Busy Doing Nothing

Rating 2 of 5

Busy Doing Nothing is the story of Rekka Bellum and Devine Lu Linvega sailing a Yamaha 33 sailboat from Japan to Canada. The journey is long taking over 51 days.

What’s interesting about the story its the less common West to East journey. You’ll find lots of stories of people heading out from California into the Pacific but not as many from people making the more difficult journey back.

Part of me finds the trip admirable. So far in a 33 ft sailboat is rather impressive the other part of me finds it kind of silly. The boat is very undersized for a comfortable trip of this scale and Rekka and Devine make it hard on themselves sailing without autopilot or wind vane. Sometimes they can balance the boat and sail it with lines from the cockpit but a good deal of the time they’re hand steering this great distance.

The book is from Rekka’s perspective. Devine is mostly just a character. Rekka spends most of the book seeming unhappy and uncomfortable. I think the lack of comforts by Rekka and Devine is some kind of low tech obstinance. They talk a lot about sustainability and things like that but mostly I think they’re just stubborn people with strong opinions.

People with strong opinions can be interesting but most of this book is focused on the toil of the journey. Which is good. Sailing is often romanticized as relaxing and its not. You have to work to sail a boat in most conditions especially from Japan to Canada.

Overall I struggled rating the book 2 of 5. I Almost welched and gave it a 2.5 but my rule is to avoid weasel half point ratings. In the end I knocked the book down to 2 because its simply not about that much. Which maybe is fine. Its not unenjoyable and theirs some fun illustrations in it so I think its a relaxing read, but in the end it just doesn’t have much to talk about.