April 23, 2020
Open Macbook…Word… File…. New Blank Document….. ‘Where on earth do I start?’
This is the thought running through my head right now as I type. I am more of a numbers guy than a words guy, or so I think, I guess we will find out. One way to start is by thanking my wonderful wife for putting so much effort into documenting our trip via this blog. Despite some technical hurdles, some self-inflicted, some not, she had been relentless in her desire for us to have an archive of material recording our experiences, something we can read and re-read when we are older, something to show the kids (our coronials!) something to help us to relive this magical year that we have had and are still having. She has done a fine job and it fills me with pride every time I read it.
Abby has also devoted a not insignificant amount of time to trying to persuade me to make a contribution with the justification being that our small readership might like to hear something from my perspective, why I wanted to come on the trip, lessons learned and expectations versus reality. Given the shear volume that Abby has produced my stalling could only last so long. Given that my contribution is most likely to be the equivalent of throwing on a 16 year old sub in the 88th minute in the second leg of a champions league game when you are already 8-0 up on aggregate I doubt I will have much of an impact on our blogging game but I will give it my best shot.
I will dive right in. Buying a boat and sailing around the world will not solve all your problems. In fact it will give you a whole host of new, sometimes very tricky, sometimes expensive, occasionally very dangerous ones. Thankfully when we embarked on this adventure I was very aware that this would be the case. I was certainly under no illusions that this would be endless sunrises and sunsets, deserted anchorages, white sand beaches and nights under the stars, despite what our Instagram feeds might suggest. Nor can I claim that my life at the time of departing was full of problems that needed solving, realistically or not. My life was in actuality almost completely problem-free. I had met and just married the woman of my dreams. I have a wonderful family and wonderful group of friends. I lived in Notting Hill in London, a city that is a truly brilliant place to live even if a pint is nearing £6 now. I had great job, with great bosses and talented colleagues who were both professional and fun to work with. If I had chosen to support Liverpool rather than Everton at age 7 I would have had very little to complain about at that point in time.
So why ‘throw it all away’ to go on this trip? I guess the answer is in the question. I find it impossible to frame the experience in its entirety as negative. I always viewed it as an opportunity to gain something. I knew that there would be the very real financial opportunity cost of going. I also knew there would be the very real cost of not seeing friends and family for a year. But I also felt it would be a wonderful way to spend the first year of marriage, a great adventure, a chance for us to build a really solid foundation for our future together, to travel the world together, to hang out with each other and to plan our future free from the distractions of city life. All very romantic I am sure you are thinking. I also knew it would be an incredible challenge for us both, contributed to in no small part by the fact that we were very much novice sailors and had no idea how to manage a complicated 55 ft sailboat. But this we knew would provide huge scope for personal growth and learning, something I think we both crave. And perhaps more pragmatically, if not now, then when? In the words of Mark Twain ‘Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails”
Finally, perhaps most importantly, I believe that what we experience in life exists on a frontier. A frontier between what we want for ourselves and what others or society wants for us. This frontier is moveable and you can gain territory for yourself and for your dreams by fighting to push the frontier forward. It is easy to harbor a dissonance about where you want to be in life and it is also easy to conceal ones true wishes, perhaps for fear of ridicule, perhaps simply fear itself. I think this trip was our way of pushing forward the frontier of our lives together, doing something that we wanted to do and on our terms, something that was truly personal to us and completely free of outside influences. Something that, whether a success or a failure, would be entirely our responsibility.
Mark Twain also said “Courage is the resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear” and fear was something we had in spades when the time came for us to slip the lines on our adventure. The last 11 months has been a steady process of replacing fear with knowledge. We still maintain a healthy amount of fear every time we go to sea but it is not a paralyzing fear anymore. Our resistance or mastery of our initial fear has come through understanding our situation better, understanding the boat better, understanding each other better, learning about the weather, seas state and all aspects of sailing as much as we are able. Fear soon dissipates and is replaced in equal measure by confidence. And with this confidence comes the sheer joy of doing something new. We are not reinventing the wheel and are in fact treading a well-trodden path but we take huge pride in finding the courage to do something significant that we could not have hoped to do two years ago.
Despite all the justifications given there was no doubt an unquantifiable risk we were taking with our relationship. We had been married a month when we set sail so were not only novice sailors but also novices at being married. How would we react when faced with situations we had never faced before, situations far outside of our comfort zone? How would we respond to spending 24/7 together? I knew I loved Abby more than anyone I had ever met, but that much? Really? It turns out yes, really. This is not to say it has been all sunshine and roses, some of our guests could attest to that! There is inevitability to some form of conflict when two strong minded people spend this much time together on a boat. However, the situation forces you to address problems in real-time as there is no getting away from them. Communication issues that I am sure get refined over years of marriage and understanding are exposed and forced into closer examination earlier on when living life this way. Necessity has dictated that we get better at these things and we have, immeasurably.
