Quote:
Originally Posted by AlexSander
Now to get to the one year, I got this from the very simple calculation that the earths diameter is 40 000km. Throw in a 50% added route due to the fact that you are not going in a straight line, and establish a base speed of 10km/h for a vessel, which, from what I read, is a very conservative speed for a yacht ( thanks for pointing it out. God damn self-correcting googling ), and the fact that the vessel moves 24h a day when sailing, that gives 250 days worth of travel to go round, leaving 3 months worth of doing everything else but sailing. Now I know it's wrong, as it was pointed out early, that's pretty much racing figures ( did I underestimate the deviations from a straight line? why isn't it 250 days? ). Now I know that. But that's how you see it when you try some simple math.
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I guess the main reason is that you are not always en route. Sometimes you are just waiting for the correct time window to make a passage. And I guess most cruisers spend much more time in anchor than in blue water.
There are differences in personal taste. As I see a lot of cruisers are retired, and plan to cruise for the rest of their lives, hurrying to nowhere. They have learnt what my uncle have put like this: "You need time for good work. And twice that for bad." So they do not push time, wait for the perfectly perfect weather window (heck, they are already in a very good place, why to hurry to get off?). And Mother Earth is huge. Mindboggingly so, no matter what some are saying about global village and such things. Yes, communication is easy, and you can get across half the earth within a day, but to really know and experience it?
However I found perfectly valid that someone views sailing around the world more an adventure than a life form. It is nice to get an impression of so many different places, life styles and such. And circumnavigating is still a great achievement, which one can be perfectly proud of. Years ahead seem like huge blocks of time, and years behind seem like short moments. So while we are young we look at one year as a looong period, when we get old we know how fast it is over. I think one might want an adveture without wanting to change lifestyle for an infinite period. And in young age anything more than a year is
infinite.
But I also think that cruising around is the type of adventure one never knows how one will like it before doing it. And because that it is best not to think about what to do after: it might end at landfall after the first passage, anchored permanently in some perfect places, going another round when arriving home, or anything. And when it is meaningless to think about its end, it is equally meaningless to plan its duration.
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