Posted by John Lambert on July 08, 2009 at 00:36:44 user John.
In Reply to: Re: Sailing alone? posted by John Lambert on July 07, 2009 at 19:30:32:
About a year ago I met a girl who circumnavigated the world with her mother and father and young sister in a yawl her father had built himself. She told me that in some of the ports they visited they met deep water sailors who spend their entire lives sailing around the world. They are poor, earning just enough on shore to buy sails, cordage and provisions. Then they set off again. There's something about the call of the sea that they can't resist. It's something I can understand. You can get a feel of it in Joseph's Conrad's "Youth". For me, it's that golden hour an hour or two before sunset when you suddenly seem to see much farther than usual. I remember the time I sailed - an a liner to be sure - through the South Pacific. After a week at sea we had got used to the throb of the engines. Then one morning I woke up and the ship was silent. I looked through my porthole at the port of Suva. I saw a few feathery palm trees and a shed with a galvanized iron roof. Painted in big black letters across the roof were the words: THE SOUTH SEAS COMPANY.
There's something about gazing at the deep blue for days and weeks that gives you an incomparable sense of freedom. For ever after, there's always something tugging at your heart. I first felt it as a young boy and it has never left me since that time. Just a few miles to the west of where I live is an arm of the Pacific called English Bay. Sail through the bay and cross the Strait of Georgia to the southern end of Vancouver Island. Once through the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the vast Pacific lies before you. You can sail forever over that magnificent water road,around the Horn, through the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, the seas always changing but always the same. When sea fever bites, it bites hard.