Question
How does the reality of your adventure so far live up to the perception of your dream now that you’ve been living aboard for a while?
Answer
I think what you’re asking here is how does the reality of our cruising life compare to our expectations before we left. To answer that I first have to elaborate on why we chose to do this and what did we expect out of it in the first six months.
Having discussed this with Helen we both agree on the why. We left to go cruising to travel, to see new places, to have a bit of adventure, to do something different for a while. To be clear, there was no real sense of escape. While the prospect of doing something different has an element of escape we both feel tremendously fortunate to have been born at a time and place where our position in the global ‘rat race’ allowed us to eventually do what we are now doing. The ‘rat race’ got us here and maybe one day we’ll go back.
This then led to some expectations. The first six months was always meant to be our break in. We chose to sail the length of the eastern Caribbean because it was not too demanding, had good access to support in the form of maritime commerce and other sailors yet at the same time offered us some of the adventure we were looking for. We had some expectations of commercialism down the islands, perhaps high cost, and certainly not the full ‘out there’ we perhaps expect in the coming years.
We also expected some emotional highs and lows. Because of our human nature it is not possible to find a state of mind where you have constant highs. At a broad level our choice in life boils down to a life where our experiences are narrow living in a ‘safe’ band of mediocrity or a life of extremes where one swings between extreme highs and lows. Or somewhere in between. We’ve always chosen the life of highs and lows and believed up front the cruising life has this in spades.
Finally, despite all that one can read about the cruising life we really had a lot of ‘no ideas’ of what it would be like. An absence of expectation to be filled in later.
So how does it compare? We certainly have had our highs and lows. The months leading up to our departure were full of them. Making the mental commitment that we would leave in 2008 was a big high and led to a lot of excitement (and trepidation). Leaving work for both of us was both exciting and rewarding in terms of the reflections from soon to be ex-colleagues. Taking that trip around Manhattan on our new friends motor boat the day after I ‘retired’ was surreal. The despair associated with our plunging finances. The investment home that took too long to close, that turned out so filthy, seemed too much to fix, that delayed the start of our dream and sucked away the dwindling dollars to get going, brought little joy and much anguish.
The first two months of living aboard were a real emotional roller coaster. Being at the stressful end of so many learning curves, the delays to our shipment clearing in St Martin, having to get the boat ready while family visited, again while wondering if we could really afford to do this brought some dark moments. The help and companionship we had from cruisers we had never known before, having our family aboard, moments alone in realization we’d actually done this brought immense highs. The highs and the lows really exceeded what we expected and we regret none of it.
The islands themselves I think exceeded our expectations. Yes they were commercial in places but then you could also get out of this fairly easily in most places and if we didn’t like where we were we could always move on. The friendliness of the locals, the beauty of the rainforests all were a surprise. Dominica especially being strong on both of these.
I guess the biggest difference between experience and expectation (or lack thereof) comes when looking at some of the little things (in no particular order and certainly not complete):
- The variety of sunsets at sea
- Swimming with the sea life never getting dull
- The excitement of (eventually) catching a fish
- The stunning beauty of some of the places we’ve visited
- Pinching ourselves almost daily when it feels ‘ordinary’ and you realize where you are
- The fun of meeting new people
- The pleasure of bumping (not literally) into old friends
- The delight of fixing something
- Seeing a tree which you realize is only a pot plant back home
- Spending time in places ‘unspoilt’ by progress
- Watching a movie with the stars overhead
- Reading a book and not worrying about the time spent
Finally, we always expected this trip to change us. It is changing us but it’s only just begun. Where this will take us we really don’t know. We know this won’t be forever but we do expect to keep going for a few years and are more and more certain we’ll stick to our original goal of circumnavigating. What comes after the trip we have no idea and bothers us little.
We are pretty certain we’ll be heading west in October and it’s highly likely we’ll be off to the Pacific next year. Sitting here at the end of our break in session down the eastern Caribbean this seems as big an adventure as setting out in the first place. So the future remains exciting, scary, full of unknowns.
Just what we want.
