2018: A Year in Review
Quick stats:
Visited – 5 countries, 5 continents and 2 British Overseas Territories
Qualifications earned – PADI Dive master, PADI Instructor, STCW
Companies worked for – 4
Flights taken – 28
Kilometers travelled – 77.391km
Nautical miles travelled – 11.577nm
Starting the year in Indonesia and ending up in Antartica pretty much sums up 2018 for us!
A year of travel, adventure and training. A year of firsts, of solidifying existing love and building new friendships. Of visiting new places and those that are so familiar they feel like home.
2018, for me, finally felt like everything is falling into place. I’ve found the love of my life and we are creating our future together; our dream life side by side. If this was 2018, I can’t wait to see what 2019 has in store for us!
Back in 2016, in a fairly new relationship, me and Steve were talking about dreams and aspirations.Not really thinking too much about it I mentioned that I’d always dreamed of sailing around the world. Steve replied with “Let’s do that”. As I soon found out, this was a phrase that I would come familiar with. “Why not?!” He would say and give me a brief amount of time to come up with 2 valid reasons “why not”.
Why not indeed.
So a plan started formulating and Steve’s obsession with Yacht World began. We planned on leaving in the fall of 2019 but there was lots to be done first; courses to be taken, miles to be sailed and a boat to be bought! We best get to work.
Fast forward to January 2018 and we’r at the airport with far too much luggage (does that ever get any easier?!), leaving the snow behind and heading for warmer temperatures. Our plan was to be in Indonesia for 3 months; I would complete my PADI Instructors and Steve his Dive Masters (having never dived before in his life, see how that went here..) It was all part of our plan to be more employable while we are ‘at sea’. Read more about our experiences living and diving in Indonesia here…
SPOILER ALERT…. we were both successful in acquiring our professional PADI certifications!
We returned to Canada in April, and almost immediately headed up north to the Great Bear Rainforest in northern BC. This is our special place, the magical place where we met, got engaged and where we even will have our honeymoon in 2019.
Read more about how our love story began here …
The centre of our love story is at a remote whale research station and a new, smaller , outpost that was just recently build and we were on our way to help with some building improvements.
The plan was to build a large deck around the building to help with the hourly whale surveys conducted here every day from April through October. However, weather thwarted our plans and instead we built an outhouse out of driftwood!! Read more about that here …
Summer time is a busy time for both of us in Squamish, we own a cafe, food truck and restaurant along with Steve’s business partner and so keeping that running as well as guiding ‘sea safaris’ from a local marina meant that it was soon August and we don’t know where the time went.
But what we did know is it was time to head back up to the Great Bear. Steve would be co-guiding a 7 day stand up paddle board expedition the first week of September and then I would be flying up to join him actually build the deck this time! After a couple of weeks of long days it was done, an 800 square foot deck perched on the rocks and over the sea was built and it had already been blessed with a couple of close whale encounters.
Straight after this we headed even further north to the Northwest Territories where we would be living at a remote, fly-in fishing camp for 2 months working as boat drivers for a TV show… We can’t write about this yet but once it’s released learn more here…
We wished we could stay longer but we had to hurry back to Squamish, we had just 4 weeks before heading off on the next adventure. And in that time we also had to have numerous dance lessons to choreograph and practise our wedding dance! As that was creeping up on us too.
December 2018 rolls around and it is time for me and Steve to say goodbye. Just for a few weeks but when we pretty much live in each other’s pockets it seems like a lifetime! Steve would be spending Christmas and his birthday on the RCGS Resolute, a One Ocean Expedition ship visiting Antarctica. This was to be our new job but I would be joining Steve a couple of weeks later. So he headed off to South America and I headed back to the UK to spend Christmas with my family, and considering I hadn’t seen them in a year everyone was very excited!
Soon we would be reunited and we would bring in the new year together, on the ship which would be our home for the next two months on the southern ocean.
What a year!
Stay tuned for more adventures in 2019!!!
