I keep a journal. Not consistently, the offshore sailing life produces the journal entries in the passages and the anchorages and the specific moments that ask to be recorded, and the ordinary life produces them less frequently.
The entry from the night that Naora became the irreversible commitment, the night after the second major co-founder meeting in March 2024 when the two of us had agreed that the plan was the plan and that the building would begin, is in the journal in the form that the significant decisions produce in my journal: not the polished reflection of the person who has had time to compose their thoughts but the raw record of the person who is too close to the decision to see it clearly and who writes it down so that the clarity will be available later when the distance has produced it.
I am not going to reproduce the full entry here. It is the private record of a private moment and the private record is the thing that makes the honest public account possible, the private version is the source that the public version is distilled from, and the distillation requires that the source remain undistilled.
But I will say what the entry contained in general terms, because the general terms are the honest description of what the night of the significant decision feels like and that description is useful to anyone who has been in that night or is approaching it.
What The Night Of The Decision Feels Like
The entry had three things in it. The first was the clarity: the specific conviction that the thing we were building was the right thing and that Antony and I were the right two people to build it and that the route and the boat and the concept were the correct answers to the questions they were designed to answer.
This was not the euphoria of the excited person. It was the calm of the person who has been carrying something for a long time and has finally put it down in the right place.
The second was the uncertainty: the honest acknowledgement that the thing being built was large enough and long enough and complex enough that the path from the March 2024 plan to the May 2027 departure was not clearly visible in all its parts and that the parts that were not clearly visible would need to be found and built as the building progressed. This is the condition of the significant commitment: the beginning is clear, the destination is clear, and the middle is the part that the building produces rather than the part the plan provides in advance.
The third was the gratitude. For Antony. For the people at home who had said we are with you. For the twenty-five years of the offshore sailing life that had produced the specific knowledge that made the plan possible rather than merely imaginable.
And for the ocean, which has been giving back more than it asks of the person who goes to it in good faith for as long as people have been going to it. The journal entry ended there. I closed the notebook and slept well.
