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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.