31 Aug. 10
Today is my older brothers birthday, so I gave him the mandatory call to wish him all the best and happy birthday. An easy task at the moment due to cell phones, perhaps not such an easy task once we are off.
Anyway everywhere I look at the moment I see the "Plastiki" adventure. Now I do agree with the idea of the recycled plastic boat and the whole “save the earth message” but the engineering of such a recycled plastic boat must have been a mammoth task. An undertaking that I believe to be larger than the average skipper out there could afford and would therefore not have been possible without the aid of very large sums of money. And sadly, real money like that can only be obtained by ruining the earth in the first place. Which leads me to my next subject, the cost of cruising.
Now I have read many books on the subject and done many hours of research on the web, and the conclusion that “it costs as much as you have” is a misconception. Most of the books try to make you believe that the possibility of going out cruising for an indefinite amount of time is something that is possible for anyone that wants to do this. The budgets that are mentioned for the monthly food, clothing and other requirements on these “cruising on a teaspoon of peanut butter” websites seems so achievable and easy. These books and websites must be speaking about countries other than South Africa because here in Africa owning and maintaining a boat costs an absolute fortune. I am not sure if it was always this expensive as I am relatively new to sailing but my experience has shown me so far that you need to have two jobs and a large sum of invested money in the bank in order to own a boat. I mean let’s consider some of the costs quickly, these will not include the purchase or building of a yacht, but only the annual costs as required by legislation.
Once a year the boat has to be taken out of the water and an annual inspection has to be done by an inspector from SAMSA. This costs roughly between fifteen and twenty thousand Rand. If you divide this figure by twelve to give a monthly figure that would be about one to one and a half thousand per month. This also excludes the monthly cost of mooring which can vary between three hundred and three thousand Rand monthly, dependant where you are, and does not include annual yacht club fees with no budget for boat maintenance. Perhaps for the Americans with the almighty dollar this may be of little consequence, but for us Africans living on the Rand not a cheap or easy task.
05 Sep. 10
Its eight am on Sunday morning. I am sitting in my dining room with a cup of coffee staring at the maps against the wall in front of me. My mind is constantly filled with images of the ocean and far away lands on the other side. I wake up most mornings with these images in my mind. What I am seeing right now is the front windows of Yrumoar. The square white painted wooden outline of the window and beyond that window, white foam blowing and falling gently from the top of the wave crests. If I listen carefully I can hear the creaking sound of the sheet line being pulled through the car. The spare bedroom door swings slowly open and almost closes as we move over the top of one wave and head down into the trough of the next wave. Yrumoar is trying to speak to me, I can almost hear her giggle as the water tickles her underside. And then suddenly I am ripped out of my dream world and back into reality by the voice of Lola telling me to hurry up and move as she feels we are going to run out of time and the pressure of life begins the day.
