Adventure

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.