How did we come to be HERE?

Like many couples who enjoy sailing, we had always dreamed about sailing around the world. The trouble was it always felt just like that… a distant dream. We came up with a loose plan, we would save up and set off in around 10 years time to give us chance to get a strong financial base and a well set up yacht. The plan was going well until Matt received a call from his boss with the shock news that the UK office of the company where he worked for 12 years was being shut down. He was asked to stay on a further 9 months to run the hand over of his project, which luckily gave some thinking time as to what on earth we would do now!

After two days of job searching Matt started coming up with other suggestions, such as taking the summer off to further explore Europe. Neither of us had taken a gap year and this seemed like a feasible opportunity. The more time Matt spent looking at other jobs, the more off the wall his suggestions became, until the flippant remark of “of course we could just sell everything and sail around the world” was met with “you know that may not be such a stupid idea”.

That flippant remark turned into an in depth discussion and creation of a very large spreadsheet (Matt’s standard way of making any decision, typical engineer). Listing everything we owned to sell and the estimated costs, it seemed just about doable.

Sailing around the world is such a simple statement, such an easy route to trace out on a miniture map of the world, yet the reality of doing such a thing could not have be further from our office jobs and weekend dinghy sailing.

The save up and go in 10 years plan became a lets go in 10 months plan. We spent those 10 months finding Florence, buying her, preparing her and preparing ourselves. Once our jobs ended, we spent 6 weeks on full time boat preparation and left just 2 weeks late on our 10 month plan. It was a timeframe we would not recommend as it nearly broke us but we were on our way.

The power of our dream has now carried us across the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, from remote uncharted reefs in the tropics to the penguins and fur seals of the Cape of Storms. It’s hard to imagine what our lives would be like if we had not seized on that flippant remark back in late 2015; a remark that changed our lives forever.