Life at sea not only demands you have a greater understanding of and empathy for your partner but also I have learned that it throws an unrelenting light on your own personality traits both good and bad. It has a way of percolating to the surface those qualities that you are proud of and perhaps don’t celebrate enough but also the qualities you are less proud of and most certainly don’t examine enough. It has been a wonderful opportunity to take greater stock of these qualities, to understand more clearly how they affect other people and to try and take concrete steps to whittle out the bad and promote the good. I am sure that this is not unique to being at sea and I have no doubt that more accomplished people than myself go to great lengths to take stock of their personality assets and liabilities on a regular basis but I have found this experience has forced me to do so in a way I don’t think I would have done as effectively without it.
So other than isolated soul searching leading to a realization of just how flawed my character is, what else have I learned on this trip? I have learned that eventfulness gives time a greater dimension. In his wonderful book Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck talks about how ‘the overwhelming size and variety of land and incidents stretched time out of all bearing’. ‘Eventlessness, on the other hand, collapses time.’ I can surely testify to this. I look back to the time when we set sail from Southampton 11 months ago and it seems like an age ago. People say times flies when you are having fun and we all know the tedium of clock watching, so how do I explain the sensation of 11 months feeling like an age, unless that is I have been totally bored. I think Steinbeck makes a good point. It comes down to eventfulness. Never in my life have I ever been able to or had the opportunity to enjoy such a variety of experiences, both good and bad, in such a short space of time. Every day is potentially a new adventure and a week at sea can involve multiple countries or continents even. We have the luxury to choose a new place to call home every few days or the opportunity to make somewhere home for an extended period of time if you really come to like it. We can enjoy in passing the beauty of new places or if we chose to stay we can get to know its history and its people. We can move whimsically around the globe, we can spend night up night at sea and days upon days in an anchorage of our choosing. Our time has been stretched out of all bearing and that has been very fulfilling. I agree time flies when you are having fun but I think fulfilment is different, it is more lasting, more consistent and holds more weight.
I mentioned earlier that I was under no illusions that this would be endless sunrises and sunsets, deserted anchorages, white sand beaches and nights under the stars. I was however completely unprepared for how challenging life at sea could be. This hit us pretty hard, certainly in the early stages of our trip when we were still getting to grips with the boat and our lack of sailing experience was being put under scrutiny by both mother nature and the inevitable mechanical failures a boat experiences as a result of continually being in such a harsh environment. The constant weather watching, route planning and the need to find a safe anchorage for the boat every evening seemed relentless in the early months. It felt like the stress of managing and keeping the boat safe was taking up so much bandwidth that there was little left for enjoying the places we were sailing to. I confess there were times where we discussed at length whether we had made a mistake and the possibility of turning back. We kept reminding ourselves however why we were doing this. We had written a mission statement during our planning phase in London and hung it on the back of our door at home so we would be faced with it regularly. During these conversations we would refer back to it and it was genuinely a huge source of inspiration as it was something we had spent a long time thinking about and writing and it kept us focused on the bigger picture and prevented us from stewing over the problem of the moment. As a result, over time these conversations became shorter and less frequent and eventually disappeared altogether. We agreed we wanted to move as quickly as possible from just getting by to truly enjoying the experience. To do this we knew we just had to get better. We were always learning, always taking copious notes so that we would be able to deal better with problems if they came up a second time. We were finding ways to mitigate problems altogether. We drew on resources available to us, friends who were experienced sailors, people who knew the boat, other crusiers we met. Overtime the shift happened and our increased enjoyment and excitement was palpable. The early months I would characterize as very high highs that we were perhaps to tense to enjoy combined with very low lows which were very difficult to deal with. This has shifted to high highs which are deeply immersive and problems which we know most likely we will be able to solve.
It is also interesting to me as I look back on our time on board that barring a couple of very scary incidents I struggle to recall in any detail the lows or the problem moments. I am however able to recall in rich vivid detail the high moments. I can relive them in my head, I know exactly how I felt at the time, I remember what was said, where we were and who was there. They stir emotion in me to the same degree the low moments produce a kind of blurred irrelevance. The high moments of which there are far too many to list here have been truly special moments that I will remember for the rest of my life. They are the things that make all the courses, planning and stress worth it. They justify our decision to come on this trip and they are the reward for each time we decided to keep going.
I began by thanking Abby for all her work on the blog and I have to finish my post by thanking her for everything else, which could be a blog post all of its own. This trip was undeniably my idea but one that Abby not only came to terms with but became passionate about. I cannot imagine how I would have gotten the idea off the ground without her help and I cannot imagine a more wonderful and capable person to share the adventure with.
