Half Way Around the World – What's Our Next Sailing Adventure?

“No, this is not the beginning of a new chapter in my life; this is the beginning of a new book! That first book is already closed, ended, and tossed into the seas; this new book is newly opened, has just begun!” C. Joybell

It’s wonderful to know that every day is a fresh start. Each sunrise is an opportunity to create a new chapter in your life. The great beauty of time is that you can’t waste it in advance. Every new hour, new day, and new year are waiting for you, unspoiled, giving you the opportunity to make your life better.

Daphne Rose Kingma describes this opportunity concisely. “Holding on is believing that there’s only a past; letting go is knowing that there’s a future.” Despite all that we have been through in the first five years of our adventure, I’m treating the second half of this journey as the opportunity for a new beginning.

Who would have guessed that we picked the worst time in recent history to sell our home and attempt to sail around the world? The housing market was extremely low. We only got a fraction of what our home would be selling for now. Two years into our voyage, Covid hit. We got locked down in a marina in Ireland for 2 years. Having to pay to be in a marina quickly drained our financial resources.

Our boat didn’t cooperate either. Almost everything that could break, did, and other things were lost through unfortunate situations. In the first half of our journey, we’ve had to fix or replace the generator, our dinghy, dinghy engine, the refrigeration system, our collapsible bikes, our electronics and navigation system, our in-mast roller furler, alternator, inverter, starter motor, water maker system, electric windlass, anchor chain, main sheet traveler, cockpit enclosure, our batteries (twice) and our solar panels. That’s the shortlist and doesn’t include all the other minor repairs and items that have had to be replaced from normal wear and tear. Let’s just say, Dan has had his hands full.

The good news? My husband knows every piece of wiring, every system on the boat, and how to fix just about anything moving forward, that breaks. Maybe that’s what first halves are about – working out the kinks, getting to know your boat, understanding all the pitfalls that can occur and how to deal with them. That’s my motivation as we sit in La Marina Valencia completing our repairs and planning for the second half of our circumnavigation. We are currently undergoing the biggest refit and repair segment to date as we are spending the entire month of January doing nothing but repairs and installations.

Part II

We’ve actually covered half the nautical distance around the world as we’ve sailed 15,000 nautical miles and the Earth’s circumference is around 25,000 miles. We’ve visited 43 countries and stepped on four of the seven continents. It’s apropos to consider this Part II of our voyage as we are halfway in time and miles. We gave ourselves 10 years to sail around the world. Two of those years were robbed by Covid.

I’m hoping that our lack of good luck thus far is not predestined, and the obstacles of our past are just gateways to new beginnings. I think the most important lesson we have learned is that things are going to break. It’s not if, it’s when. The best you can do is be prepared. The difficulty with a nomadic lifestyle is not the fixing, but finding and getting the parts. This has been the bane of our existence. We have spent days waiting for parts that were never delivered, hours on the phone, and computer tracking parts that we were told had shipped, but hadn’t. Then there’s usually a language barrier. We’ve made phone calls to get information from companies who have hung up on us the moment we started speaking English.

We have needed items in parts of the world where no one sells them and shipping is not possible. Long gone are the days when we lived in a home where Amazon could deliver almost any conceivable item to our door in a day or two. We have learned that spare parts are our most valuable assets and we do our best to keep 2 of everything possible that will fit on our boat.

It’s comical that my biggest fear setting out was running out of food. I stocked enough cans and dried goods that we could survive for a year on a deserted island. The one constant everywhere we travel is that all humans eat food. There is food available everywhere except for the occasional uninhabited islands we visit, which are the exception, not the norm.

I’m restocking my cabinets during this layup and getting rid of the canned goods I have dating back to 2018. My “second half resolution” is to stock what I think I will need that I can’t get at a small grocery store. This way, I can find what I need to cook for a meal instead of having to wade through a cabinet stuffed with unnecessary provisions.

Important Lessons Learned

As we are considering the month of January 2023 a fresh start to the second half of our travels, it’s important to embrace the lessons we have learned. Writing them down helps internalize them. Now we need to live by them. There is some truth in the saying, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” The knowledge we have collected through each crisis and section of adversity will hopefully make Part II smoother sailing.

Challenges are opportunities to search for a new center of gravity. You can’t fight them; you just have to discover a new way to find your balance.
Living is not falling or failing, but getting back up every single time you are knocked down.
When the winds of change blow, don’t fight them, adjust your course and go in a new direction. Chances are, it was where you were meant to be.
Celebrate every success.
Failure isn’t fatal. It’s an opportunity to learn. It’s your courage to continue that counts the most.
Don’t beat yourself up when you have a bad day. The bad memories fade a lot quicker when you focus on the good ones.
You can’t think in terms of beginnings and endings, successes, or failures. Life is a process and a learning experience. No matter how bad things may seem at a given moment, you can always begin again.
Don’t focus on what can go wrong, be excited about what can go right.
Plans are more loose interpretations of what you hope might happen. Expect the unexpected.

