6 years is a very long time to spend taking a hiatus from your career to sail around the world.

Or at least, that’s what we thought when we hatched our plan back in 2010*.  But now that we’re actually underway, we’ve started to realise that there’s a good reason why most of the other cruisers we meet have been doing this for 10 years plus.

It turns out that the world is a really large place, especially when you’re travelling at 5 miles per hour!

We’ve just spent six weeks travelling through Indonesia, and we really did feel like we were going too fast. In fact, in the 5 months since we left Sydney, we’ve spent more than one night at anchor in the same place just 10 times.  That’s a lot of travelling (and fixing things, and clearing Customs/Immigration/Quarantine) and nowhere near enough chilling out by my reckoning.

We’re rushing through Malaysia too, in order to get some work done on the boat in Thailand where there is comparatively cheap skilled labour.  We’ve allowed two months in Thailand (Dec/Jan), but all of that will be taken up with boat work, meaning we won’t get to sail around some of the most spectacular cruising grounds in the world. 

Why not take longer? Well, we need to set sail for the Andaman Islands in Mid February, and then on to Sri Lanka in late February, so we can make our way down through the Indian Ocean in the first half of the year to avoid the SW Monsoon that kicks in around May.   You really, REALLY don’t want to be sailing south into the SW Monsoon in the Indian Ocean.  Trust me on that one.

So if we miss those dates, then we need to wait in this part of the world for another year.

And now that we’ve started getting quotes from some of the contractors, it seems like I’ve been too optimistic with my timings. We’re getting quoted 3-4 months by some people, meaning we couldn’t depart until March or April.  Others have quoted the 2 months, but we still won’t get to see any of Thailand, and of course there’s always the risk that they’re only quoting 2 months to get the work, and then it will end up taking 3-4 months anyway.

So why not just resign ourselves to our fate and spend another year in paradise? 

Well, it’s not quite that simple.  We only have the budget to spend 5 years doing what we’re doing, and that includes stopping in London for a year to work to top up the bank balance.   If we spend another year here, we need to work for longer. And it will be a further year before we get to London to do that work, meaning it’s 3 years since we stopped working, and thus our experience will be another year out of date, making it harder to find work in the first place.

Plus we already have some commitments to meet people in the Maldives (hello Jacqui and Mark, Voni and Callie and Brad and Jenny), Madagascar (possibly Tim and Mike) and South Africa (Garry and Ness, Mum and Dad, Suzi and George), and we really don’t want to let them down.

And there’s also a philosophical debate at hand here.  If we do delay for a year, I think we’ll probably end up scrapping the plan as it currently stands and end up focusing for longer in key areas, rather than obsessing about the full circumnavigation.

And that might not be a bad thing.  But for as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to “sail around the world”.  That means a full circumnavigation, and although ultimately that shouldn’t be as meaningful as actually having a great time seeing the world, if you know me at all you know I’m driven by goals, and I’m not ready to give up on that one just yet.

We’ve always known that it was unlikely we’d stick exactly to the 5 year plan we came up with (and which is now published for all to see on the website), but it seems a little early to give up on it already.

What do you think we should do?

*(In truth we started out thinking it would only be 2-3 years, but quickly abandoned that idea when we saw the vast distances we’d be travelling between stops)