{"id":19095,"date":"2025-11-09T17:30:00","date_gmt":"2025-11-10T00:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/?p=19095"},"modified":"2025-11-09T23:10:03","modified_gmt":"2025-11-10T06:10:03","slug":"grit-risk-spirit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/grit-risk-spirit\/","title":{"rendered":"Grit, Risk, Spirit"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Though I was never a professional fisherman, I have spent thousands of hours at sea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It began with a year on the USS Virginia, where I completed my qualifications as Officer of the Day Underway. Although I never formally received my S.W.O.S. badge after passing the written and oral exams, the skipper honored me with the privilege of conning the ship into New York Harbor all the way to Sandy Hook Pier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My brother-in-law spent thirty years as a skipper in the Bering Sea, fishing for King, Snow, and Dungeness crab. Later, he became a partner in Alaska Leader Fisheries\u2014a syndicate that now owns five longline processors considered the queens of the Alaska fleet. In 2008, I had the thrill of serving as first mate on one of those ships\u2014The Bering Leader\u2014during a passage from Magnolia (Seattle) to Kodiak. By chance, just this past summer, while taking guests up to Anacortes, I was reunited with The Bering Leader as she sat in dry dock at the Anacortes shipyard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now, I am in the process of buying either a Nordic Tug or a Ranger Tug, hopeful to outfit her for crab fishing on Skagit Bay. Earlier this week, Lynn and I joined a crab fisherman out of Dugula Bay. We set five 80-lb traps in under two hours and caught our limit\u2014the largest Dungeness crabs I have ever seen. For the past three nights, crab has been the centerpiece of our dinner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As we hauled up pots brimming with 10 to 20 crabs, tossing most back, I was reminded of the wisdom and sayings handed down to me by sailors and fishermen. Here are a few favorites:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>On Work &amp; Grit<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>\u201cThe sea doesn\u2019t care about your plans\u2014only your preparation.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>\u201cYou don\u2019t wrestle crabs for a living if you\u2019re afraid to bleed a little.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>\u201cEvery haul\u2019s a gamble, but the boat doesn\u2019t move if you don\u2019t bet.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>On Risk &amp; Resilience<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>\u201cIf you\u2019re not a little scared, you\u2019re not paying attention.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>\u201cThe ocean teaches you fast: respect her, or she\u2019ll remind you why you should.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>\u201cYou can\u2019t control the storm, but you can tie your knots tight.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Fishermen, like farmers and ranchers, spend their lives working closely with Mother Nature and come to understand both the work and the risk of their professions. Those who truly love what they do regard their work as a vocation. Efficiency and productivity breed satisfaction and pride in their toil. It\u2019s a sense shared by people in action-oriented jobs\u2014military personnel, law enforcement officers, nurses, civil engineers, and surgeons\u2014whose hands and daily efforts bring them face to face with nature\u2019s forces and unpredictability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Those close to nature seem to forge that connection with greater ease. In the end, nature will have a substantial influence over how many patients one saves or how many fish one catches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There are many ways that work ethic shapes one\u2019s view of risk. In surgery, the old saying goes, \u201cThere are old surgeons and bold surgeons, but no old bold surgeons.\u201d The implication is that experience tempers risk; wisdom recognizes hazards before they become fatal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yet, I always felt this wasn\u2019t exactly right. As my practice matured and my consulting base grew, I could select the least risky cases, shifting riskier surgeries to \u201cyounger and bolder\u201d colleagues. In the back of my mind, that always seemed wrong. The riskiest cases were handled by those with the least experience. If you were an elderly patient with heart disease and diabetes, wouldn\u2019t you want an experienced surgeon? In my final years of practice, I did my best to change that paradigm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The same dynamic plays out in politics. The longer one serves, the more tempting it is to avoid hard choices and leave tough problems for someone else. It\u2019s the \u201cyoung guns\u201d who often have the courage to tackle the hardest issues. Or at least those individuals with a \u201cyoung sprit\u201d. The experience needed to address today\u2019s complicated challenges is rarely found solely within government; it\u2019s built through work, grit, and a willingness to face real risk. Politicians tend to shun risk as much as lawyers do\u2014and perhaps that\u2019s why inertia grips our governance, with so many lawyers in office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What\u2019s needed are more mothers and fathers who have managed a household budget. We are fortunate to have farmers and ranchers in our legislatures\u2014people accustomed to facing real-world opportunities, risks, and failures. We need representatives armed with the wisdom and the spirit of the fishermen and sailors I have been privileged to know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Though I was never a professional fisherman, I have spent thousands of hours at sea. It began with a year on the USS Virginia, where I completed my qualifications as Officer of the Day Underway. Although I never formally received my S.W.O.S. badge after passing the written and oral exams, the skipper honored me with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":19096,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1051],"tags":[1547],"class_list":["post-19095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-john-livingston","tag-boat","cat-1051-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19095"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19095\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19097,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19095\/revisions\/19097"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}