A Long Way Home - Ithaca's Cruising Adventures

4. Temptation of The Sea

Our sailing training was in mid-April 2014, together with Easter holiday. My husband and I took a week-long holiday to attend the training in Durban. The morning was indoor theoretical study, and the afternoon was sailing practice at sea. In the evening after the training course, the instructor and students from the class gathered at the Royal Natal Yacht Club to relax and chat freely, over some beers.

When the gathering was over, the instructor and most of the students went home. My husband and I sat outside on an outdoor bench next to the embankment, enjoying the warm breeze and admiring the rows of neon lights on the opposite side of the harbour with its orange reflection in the quiet and peaceful water. Occasionally, a giant container ship sailed past with a rumbling and whistling sound, dispersing the water surface and forming beautiful ripples in its wake. We loved to guess the meaning of the navigation lights of the ships using the knowledge we learned during the day.

Sometimes, without saying a word, we just looked at the lights and the mirror image, thinking about the unpredictable future. Nights like this was more and more tempting to me, and finally, it penetrated my line of defence. The life of a person comes and goes in a hurry. If I could spend six years travelling around the world, then those six years would undoubtedly encompass the best and most precious time in my life. It is a glory, not only to me, but even to my family. Life is transient and impermanent. I had stood at the door to a glorious dream, if I ended it here, I would be irresponsible to the future me. I wanted to live and die without regrets.

A man from the table next to us came over and remarked out of the blue, "You two are really a lovely couple. Come, you won't mind if I take a picture of you!" After taking the picture, he invited us to visit his boat, with all the friends at his table. But how funny! He forgot to tell us the boat name.

After acclimating in the Marina for a while, we got to know this interesting friend. That night his act of taking pictures, as well as my determination to follow my husband's dream, were frozen in my memory, and it became a milestone in my dream of sailing.

My husband was overjoyed when he knew that I was no longer hesitant about the sailing plan. He claimed that he actually knew that I would accept it sooner or later, because if I was cowered, I would not have ventured away from home at a young age, I would not come aboard to South Africa, and I would not choose him, a foreigner, as a husband. Like him, I have a restless heart; I will not live in accordance with tradition, and I constantly seek a breakthrough and seek an unknown.

When I was a child, my mother asked a fortune teller for my fate, and the fortune teller told her, "Your daughter, she is determined to wander far, and you will not be able to keep her close by!" The prophecy has unfortunately come true: I have gone too far, more and more out of control. The further I went, the deeper the gap became between my mother and me. In the following years, sailing became a major obstacle in our relationship that I could not cross. Sadly, until now, I could not talk to her about the joy and hardship of sailing.