…Gang Aft Agley (Translation: Often go awry)

So said Rabbie Burns, some 335 years ago, in his iconic poem that inspired the title of John Steinbeck’s famous novel, and drove countless Scots to drink trying to work out what their national poet was on about. Which is somewhat ironic given how much of a lush he was himself.

One thing we do know is that he wasn’t much of a sailor, but he obviously knew more than we did when it came to planning a circumnavigation, given just how quickly our own carefully laid plans fell apart.

Sailors are fond of saying “Plans are written in the sand at low tide” as their way of coming to terms with the inevitable changes that occur.

But even with such low expectations, no-one living our lifestyle could have ever foreseen the impact a global pandemic would have on something that (at least in our case) was almost a decade in the planning.

So here we are today in the Seychelles, exactly 3 years to the day since we left Sydney, and having traveled less than half the distance we had intended to by now. Ironically, the Seychelles is one of the few tropical countries on our intended route that we never intended to visit at all – we ended up here in August last year as Covid refugees, as it was one of only two countries bordering the Indian Ocean to have its borders open at all.

And here we’ve remained, devising new plans with each passing week, as one country after another sees Covid cases fall, reopens borders, sees Covid cases spike, closes borders, rinse and repeat, over and over.

In the meantime, staying somewhere for so long has been a wonderful opportunity in itself. We’ve made friends with locals and long term expats, we’ve discovered some of the best hiking anywhere in the world, and been able to explore many of the nearby islands at our leisure, including the incomparable La Digue.

We were fortunate to get vaccinated earlier in the year during the Seychelles’ exemplary vaccine rollout (are you watching, Australia?). At the time, it gave us great optimism that we would soon find our options opening up.

That’s not the way it’s turned out, of course, and we’ve slowly come to the conclusion that there’s no point in waiting for the world to resume “business as normal” so that we can carry on seeing the places we always intended to.

Instead, we need to change our own thinking and expectations, and find new routes, new adventures, and new ways to view enjoy and extract value from this adventure we’re on together.

And interestingly, that’s not proved difficult at all.

The second half of the verse from the poem I quoted goes:

The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft agley,
And leave us nought but grief and pain, For promised joy!

Thankfully, this is one area where Rabbie got it wrong, at least so far as our circumstances are concerned.

In our three years, there have been almost too many highlights to count, but 3 that really stand out are our time in the Anambas Islands (Indonesia), Uligan (Maldives) and Chagos. And two of these have been since the start of Covid.

In fact, our three months of enforced lockdown in Uligan include some incredible memories that will live with us for the rest of our lives. Interestingly not all the cruisers who shared that anchorage with us have the same perspective. But more than anything else, that difference in view has highlighted the single biggest learning of our trip so far.

You get out what you put in.

Those of us who were grateful for our situation in the Maldives were very aware of just how bad the initial lockdown period was for everyone around the world, sailors and non-sailors alike, and felt lucky to be where we were.

We had beautiful weather and surroundings, crystal clear water, amazing coral and fish to snorkel among, daily visits by dolphins through our anchorage and occasional visits from Manta Rays, we caught our lunch daily by spearfishing straight off the back of the boat, we were (eventually) given our own private island where we built a rudimentary yacht club and cooked on the fire under the stars. It was a truly magical way to spend three months in lockdown. And despite the uncertainly we felt at times while we were there, we find ourselves now looking back on our time there incredibly fondly.

Whereas others in the group stuck with us in Uligan focused mainly on the downsides – that we were prevented from sailing throughout the rest of the Maldives, that provisions being brought to us were basic, that the government was being unreasonable and our agent incompetent or trying to fleece us, and so on. And some from that group continue even now to say that they were traumatised by the experience and have PTSD!

The attitude we adopt impacts every other part of our life out here too. If you look upon the locals with suspicion, your experience will be one coloured by fear. But if you approach every interaction with the anticipation of a possible adventure, so those adventures come to pass.

The lack of information for sailors about the Seychelles, and the somewhat chaotic nature of bureaucracy, goods and services here, might have been a real challenge. But the extra time we have had here has given us the opportunity to truly learn how to navigate our way around, and also the time to document that knowledge in the form of a Facebook community dedicated to cruisers coming after us to the Seychelles. That group already has 300 members and is creating a small legacy of our time here. And it has also opened doors and led to lots of warm interactions as the 2021 wave of cruisers have been arriving.

