It took me a while to choose this title. Partly because I only started writing this blog 7 months into our adventure and partly because when I look back I really don’t know where the beginning began.
It’s easy to say, “Well when I bought the boat that finally took us across an ocean and up the Brazilian coastline.” But in reality it was way before that, way way before that….
It was when I first stepped on a keelboat in Clearwater, Florida possibly around 2009. You see when you’re born in South Africa in a middle income family things like sailboats and even “cruising” are not part of anything tangible for your future. In fact if you were like me you didn’t even know anyone who owned a keelboat and so these ideas were left to the realms of James Bond and Hollywood.
That all changed when I lived in the USA for 6 years. The world was different, things were obtainable, not only that but they were mostly considered “normal”. I even heard the blasphemy of somebody announcing that a sailboat could be a nuisance…
You see from the very first time I saw the thousands of Sailboats moored in Florida they represented something to me so intangible, yet so real and the lifestyle they brought was something that was to be my future. It was undeniably love at first sight and all the potential futures they could bring filled my imagination for years to come.
I was still young and earning very little BUT I had a purpose and a vision and that was all I needed.
Skip ahead a few years I found myself living back in Cape Town, now a father of 2 and a proud husband. Back in the land of (mostly) have-nots I still had my dream and little known to me at the time even more reasons why it was a bad decision to buy a sailboat.
I was driven and nothing would stop me. I bought my first boat a wooden schooner (33ft) built in Durban and an incredible boat. With the 2 kids and wife aboard it became clear that a catamaran needed to be in our future,.
I then proceeded to buy and sell 2 smaller catamarans before eventually ending up with Caribbean Soul, a beautiful 48 foot monohull and all that we could and (still) can afford. She was all we needed and the future was set.
The dreams were now a possibility and the future was set. But there was an intense fear that began to overcome me. Fear of the unknown, fear of blue water sailing, fear of loss, which almost entirely stripped me of my dreams but I pushed through. I had laid out our plan so thoroughly and sternly that there was no stopping the landslide.
This my friends is the beginning of our journey, to unknown futures in unknown lands with new friends and new horizons. I am putting this in writing both to encourage and entice anybody sitting on the fence and also to remember for myself the journey that we’ve been on as a family, that I’ve been on as a husband and an father and the journey that is becoming our lives. I hope you enjoy it as much as we have enjoyed living it.
Ryan
