I’d be lying if I said times were good and the weeks since Christmas have been particularly tough for a number of reasons. I can’t say anymore publicly but whats important is that I’m working hard and making progress. My next target is to raise sufficient funds to be able to purchase my next lot of epoxy by the beginning of February so that I can get motoring again.

It’s Tiki 38 No 130 and she’s being built in Geneva, Switzerland by Olivier Roux. If memory serves Daniel Ganz built ‘Marabu’ in Switzerland  as well. Two Tiki 38′s from a completely land-locked country, fantastic!

Olivier has started by building the engine boxes ‘to save time later’. Now that’s the kind of thinking I envy. I’m just too linear when it comes to following plans and instructions, seems I need to do things in the order they come up. He’s just finished these engine mounts and if the rest of the boat matches the high standards he’s achieved with them she’s going to be beautiful.

All credit to Olivier for getting started and my thanks to him for e-mailing me to say that he’d been following my blog for a while and that in some way I’d contributed to him starting his own build. I can’t take any credit for that but it’s a nice thought.

I’ve put a permanent link to his blog down in the ‘Wharram Builders’ links section but here’s a DIRECT LINK  for those that want to go see now.

Anyhoo here it is, another year and, scarily, the beginning of my sixth year of building ‘Gleda’. I’ve always been wary of falling into the trap of ‘perpetual building’ that many other have done. I’ve always tried to stay focused on the fact that I was actually a sailor who just so happened to be building a boat.

I set out on this journey with a five year build in mind and loyal readers may recall that my original launch date was May 1st 2012. For reasons documented elsewhere in this blog I made the decision to extend that deadline by twelve months in Spring last year, my intention was to focus all my time and energy on building the business that would finance completion of the build and subsequent cruising funds thereafter.

Unfortunately it hasn’t happened, if anything I’ve gone backwards and truth be told, at this point in time completion and launch of ‘Gleda’ seem like an impossible dream.

I confess that I’ve been in a dark place these past months, it’d would be easy to succumb to depression and helplessness and I have the scars to show how hard I’ve been fighting. But this New Year has brought new hope. My head is in a much better place, my optimism is high and I’ll be doing my damnedest to make 2012 the best year of the build yet.

It’ll need to be if I’m to reach my target for this time next year because by then I want the hulls sheathed and painted, portlights and hatches installed and the interiors fitted out well enough that I can live aboard. I also want the beams built, sheathed and painted so that the boat can be assembled and put on the water if needed. It’s a big ask I know but if I’m to reach to re-vised launch date of May 1st 2013 one year and four months away it has to happen.

The boat is to be called ‘Mon Tiki’ and is being built by David Ryan who is owner of a charter sailing company in Montauk. What’s really interesting is that ‘Mon Tiki’ is being built to a very high spec and when completed, she’ll  have a USCG certificate of inspection (COI) for 24 passengers and will, according to Davids website be the only Coast Guard certified sailing vessel operating on Long Island. I’d go further and suggest anywhere in the world!

I know that ‘Natural High’ Warren Matthew’s Tiki 38 has been built to a very high offshore spec with escape hatches etc. but I don’t know how the certification compares.

Now whilst there’s no way that ‘Gleda’ can be built to such exacting standards it will be fascinating to see what design modifications are needed and how the boat will set up to accommodate 24 passengers. Thinking ahead I had already given some thought to the fact that with lots of deck space, easy access in and out of the water and great stability a Tiki 38 would be great as a dive platform, whale watching boat etc. etc. and there would surely be opportunities for such activities in areas of the world far less regulated than Europe and the U.S. I’ll be watching this build closely for ideas I might be able to use.

 I’ll be contacting David to see if I can get some inside information to pass on here but you can follow the project via their website HERE.

On the subject of other Tiki 38′s thanks to everyone who’s taken a few minutes to add or update their entries in the Tiki 38 register I revived the other week. Please pass the word and lets see how many we can track down there are a lot of sail numbers missing. Here’s the link to the form

I’m checking the register weekly to keep things in order, I’m pretty sure it’s all working OK but drop me an e-mail if you have any problems or questions

Wouldn’t it be great to find out more about the other Tiki 38′s out there?

The form below auto-updates the full Google Docs Spreadsheet which can be viewed HERE. By the way I’ve hidden the e-mail column on the publicly viewable spreadsheet so as to avoid any privacy/spam issues. Of course I’ll happily facilitate communication between consenting parties.

