“What is your course, your next waypoint?”

Dear friends,
It seems I am posting backwards, we write about our travels, encounters, some tips and hints and newly acquired insights. How did it come to all of this, what happened, what made me take responsibility and trace my (new) course…This is about  how this actually happened…

A couple of years ago, my “brother” and great friend Vagner (he built his own monohull, a Bruce Far 43, by himself, took him 16 years, but SV Christalino is finished. Check his story on his blog: www.christalino.com.br)  asked me during our frequent sailing trips in the bay of Paranagua (PR, Brazil) on board my ODay 23: … “ So, what is your plan? I mean, you are working hard, making money, you have a great job and so on, but where do you want to go? What is your course going to be? What is your next waypoint?”… I sat there, had a sip of a nice cold Heineken, and I didn't have an answer to that rather simple and straight forward question… This  haunted me for the next several weeks…Even more so as he shared with me a great story: “ A business man (father of a friend of Vagner), working hard, devoting all his time to his business, making boat loads of money, and because of that, destroyed his marriage, but working harder, making even more money, life full of stress, and obviously he got sick (the usual: blood pressure etc…hart disease etc). His doctor told him: you either change, or you are dead in the next 6 months. So, what is going to be? What do you really want to do? The man replied: What i really want do is, move back to the small fisher village where I was born, and play domino in the town square with my friends… Yes, that would make me happy… And so, he did move back to his village and played domino… He was in peace with himself, and his health returned… He then realized that he could have changed to this years ago, still married, and in good health as he already had enough financial resources at that time…” In other words, Vagner said to me: if you are able to define what the size will be of the sailboat you are dreaming of to have, you also now how high the mast will have to be (as there is a relation between boat size and the height of the mast), so the moment you have defined one, you have defined the other, and you won’t be needing a taller mast , you’ll have your sailboat and the mast you need…

After a couple of, rather disturbing, weeks it dawned on me… and made a few calculations, figured out upsides and downsides of re-shaping a new lifestyle and there were more upsides than downsides. I was in a particular point in my life I could take those decisions. So, it still took me about a year or so, to work on this project, but it felt great to set a new course, and “sail” to my next waypoint… The universe conspired (again) in my favour, and things fell into place following a natural order… And so, changing land for the sea, here I am defining new waypoints sailing as we go along…
What is the “size” of your sailboat?
Enjoy…