Read an Excerpt
Turning the Dream into Reality
Why would you want to make a sailing boat your home and cast off to venture beyond the horizon?
That’s what my husband and I did. We wanted to have our adventure, our taste of paradise, in this life, not in the next. So in 2002 we set sail and lived the life we’d always dreamed of. Our four-day stay in magical Bimini slipped to four weeks. We spent five weeks anchored off the beach at Freeman’s Bay, Antigua, one of the most beautiful anchorages in the world. Why? Because we loved it.
As a well-known pirate of the Caribbean once said: ‘What a ship is, what she really is . . . is freedom.’
Freedom from the demands of work. Freedom from the daily grind of office politics and social one-upmanship, schedules, the normal, the ordinary, school term times, the school run.
Freedom from traffic and parking restrictions. Time out to explore on every level. Time out for yourself and your partner. Your boundaries will become the horizons you sail over; your perceptions will change with the tides. Teacher, labourer, lawyer and chef will all merge into a sailor of seas.
How much would you give for perpetual summer? To turn the cold rain and grey clouds into
sunshine and blue skies, not for days but for weeks or months in the Caribbean or the Pacific.
And then perhaps having explored in T-shirt and shorts you may want to go further, to the cooler waters of higher latitudes. The world really is your oyster.
While escaping the humdrum is challenging and doesn’t mean a life of ease, even in the toughest times you’ll be in a place that most call heaven on earth. For weeks on end you’ll be somewhere that most people only visit for their precious fortnight’s holiday and you’ll have the luxury of not knowing which day it is, let alone which week. You’ll be cruising, dropping in and out of the tourists’ world as you wish, part local, part traveller.
As JRR Tolkien wrote, ‘Not all who wander are lost.’ One of the many joys of cruising is the unexpected pleasures – be it the thrill of discovering a stunning, uncrowded anchorage or the exhilaration of feeling free to go wherever you want. Freedom doesn’t mean release from stress, but it does mean stress on your own time, stress at your command. You will have to fix the boat, but you will be setting the agenda.
