Syzygy Sailing

This blog is ancient at this point–you’ll notice that our last post below was in 2011. Recently however I have been thinking about our trip, looking at old videos (the ones on this site in fact), and wondering if there might be another trip in the distant future…

Karen and I now have three children, aged 8,6,4, and are living in the mountains of New Mexico, doing the extremely cliched American existence. We live in a modest house with a small backyard in a typical neighborhood and I work a 9 to 5 job while Karen parents and teaches the kids at home (while trying to fit in a bit of legal work on the side). It’s quite wonderful.

I’ll let Jon chime in with his situation up in the front range (spoiler: also very domesticated).

To be honest, we were all more mountain folk than ocean folk (and I include Karen and Jon here, and Jonny too), and that’s evidenced in our current lifestyles and locations.

My current fathering efforts are focused on getting my boys outside as much as possible, and we even started a blog about all that (of course we did). Skiing, climbing, biking, and lots of camping; that about covers it.

So what about sailing? Well, Karen and I have–for a few years now–been noncommittally mentioning how nice it might be to maybe one day try to take the kids sailing around the world. In 10 years or so, before our oldest heads off into the world by himself. Really preliminary thinking. Not too seriously. I know how an idea can snowball, like a “grass is greener” cancer, and develop a life and momentum of its own that can be hard to check, so I am maintaining a particularly low key approach to this next trip notion.

Karen is homeschooling them this year, and that may or may not continue, but our little mini fantasy is summed up thusly: we have the ability to take our kids sailing around the world together as a family–how could we not give them that experience, if it’s possible to do so?

Much of the wavering, the maybe possibly might has to do with our knowledge of how challenging and uncomfortable the sailing can be, even with adults, even with savings prepared. How much harder would it be with kids? We concluded after the 2011 trip’s end that we weren’t very good cruiser-types, that it didn’t, in the end, feel like our “thing.” We learned much from our experience however, and rosy-retrospection has finally kicked in. It’s easy (enough) to convince ourselves that “next time it will be different”. We are also cynical enough to know how self-delusional of a sentiment that might be…

I don’t think we would be inclined to ever do it again, if it were just the two of us. But as a family, it could be incredible (or, admittedly, a disaster). What better bonding experience could we have with our boys, in 9 years or so, before they go away forever to college and life apart from us, than to travel the world together?

More likely, they’ll have local friends and activities and pursuits and won’t want to leave for one to two years, and it would be a miracle if Karen and I could afford it anyway, but it has become something to think about…

Hence my recent reviewing of videos from the trip, and the motivation for this post…