[p]kudzuu1114

[s]
pos: 36 03.796N 002 39.395W
d: 04/07/2019 1530 GMT+0
w: HAZY MORNINGS, CLEARING BY MIDDAY, HOT AND SUNNY AFTERNOONS

Regular readers of these pages will recognize it, but we had never even heard the cruisers' cliche before we proved its validity in 2011 - cruisers' plans are indeed written in sand at low tide. It was our plan that year, as we prepared Mersoleil and ourselves to sail the world, to head down the West Coast of America to Mexico, then Panama, before transiting the Panama Canal and crossing the Atlantic to the Mediterranean Sea. Later, after spending a year or two in the Med, we would pass back through the Canal and circumnavigate in a Westerly direction.

That was the plan until June of 2011, when we looked back over the first half of the year and asked ourselves what on earth we were thinking! Greece and Spain were both on the brink of insolvency, looking to the EU to save them from financial ruin. The Arab Spring had incited new levels of terrorism across Northern Africa. An acquaintance of mine was one of four American sailors killed in March of that year by Somali pirates during an attack gone very wrong in the Indian Ocean. Why, we asked ourselves, would we want to spend time in the most expensive cruising grounds in the world when the entire south coast of the Med was off limits to us and several countries on the European side were angry and preoccupied with failing economies?

Two months before we left Seattle, Robbie and I scratched plan A, wadded up the paper, and threw it in the fire. We sailed down to Mexico and turned right instead of left, bound for French Polynesia and the South Pacific! We have never looked back on that decision.

Now fast forward to July 2019 and imagine how we felt yesterday sailing into the Mediterranean Sea in bright sunshine and light westerlies through the Strait of Gibralter. We are thrilled to be here! We're completely different people from the couple who left Seattle eight years ago, but we're just as excited to be in the Med, finally, as we would have been in our first season cruising. Several of our friends have completed their circumnavigations in the last month or two, one couple writing to share their excitement and noting that they had sailed more than 40,000nm in their quest to reach the starting point again. Our goal has never been to complete an official circumnavigation, but we've already sailed more than 50,000nm and we both felt yesterday, passing through the Pillars of Hercules and gazing at the Rock of Gibralter, that we had reached the same kind of milestone. We got here, by golly! The long way.

Mersoleil is in the Mediterranean Sea!
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