Lifehacker had an excellent article yesterday that, while not being about moving on to a boat and sailing off to the sunset, has everything to do with moving on to a boat and sailing off to the sunset, and it got me thinking...
Folks we have come across who devise cunning and detailed escape plans to go cruising seldom (if ever) actually get to go cruising and, those few who do manage it, seldom stick it out. Which from where I sit (anchored in eighteen feet of water in the Caribbean) is a kind of a bummer. All those plans and effort to no avail is just sort of depressing!
What may surprise some, is that once upon a time I was one of those folks with a cunning plan to take off and go after I had done a rather insurmountable list of things which were must do's before I could do the deed... In hindsight, I realize that if I were to have waited to do the plan and all my t's were crossed and i's dotted I'd still be sitting in France doing the same old same and making plans while not doing what I wanted.
So, the question is, what happened that made me lose the plan/list and retire at forty to go cruising?
Well, part of the plan involved doing lots of research and part of that was joining the most excellent Seven Seas Cruising Association and getting their monthly newsletter which was a font of information on cruising by folks currently out there doing it and by all accounts doing it well. While most of the content of the newsletters dealt with cruising, anchorages, and various tech issues of the cruising gig, there was also the occasional obituary of members who had passed on...
I'm not sure exactly how you see things, but I tend to notice patterns in news and suchlike and it did not take me long to notice that a lot of the members whose deaths were being reported at the time in the SSCA newsletters were passing away at the start of their proposed voyages due to natural causes of one sort or another. That John Doe at the age of sixty-five had a heart attack in Miami three hundred miles into their proposed circumnavigation... Which is not to fault them as they had done everything right and by the book... raised their kids, seen them through college and into their new lives, waited till they could afford and get the right boat and everything was perfect and left. Only to meet the grim reaper a couple of stops into their voyage... Death not being something the "list" and five-year plan had factored in. Serious bummer that!
Which is why we took off and went sailing when we did just shy of forty and somewhat more under capitalized than we would have preferred but in apparent good health and a lot younger than most of our cruising brethren from the USA we would meet for the next few years in the Med and points west.
Looking back we might have done a few things a bit differently but we still did the right thing by not waiting for "the plan" or "the list" to get finished and I'm content in our choices. Which when you think about it, is no bad thing...
Plans Change, Martinique version
1 week ago
