Dear People,
It has been almost seven months— 156 days — since we started our circumnavigation. Not quite half way through, our journey has been astoundingly rich and full so far— too much so to recap with any coherence. So we will just start, where we are, now.
At the time of this writing, we are on Denarau Island, Fiji. An unexpected detour to a tourist enclave teeming with Kiwi and Aussie families on winter break, Toby required some urgent medical care at a hospital in Nadi Town, the unfortunate outcome of a nasty staph infection picked up in the water at a beach party in Tonga (so we think). Suffice to say, this enforced downtime has got me to the keyboard at long last. And without these tourists, including us, such excellent medical facilities would not exist.
But before I go any further, let me zoom back out and explain why we have been so bad at this. A dear colleague of Toby’s put it rather bluntly: “man, it’s a good thing you’re not an influencer because you suck at it!” So what’s the deal?
Busy finding our groove
First off, to be clear, we have zero desire to be influencers. Perish the thought! Our ambition was always much smaller, to chronicle our sailing adventure for friends and family.
The honest answer is that this sailing lifestyle is way more time-consuming than we anticipated, even with our boating background, even with our amazing crew who do the hard work. Through obvious in hindsight, when living on a boat full time there is always something to fix, plan, problem-solve, see, explore and experience, and this holds true no matter the number of hands available.
Adapting to life at sea, especially as a family, has taken no small amount of energy as well. By far the most extraordinary experience of our lives— a privilege so few will ever get—it’s been quite an adjustment. We knew it would be. But when making a leap like this, you never fully know how things will play out until you’re in the thick of it.
Missing in the stunning photos is a more complex context: the long stretches of boredom and inactivity during long passages, the discomforts and disorientation of being a sea, the tensions of living so closely together as family, or the parental pain watching your despondent tween daughter miss her friends back home— all occurring within constantly changing circumstances from shifting weather patterns to new cultural norms. Though this may help the FOMO Contingent and disappoint the Living Vicarious Crowd, this is the other side of blue water sailing. And isn’t always holiday-time. Feeling more like an endurance sport, true chill-time is rarer than you think.
At a meta level, I think the Fun Scale explains our experience the best. Our trip has simply supercharged all types of fun (I, II and II)—the number, frequency and intensity—including the not fun types. The good news: our story bank is getting very full already. So much so, I can barely capture what has happened each day on my crude excel spreadsheet, let alone re-acquaint myself with blogging Apps.
The priority, instead, has been to figure out ways through these challenges and find our groove. Not unlike a pilgrimage, which has spiritual and physical tests along the way, this has become a true adventure— dare I say a quest to finish.
To learn, grow and stretch our senses and selves, even if we fail and falter a bit along the way, is a big reason why we are doing this in the first place. Flexibility, adaptability, tolerance for uncertainty, perseverance, resourcefulness, perspective-taking, physical strength and stamina, plus a healthy dose of good humor and play have been essential attributes so far.
And to be clear, we are far from suffering any true hardships (Toby’s health scare aside.) We have our beautiful boat full of modern conveniences, a fabulous crew to rely on, and no lack of canapés and champagne as well.
The Rally is not a race… but still fast
We are also not ‘just’ cruising. We are participating in the Oyster World Rally with 21 other sailing yachts over the space of 16 months, finishing in Antigua the first of April 2025. Even though this sounds like a long time, this is considered a fast circumnavigation.
Many cruisers take two to six years or more, and often just in French Polynesia alone. They find our rushed schedule pure folly. “Aren’t you exhausted?” they pityingly ask. Yes, we are admittedly a bit tired at times. But then I make two points.
One, a lot of us have a background racing sailboats (i.e. me). This means we don’t do ‘slow’ very well. Two, we feel just as blessed, most of all because of the phenomenal community that has formed within the Oyster fleet. Adding in the tremendous technical, practical and moral support from the Oyster Rally Team, all superb humans, it’s hard to imagine doing this voyage without them now.
(For more, see the OWR Live website, it has professional photos, a blog, videos including snippets of us, and a fleet tracker. Skana is the brown boat.)
The Social Media Bind
Our slowness to start this blog also belies a deep ambivalence towards social media. For all kinds of reasons, we have not been active users of these platforms for a long time. That puts us in a bind, of course, if we want to share and connect our experiences. So we are working through a compromise, figuring out what to share and where.
Related to this, I have struggled to find the right voice or organizing conceit for this blog. While I applaud the many sailing blogs out there and have benefited from the best of them, it’s a noisy space these days and I would find a photo-album approach to our trip a boring, repetitive read. The 100th picture of a sunset gets old fast. A loosely related rubric, the intention is to focus on acts of wonderment. My next post will delve into this in more detail.
Thanks for reading this. We hope you will still join us on this journey and we will see where this takes us together. As a reminder, you can track Skana here on this website and us within the Oyster Fleet on their website.
All the best,
Nicole
p.s. The rest of the Skana team (Toby, Jackie, crew Joren & Lotte, or guests) may contribute too and have their own take on this blog. We will see what happens.