The Plans They are a Changing

Singapore in the distance

Every time we run into a cruiser we haven't seen for a while one of the first questions is, "what are your plans?" It's not that we forgot their original plans (though it can be hard to keep track) it's more the fact that cruising plans are, as they say, 'written in sand at low tide.'

Depending on boat repairs, the strength of your home currency (last time we cruised our cheeseburgers in paradise suddenly got really expensive when the Canadian $ went into a steep decline), the health and happiness of crew and family at home, and a dozen other factors plans can change without warning.

Our plan had been to kick around South East Asia for the next year. We wanted to do some inland travel in Cambodia and Vietnam, spruce up the boat in Thailand, do some writing... But then last week Evan and I celebrated the 29th anniversary of meeting each other and starting to date. We were children…

threading our way through the freighters to Puteri Harbor

As we tallied up our life: 30,000 sea miles, living and working in a handful of different countries, friends around the globe--one detail stuck out: We've been living on boats, away from Canada for fully half of those years. Then Maia pointed out that for her it's been over half her life. Somehow, in a five minute chat, we all decided it was time to point for home.

There are other factors: Maia’s growing up faster than we can keep up with and as much as she loves cruising and travel her taste of high school has made her decide she wants to finish out her schooling in a school. And Evan and I both really want to spend more time with our parents and siblings—not to mention the old friends we have at home.

 

looks like we're planning to cross an ocean...

So that's what we're doing. We'll be taking off to cross the Indian Ocean in a few weeks (we'll share more about our route in the next post). One big bonus is that a number of other boats we've met along the way, including our good friends on Totem, had already committed to the big trek to South Africa. And because Behan from Totem is a planning guru (we used all her spreadsheets for crossing the Pacific) we feel fairly organized. Though honestly, that fades a bit with each day we get closer to our planned D-day…

We still have a number of repairs to make but we've already taken a dent out of our provisioning needs and feel pretty confident that somehow it will all come together. So South Africa or bust!