Before I had a boat, my dream was to go cruising.
When I bought Wisdom and moved aboard, my dream was still to go cruising.
Then I met other cruisers, and the ones who confused me the most were those that were selling their boat and moving ashore. They were done with boat life and wanted to be a dirt dweller. My dream was to go cruising and I could not comprehend this decision to end happiness.
Then one lucky day in 2015, Maddie and I went cruising for just 1 month. We sailed down the Chesapeake Bay and out into the Atlantic Ocean. We sailed about 1000 nautical miles, experienced many beautiful sights on the water and had a few adventures ashore in distant places.
When we returned to the marina in Baltimore, Maryland, I kept looking at pictures from our trip. That really was the happiest I had ever been in my life and I wanted to return to that state of being so badly! Thankfully, Maddie felt a similar way and gave to OK to a 9 month voyage that would start in 2017.
July 10, 2017, we set sail for a 9 month cruise. Soon, Maddie extended the end date to a full year cruise. At the end of the year, Maddie OK’d another year, making this 9 month cruise a 2 year cruise. Life was good!
We are now 3 years into our voyage and in the Mediterranean Sea! We have sailed about 17,000 nautical miles and are very very far from our starting port.
We are nearing our turn around point, being the point where we stop sailing away from our end point and begin to sail back to it. Turn around point will be Italy, because both of us independently wanted to sail to Italy!
Once we reach Italy, we will begin sailing back to the United States where we will find a new port to settle down in, and eventually buy some dirt to live on.
This turn around point is especially important to me because Maddie and I talked about where we would turn around when we were in Gibraltar. The reason this is special to me is around the same time, I was reading “Mediterranean Adventures” by the Pardey’s and they had a similar discussion in the Mediterranean.
They were cruising in their first boat and had just received the plans to their second boat. They were deciding on how they would sail to California where they would then begin construction on their new boat. Should they sail back out the Strait of Gibraltar and cross the Atlantic or keep going and cross the Pacific? They ended up going the Pacific route and completing their first circumnavigation. We chose to return through the Atlantic.
So far, every mile we have sailed has been a mile towards a new destination. Once we decided on the turn around point, every mile became a futile mile that we will have to sail back again. Once we reach our turn around point, every mile will be a mile closer to the end (even though the end is thousands of miles away).
This feeling that we are sailing towards the end of our voyage is an odd thought as this has been my dream for over a decade and our life for the past several years! To think that we are going to come back and start a new chapter in our lives feels odd and foreign. Fear of the unknown I suppose.
This frustration with perspective also makes me wonder about the perspective of someone who has completed a circumnavigation. In essence, they are done. They went around the world and probably spent close to a decade doing it. Now they are back where they started and the thought of sailing anywhere is either a repeat or a chore. I have met a few circumnaviagators and they seem frustrated that they have sailed it all and there is no where else for them to sail! Yes, you can sail to a new sea that you skipped while circling the globe, but it’s still frustrating in their mind. They can never leave this planet on a sailboat and they are stuck.
The world is a big place, but our minds can make it feel like a cage if we let it.
