Every time I picked up my pen, I do not know where to start telling you our story. Should I start it from the summer of the year that we left Durban, South Africa?
The storm raged that summer and our boat Ithaca was not spared and was damaged. After the storm, many boat owners came to check the rescue situation in the marina every day. We were frantically repairing our boat, and there were nearly a hundred items of work listed on the computer. The most important and current tasks were listed on a whiteboard hanging in the cabin at the entrance of the boat. This list was never empty. Often, one item was just completed, and two additional items were added again.
Even on the day that we cut the rope and set sail, the work board still listed several tasks that were not completed. The list was hanging there, like it was mocking us for deciding to act in such a reckless manner.
The captains of the sailing boats know that time and monsoon does not wait for you. If you miss the monsoon, you will miss your sailing year. For the circumnavigation, we had prepared ourselves for four years already. In the marina, I had seen many sailboats in the process of getting ready for a long voyage, years in advance, but those boats are probably still docked in the quay today, waiting for her opportunity, but in vain. A cruising voyage on a sailboat needs to be started in one vigorous effort to be successful.
Perhaps, our story should begin in the year when we started the dream of travelling around the world. It was at the start of 2013. My husband, Pierre, was tired of his job, that he has worked in for most of his life. He began to look for opportunities for a change. Although the job brought us sufficient financial resources, as a half-peer, I understood him. Not advancing in IT Consulting, in the tech sector is to fall behind. You need to keep up your game, which is like the state of the art, you must keep going with endless technology updates, endless certification exams and endless business trips. Since the birth of our first child, he could only stay with us on weekends most of the time and he has had enough of it.
Also in that year, we learned to scuba dive. After obtaining our advanced diving qualifications, we drove our children around South Africa's coastal areas every month and dived down into the beautiful ocean to see colourful tropical fish, we also swam with turtles, and visited shark caves. During that same year, we went to Mozambique and continued to dive there, until the boat came into our lives.
Because of the diving experience, I learned to swim for the first time in my life. Also because of diving, we encountered "the boat", which was a rubber boat over five meters long. It was completely different from a sailing boat. That was the boat which could take us to the ocean. At that time, all boats had the same meanings to us, to "dream of ocean!"
As this was our new hobby, the annual Dive and Boat show caught our attention. We went to go have a look. Accidently, we strolled past a sailing school booth. Pierre was curious and asked the instructor a few questions and left his contact details as requested. Maybe he had an itch for this dream a long time already and I was just blinded to it.
Unexpectedly, this random action became the most important and first step of our sailing life. Two months later, the sailing school sent us an invitation to their sailing courses and told my husband that, if a husband brings his wife to participate in the course at the same time, the wife will enjoy a half-price discount. Pierre could not resist the temptation and eventually pulled me into the "trap".
When my husband was young, his grandmother usually read him the story of "Robinson Crusoe". This was the seed, we only realized it many years later, which was planted in his heart at the time and finally bloomed into a dream of travelling around the world a few decades later. When we made the plan of circumnavigation, I asked him, "Where is the Robinson Crusoe Island?" He pointed at a tiny dot on the map in the South Pacific Ocean on the east side of Chile.
The fictional character in the book Robinson Crusoe, is based on the true story about Alexander Selkirk, who was a Royal Navy Officer and was marooned on this remote island by his captain. From the day Selkirk set his feet on the islands until today, almost all visitors landed this remote island by boats, since this is so, the Robinson Crusoe Island would be the first destination of our nautical dreams.
(the picture was taken with Nuno Gomes, the world's deepest water diving record holder)