Home now

We are home after spending 32 days on the the boat, 610 miles, 30 humpback whale sightings, 1 bear sighting, and 2 fuel fill ups.

Partway through the trip someone commented on facebook from a freind saying “Do you guys ever work? I am jealous.” The fact of the matter is that yes I try to not work on Christmas, and maybe 1 or 2 other big holidays of the year, but in reality I end up working almost every day. Don’t take that as complaining, as I have built my business over the last 8 years to be a business that I can work from anywhere that I have a good internet connection. Thanks to Elon Musk and Starlink that means I can work from anywhere in North America (on my current internet plan), except maybe the far north of Canada.

I do work a great deal of play and adventure into my life, however that doesn’t mean that I am not working or neglecting my job.

With the new to us this year Starlink in motion antennae we can be underway on the boat with Marcia driving the boat and I am working, on a Teams call, or connected to a customers server. There was one day that Marcia was driving the boat, with autopilot engaged, and while I was working on a mentoring call helping a client with a slow query, she was at the helm with the binoculars spotting humpback whales. I did miss out on a couple whale sightings that day, but that is the balance.

With the great team that we have at Stedman Solutions, they have helped me to scale the business allowing us to take on more customers and to scale the business, all that while help keep me sane by not working 90 hours per week. Anything more than about 60 and I start to get cranky. The team is comprised of really smart team members who all like to work on different schedules, some of the team prefers mornings, others perfer afternoons/evenings, and others mostly after hours and weekends. It all works out and we provide great coverage for all our customers.

The only constraing that we have while being on the boat is that I am limited to a single 30 inch monitor instead of 3 x 40 inch monitors at home, and the bench seat in the pilot house that use for my office is not as comfortable as my chair at home.

Typically in IT jobs where the employer or client expects you to work a normal 8 to 5 job, and then to do server maintenance after hours and on the weekends the IT people really get burnt out quickly. That is evern more so when they are in a salary position instead of a hourly pay. At Stedman Solutions we don’t follow a typically work day, instead we follow the needs of a client. For instance on every tuesday evening on the boat trip, I had scheduled server maintenance from a client doing database moves from one server to another. It was needed to be after hours, and I just worked those tuesday nights from 9pm until it was done, on the boat. On those same Tuesdays I certainly didn’t work a regular 8 hour day before doing that. By the end of the week I had certainly put in more than 40 hours, all the the illusion that I don’t ever work.

Here are some of my favorite photos from the trip.

All that while being continually on call to assist our clients if anything was needed.