Tuesday, March 19
“What the hell are we doing? Are we completely crazy?” These are questions my fiancee and I ask each other pretty much daily at this stage, and the fear is real. Where to even begin?
To make a long story short, my soon to be husband and I have made the executive decision to quit our fast-paced jobs in finance to buy a boat and sail around the world. It is an idea he first floated early in our courtship back in 2016. I thought he was joking. While I certainly had an appreciation for job stress and a certain lack of professional fulfilment, I was resigned to being fine with just bitching about it - nobody really loves their job, right? And what's the alternative?
As a quick background, I’m an American girl in her early thirties living and working in London. After graduating from Harvard, I went to New York to work in the hedge fund industry, which has bounced me between New York and London over the past 10 years. Stephen is British, late thirties, a former football player and an Oxford graduate who has been working as a trader in the City of London for the past 17 years. Both overachievers who are sometimes unhealthily hard on ourselves, both with an idea of what we thought it meant to “succeed." It was clear to both of us when we first met that we were extremely similar. We also met at a time when we were both starting to admit that at this stage in our lives we were looking for a change, for something more. I really believe that this longing for something more, without quite knowing what it was, is part of what drew us together so magnetically in those early days. He began to represent the possibility of something different, something potentially dangerous and exciting. Stephen for his part wasn’t the most subtle in trying to slip this crazy boat scheme into the conversation. After our very first dinner date, he brought me back to his place for what I assumed would be a box-standard champagne and seduction routine. Wrong. Instead, he showed me numerous YouTube videos of some guy who lived aboard his 30 foot wooden sailboat, living off the land and cruising around the seas. This, he said, was awesome, and this dude really had it figured out.
The more Stephen and I speculated on the idea of taking a break from the “rat race” and taking to the high seas, the more energised we became by it. Suddenly our conversations at the pub or the dinner table didn’t consist of just the obligatory 30-40 min rant about our daily stresses at work - we now had something to dream about, engaging our imaginations in a way that the daily grind didn’t allow. What began as our nebulous fantasy started becoming much more in those early conversations, without me even realising it. It made us feel alive, energised and full of potential. I started to really consider the idea seriously when Trump won the 2016 US presidential election. Stephen was asleep during the wee hours of the morning when the numbers started to take a dark turn. I sat in front of the TV all night, too horrified to look away. At 5 AM, when the verdict became clear, I walked into the bedroom and said, “That’s it, we are outa here.” And so the plan started to take physical form.
We have spent many months preparing for this trip whilst still working, taking numerous courses, both practical and theoretical, getting as much up to speed as possible in a relatively short time frame. It’s worth mentioning that I had never sailed previously. Sure, I'd been on a sailboat before, but my experience had been confined to sipping champagne and maybe snapping a few sunset photos. Never touched a rope, or a "line" as I now know they are called. Stephen had gotten the sailing bug a few years earlier when his close friend Dan took him and a group of lads on a sailing trip around Thailand. Since then, his sailing experience had been minimal at best. We were as novice as you could get. Here we are, months later, both certified Day Skippers working towards Yachtmaster qualifications. We finally closed on the purchase of our boat, a beautiful and very sturdy Discovery 55’ sailing yacht named Florence. The next month is going to be a whirlwind: we get married in 2 weeks in the Cotswolds, immediately followed by our “mini-moon” (i,e., a 5-day intensive First Aid at Sea Course, which I’m really looking forward to given I cannot stand the sight of blood), followed by moving out of our house in Notting Hill, moving our lives permanently onto our boat, and slipping the lines from Southampton in early May. We’ve engaged a professional skipper / dude-extraordinaire named Steven Horrobin to sail with us for the first month, providing intensive on-boat tuition as we do our shake-down cruise up to Dublin and then take Florence up the west coast of Scotland. The landscape will be rugged and largely unpopulated, the weather variable, and the tides extreme - great learning conditions, we are told.
Fears and anxieties: So, here we are, T-2 weeks until the wedding and T-7 weeks until we slip the lines on Florence and set sail on our journey that will take us across oceans to different continents. Some mornings I wake up feeling extremely energised and encouraged, other days I am a mess. What are we doing? Was quitting my job a good idea? How am I going to make money? Am I forever professionally handicapping myself by taking myself out of the industry when my growth potential is at its steepest? What about Stephen’s job, at a firm where he likes and respects his colleagues and has a real future? What will people think? Are we being irresponsible? Do we have enough experience? Will we even know how to sail this damn thing? What if we hate it? What if we end up hating each other? What if we encounter storms? What if we crash the boat? Sink the boat? At this point of the journey before we’ve slipped the lines, there are so many more questions than answers. In fact, the whole trip is a big question mark, and that I suppose is the point. We know this life in London. We know our lives in finance. We know within this sphere how we fit and what our capabilities are. What if we completely threw ourselves out of our comfort zone? What would we discover about ourselves and each other? What would we discover about the world? Who would we meet? What will we see? What experiences will we have that will shape us? How will this experience change us? What is our true potential? I guess we are going to find out….
I invite you to follow along with us on this crazy journey, as we attempt to discover what this big, beautiful world - and we - are made of.
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