Any queries, comments or amendments that don’t fit with the form, please drop me an e-mail

As I look back on the two years since I quit my full-time job on the corporate hamster wheel I can take some satisfaction in the fact that I’ve survived, just. But at the same time I’m nowhere near where I want to be in terms of income and lifestyle. I knew it would be tough but I underestimated how tough. There have been many times when I started to think I’d made a terrible mistake, one that was going to mean that ‘Gleda’ would never be finished and I’d never achieve my goal of freedom to live life as I please, but thankfully those times have been few and far between and now more than ever I’m absolutely convinced that I made the right choice. Apart from which I’m probably unemployable now!

Over the past two years I’ve learned many lessons and made many mistakes and I’m still learning, but these mistakes have left me far better placed to move forward and create the life I want. My biggest mistake was to focus entirely on my ‘business’ and failing to recognise that I was just re-creating a ‘job’. All those years of conditioning left me blind to the fact that I needed to get away from having a life separated into ‘work’ i.e. the stuff I ‘had’ to do to earn an income and ‘play’ i.e. All the things I do for pleasure and because I want to, to realise in-fact that the only way to be really successful is to merge the two and in effect get paid to play. That’s where the title of this blog post comes in because that’s an impossible dream right?

Well I don’t think so, it’s taken a while to sink in but now I can see clearly that the world has changed. When I entered the world of work in the late 60′s there really were far fewer opportunities, our paths were dictated to a great extent by outside factors beyond our control, our family background, place of birth, education etc. Today all that has changed, the power if the internet means that we can all educate ourselves on any subject we wish and more importantly communicate with large numbers of people without social or geographic boundaries. It’s unprecedented, it’s a Revolution as historic as the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions that have gone before. We really can be who we want to be, we really can do what we want to do, we just need to shake off the shackles of traditional work practice and start again.

I’ll be sharing what I’m doing to make this happen in later posts but for now I’ll leave it to my favorite sage Seth Godin to sum up:

“When exactly were you brainwashed into believing that the best way to earn a living is to have a job?”

 

“…Acknowledge to yourself that the factory job is dead.
Having a factory job is not a natural state. It wasn’t at the heart of being human until very recently. We’ve been culturally brainwashed”

 

“You have everything you need to build something far bigger than yourself”

 

 

Image Credited to Magda Biskup

I came across this short photo blog the other day and it got me thinking. The post was written and photographed by Magda Biskup and placed on her Destination World blog (links at the end of this article)

She tells the story of a guy called Peter, he’s now 74 and spent 38 years constructing his dream yacht with the intention of one day sailing around the Pacific Ocean. The yacht is huge and requires a crew of 14 to sail her and thereby hangs the problem, Peter can’t get the crew together to fulfil his ambition…… shame.

I’ve been very aware from the start of this project that it was about going sailing and not about building a boat, I’m also very aware that it’s now coming up to 5 years since I cut the first piece of timber. If I achieve my launch target of May 2013 then I’ll have been working for the best part of six and a half years.

The clock is ticking and I’m not getting any younger. I can’t afford to spend another 5 years on the build, I want ‘Gleda’ on the water and soon! I started with the end in mind but the years can blur the focus and building becomes the aim not the means. I won’t let that happen. Somehow, someway, I need to scrape up some money for a new stock of epoxy supplies and get back to work right after Christmas. 2012 has got to be the last full year of building.

I hope Peter finds his crew and fulfils his dream real soon, ‘Gleda’ will be rigged for single handed sailing so I know that won’t hold me up, I just hope it doesn’t take me 38 years to launch because I’m not sure I’ll be up to the sailing when I’m 88!

I’d encourage you to go take a look at Magda’s blog, her photos are stunning and I particularly like the rope study I re-produced above.

Here’s the link: Sailing Sydney – Magda Biskup

Peter is 74 years old. He arrived in Australia in 1961 in a cargo ship and he was supposed to stay just for a few months, visiting his sister, and then going back home, to the Netherlands. But plans seldom work out. It was the same in Peter’s case. He was offered a job in Australia, then another one, and somehow what was to be just a few months in Australia turned into 50 years.

Peter has been sailing since he was 6 years old. And he always dreamed of his own yacht. So he decided to build one himself. Sometimes in the 70s he set up a workshop in his own backyard and spend next 38 years constructing a yacht of his dreams. He wanted his yacht to be a large one. And it is huge! It requires a crew of 14 to operate it and can carry up to 27 people. Unfortunately, the dream of having such a large yacht has worked against another of Peter’s dreams – a dream of sailing around Pacific Ocean. It is simply very difficult to gather a team of 14 people, who would be able to work and live together for many months.

