Reliving it

November 18th, 2009

I just watched ‘The schoolboy who sailed around the world’ - I had recorded it and had forgotten that I had. I turned it on. Somewhat relucantly. Not sure why.

And just like that I was taken back. It’s amazing how you can watch programmes about things your entire life and think you know what they’re about and then you actually do the thing you’re watching on TV and you realise that even though a picture (a moving picture) can capture a thousand words, a thousand words is still not enough.

You need to have been there, to have seen it, to have smelt and felt and heard and tasted it. And I only did the first little bit of that boy’s journey. But as he sailed into the Canaries and battled with squalls through the Doldrums, it was like reliving my experience all over again.

Watching him race through the southern Atlantic made me feel even more jealous of the crews who arrived in Cape Town this week. Watching him wipe out in the Southern Ocean made me think that perhaps being on land was ok! Yet part of me still wants to experience that. 

It’s so hard to describe just what an impact the ocean has on you. It’s big. It’s blue. It’s surreal. It’s like a mirror that reflects your moods and indeed, creates your moods.  And once you’ve sailed on it, really sailed on it, you can never ever see the sea in the same way again.

The only way I can describe it is that it’s like becoming a parent . Until you’ve been one, you can only imagine what it’s like, but you’ll never really ‘get it’ until you do it yourself.

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