source: u/flard
this is a will be a long story
~
When I was 26, my friend and I decided we were going to sail around the world.
Ambitious? Yes.
Stupid? Yes.
As I type this, I am 3.5 years into this journey, with an estimated two weeks until I reach home-base.
I'm not sure if I will make it.
I'll sum up my life's story thus far in three short sentences: I was lucky to have a nice family growing up, and we lived by the water and loved to sail. After college, I realized I wasn't very happy with myself and needed direction. I thought I'd find answers on the open-water, or something like that, so me and my best friend set sail.
Samuel and I had saved up a lot of money ever since we were teenagers. We bought a "yacht" together, AKA, a tattered, thirty-five-foot boat that was built in the 1960's with a nice motor and huge sails. It took some work to get it going again but was worth every penny.
We had plenty of food, clean water, water purifiers, medicine, flare guns, solar generators, batteries, a pro-GPS—all the essentials. We also have a nice satellite thingy that Sam set up so we can have wi-fi on board. It only works about 10% of the time, truth be told, but if you're reading this, it means it's done its job.
The past 3.5 years have been, uh, interesting. Some weird shit has happened but I don't have time to type it all out now. The only thing of importance now is surviving the situation I'm in, and creating this written record of what happened.
It started a couple of hours ago.
Like I said, I'm about two weeks away from California (where we started our journey) going north away from Mexico in the Pacific Ocean. A few hours ago, Sam and I were sitting out on the boat's deck sipping some champagne, celebrating the fact that we were in the home-stretch. The stars, my God the stars were beautiful. You really can't get a better view of them than from the middle of the ocean.
We were quietly admiring them. We had talked so much in that past three years, but the silent moments we shared were the ones I remembered most. Like that moment we were in then—silently watching the stars at night and sipping some bubbly. Or the first morning we set sail, we didn't talk for almost two hours as we watched the sun rise. As it first appeared as a red blob climbing over the ocean's end, Sam was strumming Here Comes the Sun on his guitar. The salty wind was hitting our face and I thought, this is it, no looking back, this is the beginning of this whole journey.
I thought about these moments and more like them, but I was broken from my daze as I noticed Sam had stood up from his seat, rather quickly, and was staring off in to the dark horizon.
"What is it?" I asked.
"I thought I saw a flare."
I looked out in the same direction he was and waited.
A couple seconds passed, then a skinny, barely visible streak of red appeared. It was a couple miles away, maybe more. Sam turned to me. "Flare?"
I nodded. "Flare."
"Let's go. Now."
"Got it." I ran to the controls and started up the engine.
We turned the vessel sharply and darted over in the direction it came from. We were traveling fast, for sure, but not at an unsafe speed. Our boat rocked up and down, and side-to-side as we traversed the rough waves.
