Blogged down

November 17th, 2009

I have been utterly remiss in updating this blog. I have started posts several times and they lie unfinished and unloved. This is partly due to a lack of time. Or as Angels&Urchins reminds me, this is real life. Since returning home three weeks ago, I have been inundated with new business requests - which is fabulous given the number of bills I still have to pay - but it doesn’t leave much time for blogging.

But that’s not strictly true, because I’ve still managed to find a bit of time to update my other blog.

No, my real problem is that I just don’t know how to write about the experience. There is so much to say that I don’t know where to start.  It’s like catching up with old school friends who you haven’t seen in years. You have so much to talk about, but without them knowing what your day to day life is like, you’re not sure how to dive into the nitty gritty.

I want to do it justice. I want to be able to paint a picture of what it was like from start to finish. But I feel that if I’m going to put that much effort into telling the story, I should be turning it into a book. But then I’m not sure there’s enough for a book. 

I also wonder whether people are that interested in the finer detail. Lots of what we did was exactly the same, day after day. We rotated on a watch system. We slept. We worked hard. We ate some pretty vile food. We fixed things. We sweated a lot. We laughed. We danced. We stared at the horizon. We missed home.

When people ask me how it was, I say: “It was amazing. Really fab. So glad I did it.” And all of those things are absolutely true. It in no way covers everything that I saw and did and felt. But unless that person sits with me and we polish off a bottle of wine and get into the finer detail, I just don’t seem to get beyond this level. And even when we do natter over a bottle of wine with plenty of time to cover it all, I don’t give a blow by blow account of what happened in chronological order. Memories just pop up as we talk and I’m reminded of a specific incident, which I can share.

Yesterday I was chatting with a client and she wanted to know all about it. But she didn’t actually want to know about how we managed to get 10 knots of boat speed instead of 8 knots. Or how we fixed the bow webbing on the front of the boat. Or which way we went around the Canaries. Or how we missed the scoring gate. Or what it felt like to cross the equator. Or how you hoist a spinnaker or change a headsail or put in a reef.

She wanted to know how I’d managed to get to the point of going in the first place, what it felt like being away from home, whether I’d do it again and if so, what I’d do. She commented on what an amazing thing it was to have done. And yet, as I’ve said previously, it doesn’t feel that amazing. It now just feels utterly normal. Why wouldn’t you sail across an ocean?

So please tell me, what would you want to know about it? (and that’s being very presumptious assuming you want to know anything at all about it) Perhaps you can prompt me into sharing specific experiences and incidents. Because right now I have a surfeit of blog material and am not sure where to start.

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