ADVENTURE:These three men in a boat are following their dream on a globetrotting boat trip, with relatively little experience to guide them on their way. They tell GEMMA TIPTONabout pirates, waves and not washing
HOW MANY OPPORTUNITIES do we get in our lives to pursue our dreams? And how many of us actually seize those opportunities, instead of regretfully watching them pass us by? It’s pretty close to a perfect day in Kinsale. We’re sitting on board the Vela, letting the gentle rock of the waves bat us softly back and forth, and, dreams or no dreams, it’s hard to think of anywhere else I’d rather be.
The men I’m with have other ideas, however, and their minds are firmly fixed on the choppy waters of the Bay of Biscay, and avoiding hurricane season when they cross the Atlantic, crossing from Cape Verde to Brazil, later this year.
There are three of them (yes, three men in a boat): Sam Horler (26); his cousin Emmanuel Stuart Skånseng (25); and their friend Alexander Sæbø (25), both of whom are from Norway. It is Sæbø’s boat, or rather it belongs to his father. Built in 1956, with gleaming wooden decks and trim, it is attracting a fair bit of attention on the marina. A Welshman stops by to ask about the deck varnish, and Horler says that the previous evening, a fisherman drew up to offer the three a pollock for dinner. All the same, at 34ft, it seems very small to contemplate sailing across the Atlantic. “It’s scariest at night,” admits Sæbø, the only one of the trio who actually knew how to sail when they set off on their adventure last August, the other two quite literally learning the ropes en route. “When you’re out on watch, you don’t see the waves coming until they hit you.”
“We have nets around the bunks,” says Horler, who joined the voyage only recently in Dún Laoghaire, “so you don’t fall out of bed when that happens.” “Or there’s when you meet a tanker,” adds Skånseng, “although Alexander is very good at working out which way they’re going in the dark.”
Do they argue or bicker? “Not much”, “some”, “a little . . . ” “It was hard to start with,” says Horler. “I didn’t know the knots, or anything, in the beginning.” He ducks into the galley, and returns a few minutes later with surprisingly good coffee. He has been ashore for pastries too, although he ruefully tells me that they’ll be stocking up on tinned tuna, spaghetti and baked beans for the next leg of their around-the-world trip, which will take them to La Coruña in Spain.
What prompted the three to leave everything behind them and head off on what is undoubtedly, to use that overworked phrase, the voyage of a lifetime? “It was time,” says Stuart Skånseng, who had worked at two jobs for two years (as a hospital porter, and a care assistant) to save the money for the epic voyage.
“A girl?” I wonder. “Well, I did break up with my girlfriend,” says Sæbø. Not the recession then, I say, thinking of heading away from headlines of doom, gloom and negative equity and into the South Seas and sunshine aboard a brave little boat. “We don’t have one in Norway,” says Sæbø, “we didn’t sell our oil.” “They wanted to, years ago,” adds Skånseng, “but there was one man in the parliament, and he was very unpopular, but he wouldn’t let them. So no, there’s no recession there.”
What about Horler? He’s a talented painter, with his own Drawing Room studios in Dublin’s Clarendon Street. “They asked me, and how could I not?” I think of how much I’d love to do something similar, and of all the things I’d think of to stop myself, and Horler agrees. “I did keep coming up with reasons, but I told everyone I was going – as a way of making myself do it.”
He has brought his art materials with him, although given that a great deal of his work involves drawing and painting people, including a large-scale ongoing cut-out work called Audience, I wonder how he’ll feel when for days and days there’s nothing but grey seas around him. “I’ll have them with me in my head,” says Horler, whose several-times-great grandmother was Maud Gonne, and whose grandparents (who he shares with Skånseng), are the sculptors Imogen and Ian Stuart.
There have been mishaps and adventures. The Vela sprang a leak that was quite recently patched up in Kilmore Quay. A rope got caught in the propeller, there were days of rain, and no chance of drying out clothes. “Waking up to put on wet things – not nice,” says Skånseng. What about washing? “You don’t,” says Horler, “you swim in the sea, or wait till you get to a marina.”
We move on to talk of Somali pirates, storms and other hazards; to them, it’s all part of the adventure. As I wave them off on a shopping trip to stock up for the next leg of their two-year odyssey, I really wish I was going, too. So next time a dream creeps up and offers itself to you, follow the example of these three men in a boat – catch it, hold it, and follow it. You never know when the next one might come along.
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