We arrived in the Azores August 2018, and spent the entire winter on the hard while carrying out a refit. Now, 10 months later, we are finally ready to go back into the water and get sailing again!
When Will It End?
To start off, yes, our sailing trip will come to an end in the future.
All Good Things Must Come To An End
When I only lived aboard and dreamed of a cruising life, I was always perplexed by “retired cruisers”. I couldn’t fathom why someone would “Stop Sailing” and move onto land somewhere. I was baffled by this thought and knew that I would never leave this boat.
That was 7 years ago and my thoughts have changed. When we were just starting our cruising life (after living in a marina for 5 years and cruising for only 6 months), the thought just struck me. We were offshore beyond the sight of land, several miles (but looking back, still pretty close to the coast) off the coast of Virginia when I decided that upon our return to the United States, we would buy a house and live on land.
I wasn’t thinking about where I wanted to live or what I wanted to do in the future; it just came to me out of the blue out in the deep blue. I thought this was madness and dwelled on this thought for several days before even mentioning a word of it to my wife, Maddie. She always wanted to live on land and if I mentioned it, there would be no turning back. The fear of leaving the boat made me remain quiet about this thought for several weeks after I first came to this realization.
Then one day, I told Maddie. At first, she thought I was injured or ill; then she thought I was joking! I had to reassure her that this was not a “spur of the moment” thought and that I have actually contemplated this for a long time now. Needless to say, she was very happy!
We didn’t turn around early to get a house, instead we carried on down the East Coast of the United States, down to the Bahamas, back up to Bermuda, across to the Azores, and now onto Portugal. We still have to sail to Greece, then back to the Caribbean, and then back up to Maryland. Needless to say, when we get back, we will have sailed further than most “wishful” cruisers dream about!
So, in short, when we get back, we plan to save up and buy a house. We will not sell Wisdom, and we will not give up on sailing. Sailing is such a huge part of our lives and when we get back, Wisdom will be the longest place I have ever lived! She is so much more than just a boat, she is our home and we can’t just forget about her!
Sailing will become something that we do less often, as we will be working during the week and sailing on the weekends; but it will still be a major part of our lives and not something forgotten as we begin our next adventure: RV road trip through the National Parks in the United States.
It seems that most cruisers we meet are retired. After a lifetime of working and saving up to cruise in retirement, this is their last hoo-rah! We are very young, and if we spent a lifetime cruising, we would run out of waves to sail over! We started cruising when I was 31 and Maddie was 26. Now we are 33 and 28, and when we get back, I will be around my late 30s and Maddie in her early 30s. At that point, we will still have many years left for future adventures!
The journey is still continuing strong, and when this voyage reaches its end the adventure still will have not!
Our Most Recent Episode!
Hello Everyone! Thank you for following along on our adventure as we sail to new lands with our electric motor and synthetic standing rigging. We are venturing along using only the power of the wind to carry us across the great blue world that we live on!
Here's How to Avoid Excess Baggage on Your Future Travel Abroad
If you’ve ever been on a plane, chances are that you’ve seen a few people opening up their bags and struggling to find a solution because they packed a little too much weight. You never want to end up in a situation where you'd be in their position and you have to find a way to clear out some stuff from your bag in order for it to get into the plane. This article will help you avoid being in such a tough and stressful situation, especially if you're already a little late.
Here Are 3 Ways You Can Avoid Excess Baggage When Traveling:
Buy Certain Things At Your Destination
Whenever you're packing, you usually get this feeling to over-pack in case you'd need your extremely large shampoo bottle. Well, an important piece of information to remember is that other countries have these products too, some for an even cheaper price than the one you have. Buying things like toiletries and hair products in the place you're going to end up saving you a few kilograms in your bag, and those make a huge difference. If you're planning to stay for an extended period of time, then you'll need all the weight you can get to pack your clothes anyway.
