Chapter 113: So, What’s the Plan?

This is the 113th chapter of this blog. It’s pretty comprehensive, detailing every last part of our lives over the last 2 years: deciding on a life change, deciding what sort of life change it should be, learning to sail, buying a boat, repairing a boat, outfitting a boat, living on a boat, cruising on a boat. So when one of our most faithful readers asked us “what is your plan, exactly?”, my first thought was “didn’t you read the blog?” So I went back to Chapter 1. And Chapter 2. And then 3, 4, 5, and 6. Turns out, we never actually said what our plan is beyond “buy boat, go sailing”. I’m not exactly sure how we skipped over that part, but I guess we did. So here is THE PLAN, in Chapter 113. Better late than never.

Our plan is to sail around the world. There. I wrote it down for everyone to see. Now we’re locked in.

That would be, let’s see… 21, 600 nautical miles (almost 25,000 land miles).

Now, having said that, we might not. (See? Bailing already) Because we’re still pretty new at this. So we’re not committing to going all the way right here, right now. We’re taking it in steps, so that if we decide we hate it, we can bail.

Step 1 is to sail the Eastern Caribbean. That’s what we’re doing right now. It’s a good “playground/training ground” because the islands are fairly close together, the weather is relatively predictable (hurricanes excluded, of course), and we’re never that far from civilization. It’s like riding a bike with training wheels. We are gradually working our way south, with the goal of being in Grenada in September. In September, we’ll be taking a boat break to go stateside for a wedding. Meraviglia will be in a marina and we are thinking about having her hauled out for a week or so to do some boat work. This is bail point number one. If we’re not feeling it, we can turn around and head back north to the States, sell the boat, and go back to our humdrum lives where something isn’t always broken.

Step 2 is to sail through the Southwest Caribbean. From Grenada, we’ll head to the “ABC”s: Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao. From there, we will head further west to Panama. We’ll plan to be in Panama in December or January. This is bail point number two. We can easily turn around and head back north.

Step 3 is to get to another ocean. We’ll stage to cross the Panama Canal into the Pacific Ocean. This is bail point number three. On the Pacific side of the canal, we can still head north, either into Baja or up to the West Coast of the US.

Step 4 is, well, a big one. We’re pretty much out of bail-out points if we take this one. We cross the Pacific. From Panama to French Polynesia is 4,000 miles or about a 3 week sail. Frankly, that feels kind of intimidating. But we’ll have a lot more experience before we face that step.

From there, we would just keep going: There are tons of places: Indonesia, The Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, then across the Indian Ocean and around Cape Horn back into the Atlantic.

So, that’s our plan. Frankly, it feels too big to grasp when we think about it (and especially this week with hurricane #1 of the season), so we’re just focusing on each stage. We’re just gonna see how it goes. A lot of you are thinking we’re crazy. We get it. We think that fairly often ourselves. Right now, as we wait out rain and storms in Guadeloupe, we’re just focusing on getting from one beautiful island to the next (and avoiding hurricanes) and reminding ourselves how very blessed we are.