When Surreal Gets Real

So, we’re four days into our little jaunt around the world, and Jen and I had a really funny moment the night before last.

We’d arrived in Coffs Harbour a few hours earlier, a little bedraggled and tired, after a 48 hour punishing sail up from Pittwater. It was raining, and freezing cold. The wind had not behaved, and with a horrible cross swell, the boat bounced around something chronic. Motoring made it worse, but sailing was so slow that we were going to be stuck in those conditions for days on end, so the engines went on.

But once we’d tied up, tidied the boat, made a fab pizza and had a beer, we could finally relax and reflect on the madcap rush to our departure, the amazing send off we received, and the subsequent first few days of our trip.

And then it hit us. Is this it?

We’ve given up spending time with our friends and family - our favourite people in the world, in our favourite city, surrounded by home comforts. We’ve given up familiarity, great careers, fun sailing on tap whenever we like, financial security and a fabulous climate. 

And for what? A punishing slog up the coast in inclement weather, only to arrive in a marina that is in every way inferior to the one we left in Clontarf, and then sink onto the sofa and watch a movie because we’re too damn tired to do anything else.

As we contemplated this, we started formulating our “To Do” list for the couple of days we were planning to be in Coffs Harbour. There was certainly not going to be time to do any sightseeing - there was a plethora of boat jobs to be done (some relatively urgent), a long list of pressing “Shoreside Wrap up” tasks that we had run out of time to complete before we left Sydney, and some passage planning for the remainder of our trip to the gold Coast, including a fairly complicated arrival sequence.

For the first time since we set our plan 8 years and 3 days ago, we were confronting its actual reality. And what for so long had only seemed to be a surreal and distant life was now slapping us in the face pretty darn hard.

We looked at each other in a bit of a daze. “Are we completely mad?”, we were each thinking, but hardly dared to say. And then we did.

And the truth of it is... we simply don’t know. We know exactly what we’ve given up, but don’t yet know what we’re going to experience in its stead, and whether it will be worth it. We do know that it’s going to be much better than the last few days, and that can only help make the trade off seem worthwhile. 

Don’t get me wrong - the last few days have not been awful - absolutely not. we’ll have much much worse sails, such that we’ll look back on this one rather fondly! But we’ll also have many, many better ones, and (sorry, Coff’s Harbour) probably many more exciting destinations.

So at this stage the jury is out. 

We’re already missing our lives in Sydney - our amazing departure only served to highlight what we’re giving up (dammit, friends, why couldn’t you have cheerfully ignored us going away, and we’d have found it much easier to sniff and think “well, we never really liked them anyway”).

But we haven’t yet had any of the fab experiences we assume are in store for us, and that will in some way compensate for the life we left behind. And we especially can’t wait for when our two worlds collide, and some of you, our dear friends and family, join us in exotic places along the way (or Coff’s Harbour).

Until then, we’ll continue to focus on the fact that whether we love it and complete the trip, or hate it and bail out early, we’ve grabbed the bull by the horns and chased a dream. We’re making the surreal real, and life is well and truly underway!