To Go Or Not To Go?

To go or not to go, that is the question.  Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of living a normal life, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by casting off your dock lines? To cruise: to set-sail; Do it; and by cruising we end the heart-ache.

To cruise, to sail;

To sail: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;

For in that cruise what dreams may come

Okay, enough plagiarism, you get the idea.  Old Willy had the right idea, he just didn’t carry it through far enough.  Yes, to live is important.  After all, you have to be alive to cruise.  BUT, to feel alive, for a vast number of us, we need to feel the wind at our back and watch a sunset over the equator.  That is living.  That is getting the most out of life for those of us afflicted with the sailing bug.

So how come so few of us are lucky enough to have the opportunity to enjoy that equatorial sunset?  How do the lucky few make it?

Well, first of all, I don’t think it has anything to do with luck.  Our destiny is not a matter of chance.  Nay Nay, say I!  It’s a matter of choice.

A life of cruising is not something to wish for or dream about.  It is something to strive for.

Over the years I have listened to dozens of know-it-alls, who get up in seminars and anywhere they can drag a soap-box, to utter the fateful words, “All you have to do is cut the lines!”

Hell, I am one of the most guilty of the lot.  I have always espoused to folks the only way to get out there is to sever the line between the boat and dock.

But I have  been guilty of oversimplification.  For this I humbly apologize.  You can’t just cut the dock lines.  I know that.

But you do have to make the choice to go.  I guess we should call that “mentally” cutting the dock lines.  That is truly the first step in going cruising; in achieving that dream so many of us share.

The day your dream actually turns into a reality is the day you stop saying, “Someday I want to see an equatorial sunset,” and start saying, “Someday I am going to see an equatorial sunset.”

Thinking back over thirty years, I can easily remember when my life changed.  It wasn’t really the day I first sailed, or the day I bought my first boat.  That was only when I fell in love with sailing.

I also know the day I became a cruiser was not the day I dropped my dock lines for my first long voyage.

No, the day I became a cruiser was standing on the deck of the square-rigged topsail schooner Stone Witch, 50 miles off the coast of Mexico’s West Coast, on the third day of a voyage on our way to Cabo San Lucas.

Before that I knew I liked sailing without a doubt.  But until that day I had not set a goal to become a cruiser as a way of life.  The voyage I was on started as just another fun trip.  Another vacation.  I had not changed my goals or lifestyle.

But that dawn, I awoke in my bunk and realized that I wasn’t just enjoying the cruise.  I found myself starting to restructure my life.

No longer was I thinking about where I wanted to buy a home.  All of a sudden I was planning how I could escape my work-a-day world and make a way of life out of what was just a vacation.

The key word here is planning.  I wasn’t dreaming of sailing off into the sunset.  I was “planning” how to make it happen.

Okay, I know there is some luck involved, and what some may call fate or kismet; but the real thing that every cruiser who has ever spent a night at sea can tell you is, it doesn’t just happen.  It takes planning.

And guess what?  Planning to escape into the world of cruising is half the fun!  Once you have changed from saying “someday” to saying “when” you will find a new spark inside.  The dream will become more real to you, and in that reality it will become fact.

Okay, there is a message to all this verbiage.  It’s really pretty simple.  The people you read about in every issue of this magazine are not lucky for getting to live the cruising lifestyle.  They are people who made the decision to someday cut the dock lines, and they had the determination and fortitude to make it actually happen.

If you take nothing else from this, dreaming will never help you attain the cruising lifestyle. Cruising is not a matter of fate.  It is a conscious decision to make a plan, and to stick to it. Only then can you live the dream.