Where We Go From Here

A typical sailing route for circumnavigation follows the trade winds. You may have noticed, living on land in North America, that storm systems come from the west. If you watch the weather on TV the models show the weather on landmasses, above latitude 23.5 degrees, are driven by the jet stream from the west. This is called the tropic of Cancer. In the Southern Hemisphere, it is the same in the tropic of Capricorn. The jet stream causes these systems to be erratic and problematic for sailors. Between them, there is another weather system constantly blowing from east to west near the equator called the trade winds. Sailors have relied on these winds to sail around the world for centuries.

Trade winds are driven by the rotation of the Earth. They begin as warm, moist air around the equator. As that warm air rises, it meets the cooler air generated from the Earth’s North and South Poles and sinks at the tropic of Cancer and Capricorn. Because the Earth rotates easterly as the air is moving, the winds in the Northern Hemisphere curve to the right, and the air in the Southern Hemisphere curve to the left. This is called the Coriolis Effect and the reason for the mostly reliable trade winds from the east.

This is the ideal latitude if you want to sail around the world via favorable winds. This will be our latitude as we move forward. We have a huge, expansive stretch of ocean laying ahead and the trade winds have been propelling sailboats through that ocean since man learned how to build and sail ships. A wise man once said, “You can cross the ocean on a well-provisioned piece of driftwood from east to west.”

Our time sailing around Europe and the Mediterranean has ended. It was amazing. I feel like I’ve lived a lifetime in a few short years. I’ve seen and experienced places that have been truly unexpected and breathtaking. I had to pinch myself sometimes to convince myself that I wasn’t dreaming.

Albeit incredible, it took a lot longer than expected to visit the European countries and our delays put us way behind schedule for our travel plans. Covid has been mostly to blame as well as being laid up for four months in Lagos waiting for our mainsail furler to be repaired. We’ve had many delays. It’s time now to put that all behind us and hope for the best.

Adios to Spain

As soon as we depart from La Marina de Valencia, we will navigate back across the section of the Mediterranean known as the Alboran Sea. The Med is comprised of 11 seas. We sailed through many of them during our time in this region. We will depart the Med back through the narrow and potentially treacherous Straits of Gibraltar. The winds can be fierce as they funnel between the land masses of Europe and Africa. Contrasting is the strong ocean current, which you need to plan for use in your favor. In Dan’s Merchant Marine days, he crossed many oceans. The worst sea state he ever experienced on a ship was going through this strait. Our respect for its potential chaos is on the healthy side! We made it through just fine on the way in. Hopefully, the way out will be fine too.

Our first destination will be Morocco. Our boat buddies, who are several months ahead of us now, recently made this passage. When they arrived in the vicinity of the marina in Morrocco, they had to call the marine police and be escorted up the river to the marina. The waves were nine feet as they had to motor to follow the police vessel. It was harrowing, to say the least. I pray for more favorable seas.

Despite the potentially difficult entrance, Morocco has been the favorite destination of many of our sailing friends. We can’t wait to spend a few weeks there. The people are beyond kind, generous, and friendly. We plan on riding the Marrakesh Express and riding camels in the desert. I can’t wait!

Following Morocco, we will be en route to the Canary Islands. It’s a common staging area for those sailors heading across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. It is also a traditional starting point for sailors from Europe who have the goal of circumnavigating via the trade wind route.

The Canaries are made up of eight islands and are an Atlantic territory of Spain. La Palma is the capital and contains an active volcano that erupted in 2021. These islands have much character, each being unique with diverse natural attractions. It stays mild all year long and is an excellent choice for provisioning and waiting for a good weather window to cross the Atlantic.

What’s Next?

Remember the last lesson on our Lessons Learned list? Plans are really loose interpretations of what we hope will happen. Where we end up in the Caribbean is still a variable. Hurricane season will be upon us beginning June 1^st. We have to be below the 12^th latitude and above the 31^st according to our boating insurance policy. If your boat is damaged by a hurricane and you are not inside those latitudes, they will not cover the damage. That being said, once we arrive in the Caribbean, if we make it, we will find an island such as Trinidad or the ABCs, (Aruba, Bonaire, Curacao) to wait out the hurricane season.

When hurricane season is past, and if we are on track, we will then head to Panama. It will be an experience getting our boat through the Panama Canal. Fortunately, Dan has some experience with this as he passed through on a merchant ship many years ago. We are required to hire guides to take us through the canal and purchase large tires to act as fenders as we will be trapped in swirling locks with large ships. If anyone has an interest in experiencing the lock crossing, let us know. We can always use an extra set of hands!

There are so many cool destinations and adventures to be had in that part of the world that we won’t even begin to guess what we will visit on the other side of South America. The Pacific awaits, a whole new Ocean offering incredibly diverse choices. Half the fun of this journey is imagining what we will see and where we will end up. No use in planning at this point as we never know how far we will actually get and how long it will take to get there. For us, happiness is the journey, the destinations are the cherries on top.

“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.” – Anthony Bourdain

I wish everyone reading this a wonderful, adventurous, and joy-filled new year. I wish you a life with no excuses, and that you live your life to the fullest and with no regrets. Don’t be afraid of taking risks, your only regret in life will be those things you didn’t try to do. Coming from people who fail on a regular basis, the adventure and satisfaction you will have from attempting to reach your dreams are what makes life worth living. I highly recommend taking a leap of faith and venturing this year to somewhere new, somewhere you’ve never been. When you arrive, remember that it’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.