That was the end of sailing until I was given a Harrier racing dinghy, which I named North Opportunity. I was back on the water but only racing on a lake in Staffordshire. I did not enjoy the racing and would have prefered to use it for sea purposes instead of of sitting on a lake in the heaviest boat looking for any amount of wind to move her.
In the end the financial pressures of being a student meant that I had to sell her so after only two years of ownership she was put on Ebay and sold for £700. Again my plans of being on the water or owning a boat fell on the wayside until my Step Mother brought a Compac 23 which was based in Conwy Marina. Unfortunately I could not spend much time due to cost of getting up there on the train. Our time sailing the Compac was troubled to say the least, I was completely under qualified and ill expereinced to be sailing in those waters and after running out of fuel in the middle of the Conwy Estuary and having to be rescued by the RNLI after being caught in out in high winds off Anglesea with a fouled prop it was not going well. The last experienced mentioned had put of sailing all together for a while and this was how it stayed.
I had met my partner Carlotta when I was 21. Carlotta had never sailed before and after the experiences noted above I believed she would never want to sail again. We were living in Birmingham when we met and moved in together a year later. We both worked for the hospitality industry myself working in reservations for Hyatt and herself working in the same hotel as a receptionist. Time moved on and I was offered a job working in revenue at The Belfry where I worked for three years. I was then offered a position to work for The Grove in Hertfordshire so we moved to the smallest appartment in Kings Langley where we currently reside. Carlotta had manaed to find a job in central London but hated the commute every day.
That was it for a year, we worked hard and worked long hours coming back to an appartment which never felt like home and our lives felt to be missing any purpose. It was on the Wednesday the 27th 2008 when I was driving home that I pulled over and made a decision. We were both unhappy, the material world we were living in, the idiots we saw on the TV and came across everyday, the lack of values and a celebrity obsessed culture were all factors that lead me to believe we needed to get of this country and this life style quickly. These thoughts can be sumed up in the following quotation by Chris Mccandless (aka Alexander Supertramp):
"So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun".
The decision was made, I would take the initiative and would change my life. How, was another factor but it did not take me long to come up with the decision to try and sail round the world. I had read books such as 'Shrimpy' (Shane Acton) and 'A world of my own' by Robin Knox Johnston to mention only two, I knew this was to be my future from that point, I would leave the conformity of my current life style and try to see the world, all I had to do was to convince Carlotta that this was the best idea. Carlotta agreed to the idea after a couple of hours convincing her. There and then we made a plan to leave by the 3rd June 2010 giving us two and half years to get our act together.
We had initially decided that we needed to put a side £40K to make this dream a piossibility. We had split this money to have £25K for the purchasing of the vessel and £15K to live off for a couple of years before we had to startv thinking about going back into work. This was a little short sighted as you will find out later on in the website.
Straight away we changed our living standards, we stopped going out for dinner, stopped buying clothes and stopped going out for drinks. We spent from February 2008 to September paying off all credit cards we had and any other debts as it was pointless saving while these were hanging over our heads.
The next step was to gain some qualifications before we start sailing. We went to the Southampton Boat Show and stumbled acorss Ocean Training http://www.oceantraining.com/. The Day Skipper Course provided by Ocean Training was hbome based with all practice charts included. It took us around 8 months to complete, but more diciplined people could have it completed in a couple of weeks.
From September to the following summer our weekends and evenings were spent studying every thing we could get our hands on. We had occasionally taken a break and travelled to the coast to look at boats and keep the dream alive.
In the end we finally managed to complete our Day Skipper to a high standard and now needed to pass the practical side. We had a looked a few sailing schools on the south coast but in the end signed up with Hot Liquid Sailing based at Shamrock Quay in Southampton http://www.hotliquid.co.uk/da/17698.
I managed to pass my Day Skipper (Tidal) practical and carlotta managed gain her Competant Crew. Unfortunately we had not factored in the cost of sailing courses into our £40K budget and altogether with the theory and practical side the costs had surpassed £1,500 but we knew it would have been foolish not to undertake this practial experience so we will just have to save more money.
We needed to continue to increase our experience on the sea so decided to join the Westerly Owners Association as there was a possibility we may be purchase a Westerly model. We joined and were sent a book containing all members, we emailed around 20 members who lived near us and may want to save petrol money by going down to the coast togther. We recieved two replies, actually we recieved two rude replies, this was not a good start and could not understand why we did not get a higher take up. For the record we believed joining thw WOA (Westerly Owners Association) would have been highly benificial, we were completely wrong. Along with the above we were about to look at a Westerly 33 so I posted a note on the Forum for advise; I recieved an answer 4 months later.
