25550 days to live

09 Mar. 10


According to the Bible we have only 25 550 days to live, that is if we survive to be seventy years old. So when I get to work on a Monday and I start to wish it’s Friday then I am wasting these precious few days at my disposal. This has been an ongoing cycle for me for the past few years, so this needs to change because you only have one chance to make one day special at a time. If you waste today you cannot make up tomorrow for today, because today is gone forever and can never be replayed. I am not sure how exactly to achieve the most of each day yet, but will try different methods each day to find out how to do this. I am not saying that I need every day to be absolutely perfect but perhaps if I can achieve one or two perfect moments in each day as a starting point, then I may get closer to the goal.

My mother and stepfather came to visit me the day before yesterday uninvited, so I suppose a surprise visit. My real dad left when I was little and was never to be seen again, I heard he committed suicide a few years ago. My sense of humour is possibly a bit uncouth as I now tell people that my dad was a swinger, because he hung himself from the rafters. Hope I didn’t offend anybody. Anyway back to the visit, I say uninvited because I don’t like visitors at the best of times, and I need to be ready for visitors before they arrive thus I like some notice period. There are a few select people that can pop in at any time and I don’t mind but most of my family doesn’t fit into this category.

My stepfather and I have never really seen eye to eye, and although I try my best he seems to be able to bring out the worst in me. I always feel as if he is baiting me into an argument. I am not sure if this is my imagination or if it is real but thus I try to avoid him as much as possible. Anyway we all survived the visit and I said that we will see them again in Richards bay on Yrumoar in December, they thought this was a joke but I hope to avoid them until then…at least until then.

23 Mar. 10

The Long weekend came and went by in a flash, even though we didn’t do anything but just hung around at home, the time just flew by. I tried to teach my youngest son Kyle how to ride a bicycle this weekend but after many hours of no success I gave up and asked Lola’s dad to try, and guess what, five minutes later Kyle was riding up and down the road all by himself. I am obviously not a very good teacher for bicycles.

On Sunday this week we are flying down to Cape Town to do our practical part of our coastal skippers licence. We have arranged to rent a car in Cape Town and drive to Langebaan where the sailing school is situated. This is the only sailing school that offers the course on a catamaran so we would get our first taste of sailing on a cat. How do I feel? Exited, nervous and a whole mix of emotions that I can’t explain.

25 Mar. 10

Went surfing on the net onto Windfinder to see the forecast for the sailing course over the next few days and it seems the weather is going to play along for the first few days at least, with light winds of up to 10 Knots and wave heights of about 2 metres. The weather seems to get slightly worse here by the 30th with 20 knots and 4 metre waves. The forecast further than that is not yet available. In order to try and judge the wave heights I measured to the top of my house roof and this was about four metres, wow how high do these waves get out there? You know being on the ocean only once before on the day skippers course a few times with small waves off the coast of Durban, and then dam sailing at the Vaal Dam for the past year on weekends only, may not have prepared me for these waves. Fortunately we will have a competent skipper on board, or so I hope, as my experience is definitely not enough yet and I think this will help in gaining some much needed knowledge and hopefully some confidence.

We are packed and ready to go already but I am not sure if our Pep stores Dry-Macs are really the correct sailing gear for the Cape waters. We did ask the lady at Sail Due South training school and she advised that we should be fine as long as we have warm clothing, and that we should wait till after the course to decide to buy wet weather gear in order to see just exactly what we would require. Our plan of sailing up the east coast of Africa to more moderate climates may not require such heavy weather gear, but I don’t really know this with my limited knowledge and hope that my decision is the correct one. I do know that Lola will do lots of research before we leave so we should have a better idea. I also intend to ask advise from other sailors that have done a similar route closer to the time.

Goodbye to the old, hello to the new

Drove down to Richards bay on Monday, met Greg the owner of Debenair, and we knew instantly that she was the one, the future Yrumoar.
So we made an offer and agreed upon a price and payment plan. Afterwards we drove through to Durban and spent the night with Lola’s sister and brother in law, Kim and Darren, and in the morning we drove back to Gauteng. Total distance covered one thousand five hundred kilometres in two days. I believe that we will be making this trip quite often in the next few months and although it is far the roads are excellent and the trip doesn’t take that long. The week before this we got a call from Danie to view our Vivacity and we met him on the Saturday at the Vaal. He seemed impressed with Bluefin and said he would confirm on Monday. Whilst driving down on Monday we received his call and made arrangements for the following Saturday to meet again. We decided to go down to the Vaal on Friday night to spend some time getting her ready for Danie’s visit on Saturday morning and met him on Friday night at the restaurant. After a short visit with him we went down to Bluefin to get her ready and have our last sleep over, but the shore power kept on tripping and whilst trying to find out where the problem was on the marina we went past Nikitu and met Gus and Pauline. This turned out to be a very interesting evening and we eventually got to bed at four in the morning. Needless to say we where not very fresh on Saturday when Danie arrived but we did take him out for a quick sail and then down to the bank to finish our business. Whilst sailing back into the marina Kyle our youngest son started to cry and told me that you don’t know that you love something until it is gone so he would miss Bluefin, shame, I understood how he felt.

Selling Bluefin

Spoke to the owner of the fair-weather 39 again and made an arrangement to view on Monday next week down in Richards Bay. He managed to send me the pictures yesterday and she looks just about perfect. I have been absolutely inundated with phone calls from people that are interested in buying my Vivacity 24’. If I knew I would have such a response I may have made the price higher, go gumtree, and the ads in junk mail and the sailing magazine haven’t even come out yet.

Remembering Bluefin

Took one of our employees to the Mugg and Bean this morning, for coffee, to explain our plan to him and hopefully where he fits into the greater scheme of things. Lola put our 24’ Vivacity up for sale on Gumtree, this is the South African version of E-Bay, last night and this morning I received a call from a guy to enquire about moving her to Midmar dam in Natal. I explained that she is a twin keeler and can easily be placed on a trailer. He told me he would contact me next week Thursday as he is coming up to gangsters paradise (Gauteng Province) on business, and to view her. It will be a sad moment in my life to let her go as she has provided me and the family with many happy memories, and also some much needed experience as to what owning and sailing a yacht is about. I did my first solo sail on her last year and went around the island on the Vaal. She also taught Lola to cook excellent meals on board whilst under sail both on a braai and on her gimballed gas stove. She taught me that you can point her closer to the wind than the wind instrument allows and still make good headway. She taught me how to use teamwork in the family in order to dock on a windy day without sinking and damaging other boats next to me. Yes she will definitely be remembered.