When your dream has become your new reality…

What do you do when your dream, which you spent years working towards, has become your new, every-day, run-of-the-mill reality?

It’s been two and a half years since Richard and I moved on board our 12m catamaran, Persistent Shift. At that time, we’d been actively planning for our blue-nomad sea-change for two years, and vaguely envisaging it for most of our lives, albeit separately until we met. Finding and buying the boat, organising income streams and making the shift was a huge achievement, and one we’ve been glad we made every day since. We’ve had adventures together, stressed about maintenance costs and bad weather together, navigated thousands of miles together… lived our dream together. It’s not a dream any more; it’s our new ‘normal’.

Does that mean we now take it for granted? Not at all – every morning we wake up on board to the sound of the water lapping on the hull, we are grateful. Every evening we spend on deck watching the sunset, we are grateful. And every minute of every day in between. For us, the first thing to do once you’ve achieved your new reality is to simply enjoy it.

Is it everything we wanted it to be? Everything we dreamt of? Overall, yes. We’ve done less cruising than we thought we would, having spent last winter in NZ instead of cruising to the Pacific Islands again. But I’ve also discovered that ocean passages which involve heavy weather (and they invariably do, especially the long passage to and from NZ) are really not my thing… I love fair weather crossings, but I’d be happy to do without rough seas and strong winds. I’m not sure it’s something that will ever become an ‘acquired taste’.

That’s not a massive disappointment; what we are loving most about boat life is simply living on the boat… and there’s so much of New Zealand to see, without ever needing to head offshore if we don’t want to. This week, we are finally ticking off one of Richard’s bucket list items. We left Opua on Wednesday afternoon, taking advantage of a gentle northerly to do our first overnight sail in 18 months. We’ve come south to Great Barrier Island, where his great-grandparents lived. His grandfather and grand-uncle survived WWI and the battles of the Somme, only to come home and discover thier mother had passed away the week before, in the great flu epidemic. A tragic homecoming for the two brothers. She is buried here, so Richard finally get to see her grave site, which you can only reach by boat.

For the moment, we are anchored in Smokehouse Bay, in Port Fitzroy. This would have to be heaven on water for cruisers – a local family and various yachties have built facilities on shore over the years, so there’s a pizza oven, a smokehouse, a campfire with seating, and even a bath-house which boasts warm water fuelled by a wetback wood-fire oven. After breakfast this morning, we spent an hour gathering firewood to stock up the pile and we’ll join friends there for lunch later. That’s Richard in the picture, delivering a dinghy load of firewood to the bath house, with SV Persistent Shift in the background 🙂

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April has arrived, bringing autumn with it in New Zealand. The water is colder, there’s more wind and rain around, and we had imagined that by now we’d be thinking about sailing north to the Pacific Islands again for winter. But it’s not on the agenda again this year – I have been offered a place in a workshop in July for post-graduate academics, with specialist mentoring for writing and publishing in academic journals. The workshop is in Prato… so we’re off to France for a different boating adventure, cruising the canals for the European summer instead.

We’ve found a canal boat in the Canal du Midi which will become home for five months, from May to September. We haul out at Norsand in Whangarei at the end of April, and will leave SV Persistent Shift on the hardstand there, waiting for her annual maintenance when we return in November. Then it’s off to Paris, so in just a few short weeks, we’ll be enjoying spring in France.

For both of us, canal cruising has always been another bucket-list item. So I guess another thing I’ve learnt is once you’ve achieved one goal, don’t let it stop you remembering others, and striving to achieve them as well. And as you consciously choose to live the life you have always dreamt of, taking the time to lend a helping hand, sharing your happiness with others, generating good will, doing ‘the right thing’… it all makes the world a better place. Even if it’s something as simple as gathering more firewood than you’re going to use, to make sure the pile doesn’t run low for those who will follow…

Stay tuned for our European adventures!