Sailing adventures

 When I was in my twenties, just recently fallen in love with the ocean and hungry for sailing adventures, I started reading the biographies of many sailors.  From the great discoverers like Magallanes, Marco Polo and Zheng He, modern sailing records lie Laura Dekker and even the random middle-age couple that decided to sell their house and sail around the world and write a horrible book about food recipes and the most boring Atlantic crossing I have ever read. 

In any case I devoured them all books, dreaming of a boat that I didn’t have and experience that would take me years to get.  since I turned 23 and forsook my career in science and committed to become a better sailor and sailing instructor it has been a long and bumpy ride. 

Working as a sailing instructor in different places, carrying my books with me. I was in the fjords of the south island of New Zealand while reading the memories of Captain Cook, on the same bay where he was attacked by wild Maories, reading the same passage of the book feeling history running through my veins.  Sailed to Milford Sound, that secret cove that he failed to discover in his first draft of New Zealand map, like 400 years ago. I made it to the far far east, same as Marco Polo on his journeys to the old Cathay, now the People’s Republic of China. I made myself a house in a far away beach in a tropical island, that most of people call Taiwan but I insist in calling home. Started teaching sailing to some local kids, learnt the language,  find a crew of cool young people with the same dream, that slowly have become my family. 

It has been 10 years, now that I just recently turned 33, of a lot of dreaming and a lot of learning, to become what I wanted to become. Teaching sailing across many countries and grabbing any opportunity that I had to get on a sailboat and learn. And the more I learn, there more I see there is to learn. But despite being an endless learning path, at least I have accumulated enough experienced to be here where I am right now, doing some things that a few years I could only dream about.  

A few days ago, I got a sort of some small job to help on a sailboat transport from West Philippines to East Philippines on a 54-foot yacht, with my sailing coach co-worker Chen Yee that now she is the captain-in-training of this beautiful boat.  We have 4-5 days to reach Cebu island, before the boat gets ready to go to Palau and then eventually to Taiwan, despite I will be joining only for the Philippine leg of the trip. But still an awesome training experience before I get my 27-footer day-sailer ready to sail to Taitung. 

These are foreign waters to me. Somewhere along the Philippine Sea, very very far away from where I grew up in the Mediterranean, half across the globe of where I was born, almost in the antipodes, Argentina.  Hundreds of miles down south of the Taiwan strait where  I was sailing just this last weekend. The strange island that still refuses to acknowledge its ocean heritage as if on a self-denial tantrum lacking to see that north south east and west it’s all just all water.  In any case, I am far away from anything that I ever called home. In a pitch dark night, sitting at the helm while all the crew is fast asleep.  Only with the Filipino crew member that is also on my watch but doesn’t speak to much.  It is blowing 20 knots and the swell is picking up. We are on a hard heel, upwind, 90 degrees straight to the east, waiting for the sun to rise in the horizon.  

It’s time to put all those adventure books behind me and start writing some of sailing stories myself.