But Peter is not giving up his dream. He keeps trying to find his crew. In the meantime, he gathers his family and friends and organises sailing trips around Sydney for them. I was lucky to take part in one of those trips last weekend.

Sailing with Purpose: The Pursuit of the Dream

I have seen Jay described as ‘an opinionated SOB’ and I doubt he’d contest such a label and with all such characters you can guarantee that their views will always provoke discussion!  One of Jays early crusades was that of engineless sailing and his foundation of the ‘Oar Club’. This is actually a topic I have been interested in for quite a while and I still haven’t decided if ‘Gleda’ will be engineless or not, but I’m saving that for another day.

Today I wanted to highlight an interesting talk that Jay gave recently gave to a Tedx audience in Hilo, Hawaii.

Jay now lives in Hawaii on a farmstead hacked out of the jungle and posts occasional articles about responsible living, and sustainability on his blog Sensible Simplicity.

One of Jays other crusades has been centered around something called ‘sea-steading’ which was the subject of another book Sea-steading: A Life of Hope and Freedom on the Last Viable Frontier and when he moved to Hawaii it seemed that his intention was to stay land-locked only as long as it took to build his new boat which may well have been a Wharram Pahi 63. It seems he’s changed his mind and he explains why in his talk. He goes further and suggests that we should all take responsibility and demonstrate by example that sustainable living in the way he lives himself  is the only way that our children will have a planet left to enjoy.

I admire his strength and call to action but equally I believe my own plans will enable me to live authentically, to contribute and to show that there’s a better way to live.

Here’s his video, I’d love to hear what you think.

Click here to view the embedded video.

She was built to the highest standards (as can be seen from this photo of the galley) and was launched in June 2010. She’s fully equipped for extended cruising and as I understand it the sale price wouldn’t even cover the price of the materials and equipment that went into this fantastic vessel.

Martin was the guy who organised the bulk purchase and shipping of the marine grade aluminium for the masts of  ’Al Raso’ Jacques Pierret’s ‘Pilgrim’ , Daniel Ganz’s ‘Marabu’ and my own ‘Gleda’. Sadly I’m the only one who still has these mast packed in the crate they arrived in but given that both ‘Pilgrim’ and ‘Marabu’ have now crossed the Atlantic and, as stated above ‘Al Raso’ cruised more than 6000Nm at least I can be confident they’ll do the job! Point is Martin went to huge trouble to research. source and negotiate price on the right material for the job so I know he will have done the same for every other component of the boat.

Martin can be contacted directly at sv.alraso@gmail.com but if you’re interested don’t hesitate, ‘Al Raso’ is currently lying in the NE area of U.S.A. and I’ve no doubt she’s going to sell quickly.

I confess to a twinge of sadness that Martin has decided to sell but having followed his story I know he’s made the right decision for himself and his family. ‘Al Raso’ has taken them on a journey they’ll never forget and I’m sure she’ll do the same for her new owner.

The somewhat flippant title belies the serious content within and the premise of the book is simple – Do what you love and work becomes play. Make no mistake, this isn’t about slacking, quite the contrary. To be successful is going to take a lot of hard work but here’s the thing, if you’re doing what you love, if you’re in ‘flow’ it becomes fun.

The other day when I was catching up on news from the Wharram community I came across an item about the launch of ‘Amatasi’ which as I’m sure many of you will already know, is the Wharrams latest design. She’s a 27ft environmentally friendly fishing boat, she’s already won awards for her design although I had to smile at the following quote in the press:

“The boat has been hailed by industry leaders as a radical innovation in design”

Given that James designed and built a boat sharing a very similar design back in the 1950′s it’s taken them a while to latch on!

Anyway my main point is this, James has been described as the most prolific boat designer in the world and he is in his early 80′s, Hanneke of course shares much of the credit for the designs and in the ‘normal’ world would have retired years ago. But no, here they both are, still designing, still sailing and still innovating, still doing great work. I admire and envy their continued enthusiasm and energy and you can witness it in the photos and video of ‘Amatasi’s’ recent launch at Devoran. I wish them many more years of the same and thank them for their inspiration.

You can see photo’s of the launch HERE

You can see a short video of the launch HERE