A Major Achievement — Sailing Steel Sapphire

I was walking around our local supermarket in Clontarf two months ago when I had a weird thought.

I realised that when we set off on our circumnavigation, we would likely go for 5 years without ever buying groceries in the same place twice.

It was another moment when I contemplated the strangeness of the life we were about to embark upon.

Of course there was an element of excitement in the prospect of shopping in exotic markets and eating local produce in all of our intended far-flung destinations. But I was also overcome with a degree of sadness, of loss even, that I’d be leaving behind the comfort that comes from knowing your supermarket, where to find each item you’re looking for, and the familiarity of the specific brands you purchase week in and week out.

There may be sunsets and beer, but no sign of skittles anywhere!

Over the last year or so, as friends and family have expressed excitement on our behalf about our impending trip, I’ve felt a degree of guilt that we were leaving behind our day-to-day life for what might seem like an endless holiday. Semi-defensively, I found myself pointing out that our life would not entirely consist of cocktails and sunsets, and grocery shopping became our most often cited example of one of the struggles we would encounter.

It’s not only the lack of familiarity that we would highlight, but also the sheer logistical effort required to buy provisions for weeks or sometimes even months at a time, in a strange country with no car.

Finding somewhere to leave the dinghy is all well and good, but will it still be there when you get back to it?

Rather than popping into the supermarket on the way home from work, I’d explain, or doing the weekly shop on a Sunday night, it would often be a full day activity, involving taking our dinghy from wherever we were anchored to shore, finding somewhere random to tie it up (and fervently hoping that it would still be there when we return), finding out where the nearest markets or shops are, walking or catching public transport there, buying vast quantities of groceries, finding a way to carry them back to the dinghy, get them in the dinghy and launch it without losing anything overboard, then transfer them from the dinghy up onto the boat, and then stow them.

Mostly in blazing heat or tropical downpours of course.

I’ll be honest, the more I’ve spoken about it, the greater the sense of trepidation I’ve felt about the whole exercise.

So when we left Sydney 4 weeks ago, we made sure we had about 6 months supply of staples on board, stashed in every nook and cranny on the boat. That way, we could reduce some of the effort required, and also go longer between shopping trips if need be.

As well as the staples, we did enough regular grocery shopping to last us around two weeks. And so it was that we found ourselves two weeks ago on the Gold Coast, waiting for some work to be done on the boat, and beginning to run out of fresh food.

The time had arrived - it was our first grocery adventure! (there’s a phrase I never imagined I’d be writing).

To set the scene, we were anchored outside a boatyard, about 10 miles up the Coomera River. Despite the fact that we were in a fairly commercial area, we’d noticed when we motored up the river a week earlier that we had gone past a number of residential developments, centred around the river and lots of man-made canals.

Coomera River, with the residential canal development clearly visible. We were anchored off the southern tip of the island in the top left quadrant.

So we knew there must be shops somewhere nearby. But where exactly? We had earmarked a particular afternoon to do some Googling and see what we could find, but that very morning, serendipity intervened, not once, but twice.

Prior to embarking on our grocery hunt, we’d decided to go for a little adventure on the river. We’d spent a week sitting in the same spot, but our every waking moment had been filled with boat jobs, so we had not yet explored our surroundings.

We set off in the dinghy with nothing more than our phones, wallets and a bottle of water, with the intention of buzzing up and down the river and its various canal tributaries, just checking out the beautiful houses and getting a feel for the place. As we did so, I remembered a marina that we had passed on the way up in Steely which was only a mile away, and I suggested to Jen that we stop by in case they had any shops there.

As we motored into the marina, it seemed like there was a good chance there would be some shops nearby – there were about 200 boats there, many of which were live-aboard. We motored up to the jetty closest to shore, only to see that it was roped off to prevent access. There was a marina worker nearby, so we called out to him to ask what the situation was. He confirmed there were indeed some shops there, but it was a private marina, and we could not come and go.

He pointed out the open security gate and said he was about to knock off work for the day and would be locking it, thereby dashing our embryonic dastardly plans to return when he’d left.

We shrugged and turned the dinghy around, ready to head back to Steely. As we motored slowly out of the marina, a guy walking along one of the pontoons hailed us.

As we motored over to him, he said he had heard our exchange, that he was a berth holder there, and he would be happy to lend us his security key to come and go as we pleased if we needed to do some shopping. Are there any good shops for groceries, I asked, hoping for a decent convenience store at least?

“Well there’s a massive Coles about just behind that building there”, he said, pointing to the marina office 100m away.

Huzzah! The Grocery Gods were smiling on us indeed.

Two hours later, we arrived back at Steely with our shopping bags, and our hearts, full!

Once we unpacked, we looked at each other triumphantly, high-fiving each other at a job well done, before dissolving into fits of laughter as we realised how much our horizons had shifted. After decades of high-flying corporate jobs working with budgets of tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, we’d been reduced to a sense of massive achievement just for successfully doing the grocery shopping.

Initially we weren’t quite sure how to feel about that.

But then it got me thinking, and I remembered a passage I’d just read in Jesse Martin’s autobiography. Jesse was an Australian teenager who, twenty years ago, became the youngest person to sail solo, non-stop and unassisted around the world.

In his book he recounted the story of when he reached the half way point, and after over 4 months without seeing another human being, his family and some well-wishers sailed out to meet him and wave, and chat, while passing over letters etc.

It was an incredibly hectic day, involving lots of rushing around on his part: showering and shaving, tidying and cleaning up the exterior of the boat for the sponsor photos, quite a bit of navigating and sail changes, cramming some food down, then lots of close quarters manoeuvring, plus of course, the extreme levels of emotion involved.

After looking forward to it for weeks, he found the entire day extremely unsatisfying and disappointing, and in analysing his feelings afterwards, he contrasted that experience with the joy and satisfaction he was finding in catching, preparing and eating a single fish, which would sometimes stretch out to fill an entire half day.

He came to really understand and appreciate the value of being present in each activity, and extracting the maximum sense of satisfaction and achievement in fulfilling tasks that previously he would have taken for granted in his every day life. By contrast, on his Half-way Day, when he had too much to do and experience, each and every part of the day felt dissatisfying.

And, now, finally, I really understood another part of why we are doing what we’re doing.

After years of being highly ambitious, driven and achievement oriented, but never quite finding lasting happiness despite being “successful” by most definitions of the word, part of my journey is to be about learning to appreciate the smallest of tasks, goals and achievements just as much as the big ones.

Who knew grocery shopping could be so profound?