It was on the auspicious 8th August 2017 we untied the lines from our berth in Oeiras Marina, Portugal to finally set sail on our new home.
It was a day full of firsts:
It was our first sail just the two of us;
It was Ella’s first sail;
It was our first sail in heavy seas;
It was our first time sailing in an ocean.
The Dream had been ours for just 10 months now and we had left our jobs just two months before our departure. We moved The Dream by ourselves for the first time from the boatyard into a marina the month before to prepare for that moment of untying the lines and set sail into the horizon.
That day was precisely 2 years ago and since then, we have already achieved so much!
In these two years, we’ve sailed more than 6000 nautical miles and visited 16 different territories.
That day we left, I can say we had taken a leap of faith to see how much of sailors we truly were. With limited experience, we had decided that we needed to learn to sail the boat we had and not the one we should have bought, that we needed to put ourselves out there into the ocean and not in the safety of a bay.
On that day our experience was limited but our capability and capacity to learn were not, our empirical and theoretical knowledge was enough. The real lessons were out there for us to discover.
With our thirst on sailing the world we made our way down the coast of Portugal and then through the treacherous Strait of Gibraltar, ventured down the North Atlantic coast of Morocco, sailed into the mid North Atlantic to be mesmerised by the Madeira Islands, we were left adrift without engine in high seas and learned to fix the problems by ourselves.
We experienced Gibraltar, Morocco and Madeira for a month each, soaking up the culture, explored the Balearics and the south of Spain for three months, enjoyed the Italian Western Islands for another three, lived and discovered Tunisia for six months and learned important lessons sailing in the Northern Adriatic Sea.
We endured storms at anchor that pinched our nerves when seeing wind speeds of 55knots+ on more than one occasion, we made good anchoring choices and another’s not so brilliant. We have been caught with too much sail up on occasion and fought the weather hard to control it.
On each occasion, a lesson was learned, a lesson that will push us to keep going further and further chasing our dreams.
During these two years, we have been preparing and learning for those dreams while enjoying countless sunsets and rainy days. Nothing beats dropping anchor on an empty anchorage and simply enjoy the place without running, running to see something else nearby “the Jetset moment”. Just stopping and drinking in the nature of our world for a little bit.
For us life is at a slow pace, soaking up all that is around us on that little spot we found, the people we meet along the way make it even better.
But most importantly, we could not have done it without each other.
