How to make God laugh

There is one nice saying about relativity of life. It goes following. If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans. 

Our initial plan we committed our lives to was to circumnavigate around the globe on our boat.

Many years passed since verbalising the idea. And it has been since October we all left our home in Prague for the odyssey. 

The learning curve has been amazing. We start properly living on our boat. We are boat schooling (different to home schooling). We crossed our first ocean. We celebrated first Xmas somewhere else then in Prague. Our boat sailed around 6.000 nautical miles since its departure from La Rochelle. 

All has been old and new to us at the same time.

There are great moments that keep us going. 

We see our kids became “partners in crime” 😎. Of course they argue as any siblings in their age getting on their parents’ nerves. But they have formed a great couple who is able to have fun, motivate, take care and rely on each other.

We see how they improved in swimming and snorkelling. They can dive better and longer than their mum! Together we are able to overcome their fears from unknown and show them they can combat them. Latest example was swimming with them in Titou gorge at Dominica. 

We are also colouring blind maps of destinations we have not visit. We are learning geography, history, weather, oceanography and many more.

Travelling also helps us to understand the world better, to see how human culture evolves both in good and bad.

We are getting compliments on our kids’ English, which finally makes the investment into their language skills paying back.

We have time to talk about future of our family, about our kids personalities. We meet various people from around the globe and get inspiration from how they live.

There are however situations that go against our plan or make the plan harder to execute.

We realised boat schooling differs from home schooling substantially. 

Imagine you need to sail constantly. So when you need to write your desk is constantly rocking. Your pencils are constantly falling down. Sun is shining into the cockpit but whenever you sit to a shade, the boat moves and again the sun shines on you. 

Kids get distracted very easily by other boats passing by. 

We cannot have proper timetable for schooling. Anytime we tried to, plans changed and we had to move somewhere. 

This we luckily fixed by a different concept. We do school anytime we can, not anytime we want. That was a big difference for the kids. It requires a lot of patience and discipline from both parents and children. But it works much better.

In the end we see our kids would be happy on the boat or at home. Their flexibility is a blessing for us.

Also we all thought covid would limit travelling for one year. It is definitely better but it is still stigmatised. There are various regulations in every country that often change. All the mandatory tests before or after arrival to a country are costly. 

This uncertainty means much less tourism, less families on their boats, less kids to play with. And when they finally make new friends, them or us usually leave in few days somewhere else.

All this we overcame knowing our adventure is just worth some complications. You cannot have sky without clouds 🌤

The biggest barrier in front of us turned out to be Pavla’s seasickness.  

Her 3 weeks agony during the Atlantic crossing forced us to stop and re-think the whole trip.

It was clear, we are not able to cover the Pacific crossing, just Michal, Pavla and the kids. Also Pacific would be at least 1 week longer then the Atlantic!

So what were the options?

We could get professional captain or crew to help us transfer the boat to French Polynesia. Pavla with kids would fly to the desired destination. Few crews in the really have extra captain when sailing long passages. So it would be probably feasible.

Yet such solution goes against the philosophy of why we do it. We either go as family and have fun together or it is not worth it. 

Another option was to stay in the Caribbean and do not continue with the really. We would sail the area until the hurricane season in June.

Then we would need to figure out if we keep the boat here but stay somewhere safe, sail the boat back to Europe or we sell it.

In the meantime Pavla has to figure out her inner ear.

It has been multi-criteria decision making.

If we stop and park the idea of circumnavigation, kids would go back to school. Once they do, we have “only” 2 months every summer to sail on the boat together. But in European summer there is a hurricane season in the Caribbean.

Is it worth to spend quite lot of money maintaining the boat when we do not live on it except for summer? Not really :/

Finally the decision had been made. We quitted the really. We have time until June to enjoy the Caribbean. We avoid long passages so Pavla is ok. This means we would spend nearly a year travelling and living on the boat which satisfies pretty nicely our wanderlust 🌎 We will come back home end of May with the dream parked waiting to be finished some other time in the future.

In our new itinerary we have already visited Dominica and Guadeloupe. Right now we are in the Dominican Republic and are planning stop over in Peru.
We hope we did not disappoint you. But this is the life.
The only certainty is a change.

Your Family on the Boat ❤️