That’s just two examples, but the truth is that in many ways, our first 3 years have not turned out exactly the way we’d expected. Not at all.

And our adventure has been all the richer for it .

Three years ago, who could possibly have imagined that we would:

• Cut short our very first multi-day passage after we left Sydney due to unpleasant weather, allowing us to bump into a delivery skipper we’d met previously in Sydney, who now lived in Thailand, but was randomly in the same marina in Coffs Harbour that we were now in, and who gave us the contacts of the person who would ultimately help us get our enormous Cockpit Roof project off the ground some 7,000 miles later.

• Enter Steely in Australia’s premier yacht racing regatta, and actually get 3rd place in one of the races

• Randomly pick up an Austrian professional golfer in an Indonesian Dive Resort and press gang him to come sailing for three days to Komodo National Park

• Discover that a friend from our yacht club in Sydney who was sailing with us through Indonesia had connections with a Balinese prince, who had arranged for a special mooring to be laid so that we could stop at a nearby island that is usually inaccessible by yachts.

• Borrow money from a random cruising couple that we’d met 3 minutes before to pay Thai immigration, turn down their offer 10 minutes later to join them for breakfast at a brothel, only to become best friends and sail with them non stop for 2.5 years

• Rent a fabulous townhouse in Phuket and stay there for 3 months due to a mistake when negotiating with a marina

• End up with our favourite feature of our boat (our new cockpit roof) after 3 months of torture, disappointment and arguing with a Thai contractor, which made us miss our Indian Ocean window, and thus led to all the subsequent unexpected items in this list hereafter.

• Have to spend a further two months having our new roof repaired in another country, which led to Jen being flagged down last week here in the Seychelles and being given chocolate brownies for her birthday by a lovely family who we met while waiting for said repairs in Malaysia.

• Spend two months in the Anambas Islands in Indonesia, one of the most spectacular places we have ever (or will likely ever) sail to.

• Hang out with and become firm friends with YouTube Sailing royalty for two weeks (who we’d been following and watching weekly for 7 years prior), and even feature in a few of their videos.

• Have my oldest friend (going back 45 years), whom I haven’t seen for 15 years, fly in and join us for 10 days with his girlfriend , only to discover that not only could we pick up our friendship exactly where we left off, but we liked his girlfriend even more than him!

• In fact, have 23 friends and family come and stay with us in our first 18 months (Damn you Covid, you’ve taken away literally the best part of our trip)

• Lose our beloved Dixie cat, but in the process discover and experience the true kindness of strangers.

• Have a medical emergency at sea during a 10-day passage, involving a ship to ship medicine transfer, multiple satellite email consultations with a medical specialist on the other side of the world, and an emergency diversion to another country for treatment. The diversion meant that when we resumed our passage, we experienced the best 7 day sail of our lives.

• Write a blog post that went viral and brought over 10,000 people to this blog, and led directly to being asked to write articles for one of the most prestigious sailing magazines in the world

• Negotiate access to a private, uninhabited island to set up a treasure hunt for Jen’s birthday. And then discover that locals had showed up that morning and discovered/dug up some of the treasures I’d hidden for Jen the day before!

• Visit almost as many countries that we did not intend to go to (Singapore, Vietnam, Seychelles) as ones that we did (Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Maldives).

• Oh yeah, and the small matter of a global pandemic closing virtually every border in the world for multiple years when you’ve given up your career, house and financial stability in order to go sailing around the world!

Every item on this list is something we could never have anticipated, and has made the adventure richer than we could have ever expected. And there’s plenty more examples I could write about.

But hopefully the point is clear – we’re living our best lives because of those plans going astray, not despite them.

And so, as we’ve found ourselves sitting here over the last few weeks slowly coming to terms with the fact that Madagascar is NOT going to open up in time (the primary reason why we stayed here for a year), the feeling we’ve had is not one of despair or disappointment.

Instead it’s one of excitement.

Because the plans we have for the year ahead are not something we could have ever imagined. We’re going to be going to countries, doing things, and even living somewhere, that were never on our radar at all until just 3 weeks ago.

In the immortal words of our friend Jaime-Dave, we’re going to Carpe that Fucking Diem.

But more on that later.