Month: October 2016

When Ricky left a message for us to call him. We knew something was up. We took a deep breath and set off for Tasha’s, where we ordered cappuccinos to steady our nerves.

He didn’t disappoint. He had just signed a contract to provide an aircraft for MINUSTAH, the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti. He wanted us to go as the crew because he knew that, as a couple, we were prepared to be away for longer than most pilots. Air tickets between Haiti and South Africa are expensive, so he wanted us to go for five months at a time, with two months off to follow. We countered with four on and two off. Ricky agreed. He wanted us to leave almost immediately, but we had to give three months notice to Comair, so we settled for a start date of the 1^st October.

Bubbling with excitement we headed for the iStore to look at upgrading our computers for the new job. I’m not prone to verbosity, preferring to keep my counsel most of the time. Nicky is normally the extrovert, splashing her 7,000 words about generously and even using some of mine. But suddenly I felt the need to use my daily allocation of 2,000 words all at once. The poor salesman probably didn’t want to know anything about us and I’m sure he didn’t care. But when I let him have the full 2,000 words about our new job in Haiti, how excited we were, and what a huge adventure it would be, he took it on the chin, played along and shook up a cocktail of enthrallment, even though we left empty handed.

A few days later we went in to work to hand in our resignations. They knew why we were there – we hadn’t kept our intentions secret. Between us, Nicky and I had been with the company for almost twenty years and it was not without the occasional lip wobble that we handed in our notice to the Chief Pilot and fielded questions from the curious corridor lurkers.

They say the most stressful things in life are losing a family member, changing jobs, moving house and getting a divorce. We’d just lost Max, resigned from our jobs and were about to put the house on the market. We clung to the hope that the stress from the first three wouldn’t lead to the stress of the fourth.

About a week after Max died, we escaped to the Lowveld, where we stayed at Ashbourne Lodge, owned by Rob and Dawne Topham. Rob is a gregarious guy and reminded us both of Carlo, our larger-than-life ex-boss. When we told Rob of our desire to jump off the hamster wheel, he gave us an allegory that has stayed with us.

‘Most people,’ he said, ‘spend their lives sitting in front of a warm fire with a glass of red wine. They are comfortable, secure and content, unaware of the blizzard outside. Every now and then one of them gets up from the fire and opens the door. Some come straight back. But those that do venture out, when they return frostbitten and draggled, have the most incredible stories to tell.

It’s tough,’ he continued, ‘to get up, pull on warm clothing and step away from the security and comfort of the fire. It might end up in failure, but it’s worth the risk.’

And so when Ricky called, we knew that we had to step out into our blizzard. When I emailed Rob to tell him, he replied:

‘Fantastic. Collars upturned, balaclavas on, huskies tethered….then get ready for the first person to say, “Hell, you guys are so lucky!” Well done. Now…UN Peacekeeping! Nicky…long skirt, leather sandals, burn your bra, and don’t wash your hair until Michaelmas. Brady….bell bottom denims and a ‘Ban the Bomb’ pendant! Please send a photo when you have your kit appropriately assembled.’

I’ll post the photo when I find a pair of bellbottoms!

We found our perfect boat at the Southampton Boat Show. We were visiting Nicky’s sister in Portsmouth and, by chance, saw posters for the show. After some optimistic tire-kicking at the Discovery and Oyster stands, we stumbled across the Allures 45, an aluminum yacht from the French Garcia yard. It was love at first sight. She was everything that we

wanted, but at a price we couldn’t contemplate. A boat is more like a car than a house; it starts to depreciate as soon as it gets wet for the first time. So, although we could afford it, we couldn’t. And it ruined us for all the other boats that we looked at. We began to shift our expectations.

What Coyote had kindled, we realized, was not necessarily a desire to sail around the world, but a yearning for adventure. In our dreams, the yacht was more a means of getting from one place to the next than an end in itself. Another worry was that while we were saving for our dream, the rand was falling faster than a greased bowling ball down a mineshaft. Our real earnings were decreasing and expenses rising. If we didn’t change something soon, we might never be able to buy the yacht. Even more frightening was the possibility that we might succumb to some arbitrary disease, get hijacked, run over by a taxi or, horror of horrors, wake up one day to find that retirement was looming and we had never even tried to set sail.

