Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails.
Explore, Dream, Discover!
by Mark Twain
July 4, 1980--Tortola, British Virgin Islands. The yacht Sunraker lies restlessly at anchor. She is a Carib 41 built in Farmingdale, N.Y. in 1969, the first of a fleet of 60 built for C.S.Y.(Caribbean Sailing Yachts). I had the opportunity to buy the last one in the fleet. Unfortunately, she had hit a reef and was "repaired" in the usual lackadaisical manner typical of the chaps in the Caribbean. I lived to rue the decision to buy her many times. But still, for $30,000, there was not a lot on the market in forty-footers. After seven years of suffering at the hands of skippers of varying experience, and having been on a reef, we had managed to make Sunraker look pretty spiffy in a new coat of paint, new sails, and a clean bottom. But as I viewed the repairs from inside the engine room, I was quite apprehensive and wondered at the decision by C.S.Y. to repair rather than scuttle her. Much later I was to see how bad the repair was. It was a miracle she took us across two oceans before sinking.
I chose Bequia, a small island south of St. Vincent in the Windward islands, for our jumping-off place to begin our circumnavigation. I knew it would make an ideal spot to make landfall on our return two years later. Little did I realize it would be over six years...
I had come to believe that a majority of men harbor a dream to get away from it all and sail the seven seas. But how many are really crazy enough to do it? In the following chapters I am going to have a go at trying to figure the answer to this question. To do this, I will have to go clear back to the beginning of my life. I am sure I will find this painful at times, because as Thoreau put it--
It is easier to sail many thousands of miles
Through cold and storm and cannibals
Than it is to explore the private sea,
The Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's own being.
