You have done Southeast Asia. You have done South America. You have been to Japan twice and Morocco once and you know the difference between the parts of Italy the tourists go to and the parts the Italians actually prefer. You have points and status and the kind of travel fluency that comes from having done enough of it that the logistics no longer surprise you and the novelty of the new place arrives more slowly than it used to because the category of new place has been well-populated by the years of going to them.
You have not been offshore. Not in the sense that matters. You may have been on a sailing boat, a charter week in Croatia, a catamaran in the Caribbean, the yacht belonging to someone you know. That is not offshore. Offshore is the condition of the open ocean at the scale it actually is: three weeks from the Canaries to the Caribbean with no land visible in any direction for most of the crossing, the horizon in every direction the horizon, the boat the only reference point in the water and the sky.
This is a different experience from the sailing holiday the way that swimming in the sea is a different experience from standing at the edge of it. You know the edge. You do not know the depth.
What Offshore Is That Everywhere Else Is Not
The offshore passage removes the option of leaving. This sounds like a limitation and it is the opposite of a limitation: it is the specific condition that produces the quality of the offshore experience that no land-based travel can replicate. When you are three days into the Atlantic crossing and the Canaries are behind you and the Caribbean is ten days ahead, the situation is the situation. T
here is no flight home, no train to the next city, no option to decide that this place was not what you expected and that the next place will be better. The next place is the ocean. The ocean is the place. You are in it and the being in it is the experience rather than the transit to the experience.
This is what offshore is that everywhere else is not. Not a better destination, the Marquesas are extraordinary but the word extraordinary applies to many of the places you have already been. The condition of the arrival: the three weeks of open ocean that made the Marquesas the landfall rather than the destination, the arrival that the ocean passage produced as the thing you earned rather than the thing you purchased.
You have been everywhere. You have not been to the Marquesas the way the offshore sailor arrives at them after three weeks of the Pacific. That is not the same place.