So, at the beginning of this year we began to cast our nets. The first efforts were tentative: we talked to our old boss (or his son who had taken over when Carlo succumbed to cancer). He had a prospect, but nothing came of it. It was after we returned from our skiing holiday in Austria in March that we were motivated to increase our efforts.

Airline rosters, these days, are designed to sweat the assets – necessarily so because of the current economic climate. The trouble was that we were the assets. In the four weeks after our return, I flew one hundred hours, the maximum legally allowed, and spent twelve nights away from home. It was the last straw. I was exhausted, living to work instead of working to live.

Max was still with us then, so our efforts were muted, scared we might find a job we couldn’t refuse, but had to. Then one night Max had a seizure; and two days later another. When they started getting closer together, we took him for an MRI and found that he had a lesion on his brain. The vet said that we could manage his condition, but that the seizures would continue and he would most likely develop stomach ulcers from the medication. He was already pushing sixteen, so we made the impossible decision to let him go. We were devastated.

Three weeks later, we were still rudderless without Max, unable to accept the freedom that his passing had bequeathed us. Then Carlo’s son Ricky phoned us with an offer we had no reason to refuse.

But we weren’t going anywhere, for a while anyway. We had two dogs: Bella, a Lesser Dane who more than made up for her lack of stature with her outsized personality, and Max, a pit bull, or a boxer, or a bit of both with something else thrown in. We have no offspring of our own, but Max and Bella were our children, canine perhaps, but undoubtedly children. As much as we yearned for adventure, we could never leave them behind.

So we took a practical approach. If we wanted to sail the world, we thought, learning to sail might be a good start. Then there was the little matter of my crippling seasickness. Nicky suggested that I do a sailing course to test the water, so to speak. It went very well until a night exit from Durban harbor found me downstairs wrestling with a harness. After I managed to subdue it, I emerged from the companionway and promptly threw up.

We decided to buy a learning boat anyway; we weren’t going to let a little regurgitation get in the way. Our learning curve was more of a learning cliff. We had so many mishaps on our first few outings that we were convinced that Sea Rescue were put on standby every time we slipped the mooring lines.

But learn we did, enough to rent a yacht in Greece and sail the Aegean for two weeks unsupervised. That holiday convinced both of us that we were making the right decision.

But when would we go? The kids were getting older, approaching their natural demise. Would we be ready?

Cruising is all about money – or the lack of it. There is no magic number, no right amount. Some people go with little more than the boat they own and enough to buy their first meal, relying on their resourcefulness to get by. We weren’t that brave. For others, no amount is enough; they spend their live
s pursuing the elusive ‘right amount’ and never set sail. Those who did have the balls to go always seemed to regret only one thing: that they hadn’t left sooner.

We spent a good deal of time trawling for the right cruising boat, dreaming of sailing out of Port Elizabeth and turning right, past Cape Recife and into the blue.

Before we knew it, Bella was gone. She had made it to twelve, a nonagenarian of a Great Dane. Max helped to fill the void, but we were heart-broken. Our airline roster beat time away like a metronome on speed. Suddenly Max was fifteen, and we started looking guiltily towards the horizon.

If it weren’t for Coyote, none of this might have happened. We met him at Ponta do Ouro in Mozambique, where he had tied up for a while to work as a diving instructor. Coyote was about forty then, and had, since he was a teenager, only stayed in one place as long as his visa allowed. Coyote had enough skills to make himself needed wherever he went. He had worked on crab boats, oyster boats and many other things that float. His ambition was to save enough money to buy a catamaran and sail it to the Andaman Sea. There he would charter the boat to discerning divers and live the life of Reilly.

We weren’t exactly couch potatoes. We used our spare time to the full, skiing once a year, diving at every opportunity and travelling the world when we could afford it. And neither of us were tied to desks. Our office was the flight deck of a 737, flying for a regional airline. But there was no escaping suburbia; no avoiding the daily grind to and from work, dodging Johannesburg’s taxis that barge and shove like nightclub bouncers.

It was over some fajitas and a pot of re-refried beans that everything changed. He sensed our interest, knew of a boat in Nosey Bey in Madagascar. It was an epiphany, not quite like the one on the road to Damascus, but still an epiphany. We didn’t buy that boat, but for the first time in a long time we looked beyond the horizon.