries out of leaving home for so long. He’s a skier and he likes the proximity of Mission Ridge and Steven’s Pass, two local ski resorts. He was not happy about the lack of real winter weather this year. But that lack of winter weather is what got me home early; I was supposed to come home at the end of February.

I thought I’d take a few minutes to write up a summary of my trip’s expenses. I think I managed to do it quite affordably this year. You be the judge.

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Another Stay at the Hot Springs

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I spend another two weeks boondocking at the Holtville Hot Spring. My last visit here?

I’m writing this from my very comfortable campsite at the Holtville Hot Spring, a BLM managed long-term visitor area. This is probably my seventh or eighth visit and I’m planning on staying for about two weeks. That’s why I took the effort to find a campsite that clicked all my boxes — privacy, quiet, space for my pups to run off leash, close (but not too close) to the hot spring tubs — and position my equipment in a way that makes everything easy to access. This is also the third time on this winter trip that I’ve taken the camper off the truck, giving me a little bit more flexibility when it comes to running errands in town.

Drone Photo of Campsite
My campsite, which has two driveways, is tucked in among bare salt cedar trees just off the campground’s main road.

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Boondocking

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If you’re properly prepared and have the right approach, it’s a surprisingly affordable way to travel in the southwest and beyond.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I got a request from one of my YouTube subscribers for more information about boondocking in an RV. This is a topic near and dear to me, as I spend a good portion of every winter camping for free on public land in Arizona and California. It’s a nice, inexpensive way to enjoy nature and solitude. Kind of like having your own mobile Walden Pond.

Boondocking Defined

Boondocking — at least the way I see it — is camping without any RV hookups or conveniences. Although this is usually done in parking lots (think Walmart) or on public land, you can be boondocking in a campground if that campground has no services. It basically means relying on your own equipment for power, water, sanitation (toilet), and food storage/prep. It usually refers to staying in a vehicle or RV, although I suppose you can do it with a tent, too. (I’ve already had enough tent camping in my life, so I won’t address that here.)

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A YouTube Channel Post

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I share a short post on my YouTube channel.

About Buy Me a Coffee

If you haven’t heard of this service, Buy Me a Coffee is an easy way for folks to contribute to the efforts of their favorite creators. I signed up years ago and, over the years have gotten a reasonable number of contributions. Occasionally, I’d go to my account and sweep the balance into my savings account. Easy peasy.

Then, for reasons I don’t understand, Buy Me a Coffee got a third party credit card company involved, Stripe. I had to jump through hoops to set up a Stripe account and provide a lot more personal information than I wanted to in order to get my money. (I don’t see why they need a photo of my driver’s license to give me $46.) So I decided to stop using them and, instead, set up a Buy Me a Coffee item on my Square account. This way when folks make a contribution, Square takes its fee and just puts the rest in my bank account. Very easy and no need for a third party intervention.

Unfortunately, a bunch of those old Buy Me a Coffee links were still out there and that’s what my latest contributor used. So I spent this morning squashing every link in my blogs. I still need to go through all of my YouTube video descriptions. I’ll wait until I know I’ve squashed all the links before doing a final sweep and closing my Buy Me a Coffee account.

It never ceases to amaze me how many organizations need to get a piece of the action every time a creator is receives money for work.

This morning, I got a notification that a YouTube channel subscriber had contributed $25 to my publishing efforts via Buy Me a Coffee. His accompanying message to me told me a bunch of things that he liked and wanted to see.

I Need Motivation

Getting positive feedback — yes, with money, although that didn’t really matter as much — reminded me that I usually don’t just sit on my ass and watch the clock hands spin my life away. I’m usually working on creative projects like my blog or YouTube channel content or the book I started writing about my Great Loop adventure. Or making jewelry in my studio (or mobile studio).

But lately I’ve been feeling kind of meh — I think world events and the fall of the United States’ democracy have something to do with that but won’t discuss it here — and have been spending entirely too much time on social media (Mastodon), doing word and number puzzles (even I think 8 sudokus a day is extreme), and watching YouTube videos. It was only over the past two days that I decided to practice using my drone and exploring livestreaming from it that I’ve been making better use of my time.

And that’s what prompted my latest supporter, who watched the livestream, to contribute and speak up. So that’s all good.

It also got me motivated to check out new comments on my personal YouTube channel and respond to them. And to write a post letting subscribers know I was still alive and what my plans were for the next few months. Here’s that post.

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