rhys wrote:
On 12 Aug 2005 13:33:27 -0700, wrote:
I hear this sort of thing a lot, that life is short and people should
do what they really want to do etc.....However, i think many people
talk about doing things they really do NOT want to do as if they would
like to do them. Cruising can be stressful, like, "Will my anchor
hold..." When the opportunity really comes, many people will find they
really do not want to sail away because normal life really is
comfortable while life on a 27' boat will be fairly uncomfortable a
lot.
snip
If a person constantly says " I would love to be doing ######## if I
just could" and then does nothing to achieve that dream does need some
waking up but I really see very few of them.
That's why I object to the 'follow your dreams' type rhetoric. And
the subsequent 'broken dreams' thing.
Plans---- I can go with plans. Not dreams.
I have friends who spent years building their dream boat and finally
sailed away last year after defferring sailing for years.
You should only spend years building a boat IMHO if your dream is boat
building. If your dream is sailing, the buy a boat and sail.
That is why our game plan for five-seven years of world cruising in
mid-life includes the following:
1) Have the wife take a teacher's degree to teach our kid and to offer
a tutor service to fellow cruisers and/or teaching terms ashore. Learn
diesel maintenance, celestial, diving.
I'm not so sure that a teaching degree will be that useful. I have
one, and there were a few nuggets of useful information in there, but
there was a lot of other stuff that I would not need to teach one
child or tutor a small group. It may be a large expense for little
return.
I'm also not sure about the celestial.
2) Develop new markets for my (successful) freelance writing into the
travel/sail/tech aboard fields...not a stretch.
3) Spend as much time as possible living aboard in Lake Ontario on our
present boat, which is old school and pretty minimal, but big enough
to tackle bad weather.
4) Join passagemakers as crew to see if life on salt water is really
for us.
5) Repeat.
6) Repeat. Repeat until you've got some real sea hours and you get
sensibly frightened, but reasonably experienced. G
7) Rejig paid off house as income rental property, and THEN get a 50%
mortgage against it and go ocean-boat shopping.
8) Live aboard new used boat in Toronto for one year while house is
renting out. Try to replicate cruising life by finding what works,
what doesn't.
Only if each of those steps works out--particularly both of us making
separate offshore trips as crew and then TOGETHER as crew--would we
actually get a new boat. The boat we have is offshore capable--many
have gone to the Carribean, for instance, but is too small and tender
for my tastes. But all the human elements have to be in place before I
would essentially mortgage my future to take a mid-life sabbatical.
However, the rationale is to go NOW and not when advancing years,
health issues or putting a kid through college make it less likely. We
want to be at sea (or as foreign-based live-aboards) when my kid is
between seven/eight to 13-14, at which point we plan to get him back
for high school with some real life experience under his belt instead
of Nintendo thumb and a pasty fat arse.
This is a good time frame AFA the kids are concerned I think.
Wish us well...the house is paid off in six months and the sextant is
becoming familiar and the wife's applying for teacher's college this
fall.
R.
grandma Rosalie