Weigh Your Bags Before You Leave
Getting all the way to check-in your bag before you travel is a really stressful situation when you don’t know what to expect when you get there. You cross your fingers and hope you're not overweight because you don’t know how much your bag weighs after you packed it. Here’s some news, there are multiple ways to weigh your suitcase while you're still at home. Having a handy little device to check the weight of your bag before you actually leave to the airport can save you so much trouble in the long run, especially if you travel frequently.
Use a Light Suitcase
If you still carry around an old, heavy suitcase that’s huge and can fit all your clothes when you travel, then you might want to invest in something that does the same thing but with a lot more ease. There are hundreds of new suitcases that have a sturdy exterior shell but are extremely light and easy to handle. The weight of your suitcase itself goes into account when you're at the airport, and the lighter the suitcase, the more you can pack. Any problems with weight always occur with just a few kilograms that could’ve been spared by having a light suitcase.
Try To Use As Many Tips & Tricks as Possible
Avoiding being overweight and having to either pay a fee to get your bag on board or having to unpack things from your big suitcase onto your carry on bag is the main priority here, but you also want to have the freedom to carry the things that you want to take with you too. Avoiding unnecessary weight by combining every single trick in the book will leave you with the utmost comfort when you're packing. You'll pretty much never have to worry about heading there and finding out that your bag is overweight, especially if you know for a fact that it isn’t.
The Costs of Cruising
When people wonder about the costs of going cruising, they often limit their thoughts to just the monetary costs of cruising. How much will it cost to…? Everything is focused on money, the cost of buying a boat, the cost of maintaining a boat, the cost of fuel, the cost of food, the cost of everything! Forget about the costs.
Everyday you live costs money! You don’t think about “can I afford to live the way that I do?” Instead you simply live based on how much money you have, and the same will happen when you are cruising. If you can afford it, you will do it, if you can’t afford it, you won’t do it. It’s that simple!
The real costs that are overlooked are the emotional costs. These really hit me recently and were rather expensive.
When we set off to go cruising, I said goodbye to the world that I knew. Never again would any of this be the same. When I returned from cruising, the world will be different and the place that I departed from will no longer exist. This might sound dramatic but it is the truth.
Friends that you had as neighbors will move away or die, so where you once lived will not be the same upon your return. Family will get older, cousins will grow up, and everything will change.
I thought this was a preposterous concept when I was leaving. Nothing ever changes in my world. I have had the same neighbors for 5 years, my friends live their lives of routine, and my parents are very resistant to change.
In the short time that we have been gone, our old neighbor sold their boat and moved from Maryland to South Carolina. Our other neighbor went cruising, returned from cruising, and is selling their boat to move onto land somewhere. My parents sold their boat that they used every weekend because they thought they wanted to upgrade to a larger boat, only to realize that they really loved their boat and selling it was a mistake. I now have a nephew who is able to walk around (he didn’t even exist when we set off to go cruising). The area around my parents town is almost double in size, with new stores, shopping centers, and streets that make the place look completely different. Lastly, but most importantly, Sammy is no longer around. My pet bird that was attached to me for the past decade is no longer waiting for me to come home. Being how birds are famous for living forever, I figured that I would just leave her in the good care of my parents (they also have pet birds, so they know what they are doing) and go cruising for a few years. I just reached the Portuguese coast and have the entire Mediterranean to sail, but I was already making plans to pick her up as soon as we made it into Floridian waters. Sammy loved boat life because I never had to go to work which meant she never had to be away from me. I knew she would have loved the Florida Keys with their warm weather and fresh fruits! All that is a pipe dream now.
People often said that we would just slip out of the world, cruise around, and then slip back into the world where we left off without anything being different. Nothing ever changes while you are here so nothing will change while you are not here.
I feel like I have returned to an alternate dimension. One that looks similar to where I left from but is just off enough to make me question the very validity of its location in space.
Cruising is a wonderful life experience, it will open your eyes to the whole world that is just beyond your comfort zone. You will be the outsider everywhere you go with stories to tell of your travels across the seas and of distant lands, but those distant lands will be your home when you make your return. When you set off cruising, be prepared to say goodbye to everything because you may never see it again.
