I may not have had the chance to get to know the waters of Samoa, but I’ve had a week with my sister and a chance to get to know her. The age difference meant Joan had moved out by the time I was eleven or twelve. With all the travelling she’s done in the intervening years I don’t think we’ve spent more than two or three weeks in total under the same roof, and I’ve been appalling at staying in touch. Strange in a way, because even though I couldn’t say we’ve been close, I somehow feel the most affinity with her.
I guess neither of us have followed the traditionally-expected trajectory of our family; although I’m not sure there really is one anymore. Dad’s Scottish/Presbyterian heritage ensured a hard work ethic and commitment to family would inevitably be core values for all of us. Education was also important, with Mum and Dad making the sacrifices required to put all four of us through private secondary schools. Early on, as a teenager, I would have said my perceptions of my parents expectations of me were that I would get a University degree, work a bit, maybe travel a bit, then get married, have a family, keep working hard to pay off a mortgage and give to the next generation what our parents had given to me. If I was lucky and had worked hard enough, hopefully I’d be able to enjoy a comfortable retirement.
These days, I’m not so sure Mum and Dad’s expectations were ever really that defined. Certainly I think now they are part of a background that will always be there, but that life has unfolded in different ways for all of us and that there is an acceptance of that. In many ways, Joan and I have deviated from that path the most and at this point, when I’m contemplating deviating again, I really wanted to reconnect with her. Maybe what I really wanted was to be reassured, or to reassure myself, that what I’m contemplating is OK. In the end we didn’t even talk about it; maybe I realised that the only person who can decide that for me is me.
I had an interesting conversation with one of her guests this morning though; he runs a fishing charter business in Samoa. There’s only one yacht here for charter and it’s a tired old catamaran that is now capable of doing only short snorkelling trips inside the reef; no inter-island hops. So there’s a business opportunity waiting to be seized here, if someone could bring a survey-standard yacht here to run charters more effectively and in more luxury. But it would mean limiting the cruising to Samoa for the dry season, 3-4 months a year, and that would mean not enough time to really cruise anywhere else other than take the boat back to New Zealand or Australia for the hurricane season. Plus I’d be so busy running charters that I wouldn’t have time to write or do the other things I want to do. Using the boat to run a business, earn the cruising budget and get the tax advantages sounds attractive, but it would limit the cruising. It’s not the plan and I think I need to stay true to the what and the why.
