First Charter

So 3 months after (barely) qualifying as a day skipper and with the theory still very hazy, we got off the plane in Corfu and made our way to Gouvea Marina to join a flotilla. We had hired a Dufour 30 called Artemis for a 2 week voyage round the Ionian. As L stepped off the plane, one of her fillings fell out!
Keith and Emma - two lovely Ausies - were the flotilla leaders. And nothing ever fazed them. While I sorted the kit out on the boat, they took her to an Austrian dentist who sat her in a hi-tech chair in the centre of an enormous marble-floored hall and fixed her up on the spot.

And that afternoon we were off to Sivota on the mainland. Keith told us about a conspicuous conical peninsula where there was good snorkelling and we decided to go for it. When we got there, I couldn't remember how to work out how much chain to put in - so decided to use all 25M in the 18 feet of water we had below us.
And in we went. No line rigged, nobody on board, nothing.
Sure enough, in a few minutes, a gust of wind came through, and we realised the boat was moving. Poseidon was on our side and we swam rapidly to the boat, climbed aboard and tried to start the engine - but it wouldn't start. It just kept turning over. Things were starting to get serious. We were drifting slowly towards the rocks which were only 20 feet away by now.
We rolled out the sails and I went to pull the anchor in while L tried to sail us off the rocks. We were very thankful for all that experience in engine-less cruisers on the Broads. The anchor was unbelievably heavy - and that's when I realised, I had misread meters for feet. We were in 18M of water! The depth meter on the day skipper boat had been in feet and I never thought to check (and on a Greek boat - doh).
Well we got away with it, I got hook back on board and L got us away from the shore. Then we figured out what happened to the Engine: when you pull the knob to stop the engine, it's a great plan to push it back in again.
Keith was there on the quay to welcome us into our first bows-to Mediterranean moor.
We had a wonderful meal of prawns thrown whole into a half oil drum of boiling olive oil. They came out incredibly tasty and with all the bits you usually throw away - legs, head, shell - crisp and wonderful to eat. We've never seen that dish since, but have always remembered it and have done our own many times.

We had several days of relatively uneventful and blissful sailing - rapidly falling in love with Greece. Gaining confidence, we were sailing goose-winged between Paxos and Antipaxos. No attempt at rigging a preventer as we hadn't even heard of one at the time. Artemis had the main track mounted in the companionway and the Genoa sheet winches on the coach roof. L reached across from the port side to adjust the starboard sheet when a sudden wind change caught the sail and we gibed. The main sheet caught around her neck and rammed her head-first into the cockpit side. Disaster!
The gap between the islands is narrow and we were now close to the lee shore. L was dazed but concious but with blood pouring out of her gashed head. I tried to get the engine started to get the boat under control - and the key broke off in my hand! It could have been very nasty indeed but by pure chance she wasn't seriously hurt and I had time to get the boat sailing safely and could then attend to her.

The reason I tell this story is that this incident made a significant difference to our eventual choice of boat. We swore than that we would never have a boat where the main sheet is in reach of the crew. Rosa has a German Mainsheet system with the track on the coach-roof - specially designed for us by Northshore instead of the standard arrangement with the track in front of the binnacle.

We had many other learning experiences on this holiday - how to retrieve a tangled anchor, how to unblock the heads, how to moor with a long line ashore and the meaning of Schadenfreude. I won't bore you with the details.

The main thing we learned though is that we loved Greece, the Mediterranean and sailing with each other. We were on our way.

Getting Qualified

From contented middle class landlubbers with 3 kids, a mortgage and a dog to live-aboard sailors is a huge transition which we have made over more than 10 years. And it hasn't been easy!
Before we could really commit, we had to be sure that we both really did like sailing and just as important that we liked doing it together. We decided the best way was to do some chartering in the Med.
To be allowed to skipper a charter a yacht, you need to have a qualification and I decided to go for RYA day skipper (actually L decided and presented me with a booking on a course). Being a fairly arrogant sort of bloke with a lot of confidence in my maths and engineering skills, I bought the RYA course book, took one look at it, and decided I could figure it out and didn't need to do the practical course! So off I went to a weeks live-aboard course with 5 other students and a skipper.
The others were all less than 25 with years of experience and mostly there to get a ticket to sail daddies boat. I was fat and fifty and while I had done plenty of sailing in inland waterways, had never been on board a sailing boat on the sea. On top of that, I knew how to navigate theoretically but had never actually done it. The skipper told us he wasn't there to teach us, just to polish and assess.

I'm sure you can imagine, it was not the best matched crew that has ever sailed the Solent, in fact, the week was among the most stressfull of my life. It probably wasn't the easiest for the rest of them either. Among other adventures, I mis-read the chart and nearly ran us aground under full sail onto Beaulieu spit!
To cut a long story short, after a very stressful week, a huge amount of learning - a lot of it the hard way, The skipper passed me - but emphasised that it was an only just pass. I needed a lot more experience before I could consider myself safe and confident.

Since then I have done the yachmaster theory and L has done dayskipper theory. I thoroughly recommend anyone planning to become a sailor to do things the other way round, but to do them. While experience and reading since then has taught us even more, the grounding that the courses gave us saved our bacon on many occasions.

The Goal

I'm a very rare person - I got a life changing idea from management training!
A wonderful trainer called Chris Croft told us about a study done in the 1950s where a whole class at an American University (Harvard I think) was interviewed every 10 years for 30 years.
Only a small fraction of them had a clear set of life goals in 1950. By the time the study was complete, that small fraction had over 50% of the total wealth of the whole cohort. Of that fraction, an even smaller number had written down their goals and periodically got them out and studied them. That tiny fraction had over 80% of the 50%.
Allowing for the fact that 79.6% of all statistics are made up on the spot, that's a lot of wealth! Wealth of course does not equate with happiness but as Gertrude Stein said, "I've been rich and I've been poor. It's better to be rich"!
I can think of two rational explanations for why people who write their goals down end up rich:

1. Anyone anal enough to do it will have the traits needed to succeed.
2. Every day we make hundreds of decisions, most very minor. Every now and again, we make a bigger one and occasionally we make large ones. If we have no goal, we will end up with a drunkards walk where we go this way and that at random but keep on circling the same lamp-post. If we have a goal however, we will occasionally make decisions that push us in that direction. We still take a random walk, but now it gradually and almost effortlessly moves us towards the goal.

I like the second explanation.

So what was life changing about that then?

I was so impressed that I talked it through with Lindsay. We are fairly adventurous and enjoy spending long enough in other countries to get some real understanding of them. Lindsay spent 9 months on her own in New Zealand just before we got married and we took our whole family to the USA for 5 years in the 80s. We also both enjoyed sailing on the broads.
We decided that once the kids had flown the nest and before we got too old, we wanted to spend some years travelling. Doing this on land would be very expensive and it's easy to just see hotels and shops so we decided to go Sailing.
We looked at several options but the best combination of manageability (we would be well into our fifties) cost and warm weather seemed to be the Mediterranean.
So that was the goal - once the kids were flown, we would spend some years sailing round the Mediterranean.

And we wrote it down and looked at it next year and the year after that.

It's worked - we set sail in 3 months time.