Well I guess that it’s no good setting up a blog site and not posting any blogs, so here goes!

When we originally bought La Mouette last year, we didn’t have any long term plans for cruising or anything like that. Didn’t even really think about such things. It was more along the lines of weekends away around Pittwater and the Hawkesbury and maybe even up the coast a bit to Lake Macquarie or Port Stephens.

As kids on Mum and Dad’s yacht we spent weekends away on Lake Macquarie and the overnighters were just as much fun as the getting there by sail. I can remember the raftings up and group sails. It was all fun – but then life was more fun back in the 1970’s, however let’s not go there just at the moment.

Was buying La Mouette a desperate bid to try and capture a chapter of youth long gone? I wouldn’t say that, but more probably, the yearning to go sailing is still there. Packing the Landrover up with the tent and cooking gear is part of the same yearning. So is the motorbike. Especially the motorbike. A BMW K100LT is not just a tourer, it’s a full fledged gypsy machine, built to cruise the highways and take you, and your luggage to far away places – and also La Mouette. The open road or the open sea, it’s pretty much the same thing.  Bilbo, in J R R Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, is talking to Frodo the Hobbit: “He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. ‘It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,’ he used to say. ‘You step onto the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.'”.

I think It’s started. The road, or the current has swept us along already – Youtube hasn’t helped much either – too much information and too many people following their dreams is setting a dangerous example!  They say that the horizon at sea level is only 4.7 km, but we can see a lot further than that. Of course the horizon is only as far as your imagination. The hard part is turning those dreams into reality and thus the real journey begins.