Cooper B., Cooper L. Sell Up and Sail

Third Edition. — Dobbs Ferry, NY: Sheridan House, 1998. — 312 p. — ISBN: 978-1-57409-046-8.Not so many years ago the number of people living aboard cruising yachts was small enough for them to be considered very eccentric.The situation is no longer the same.
In 1980 a survey for an Italian marina company produced a figure of 4000 boats which were lived in all the year round in the Mediterranean alone. Of this number, 25% were British and some 10% were American.The number grows year by year, and to it must be added the substantial population doing the same thing in the West Indies, the Bahamas and the South Pacific, as well as the American community on the move up and down their East Coast waterways.
The significant words are ‘on the move’.We are not concerned with houseboat residents, or even those who live in a yacht in one place.This is about mobility, and we try to go into it quite deeply.
It is about escapism as well. Too many moralists infer the escape is from obligations, but this view begs a lot of questions. Many of us escape from regi- mentation, from interfering bureaucracy, from cradle-to-grave suffocation: we want to look after ourselves. We are rebels from the Welfare State. We discuss that.
But an urge to go is not enough.To a lifelong sailor the act of setting sail comes naturally and easily. Most people are not so experienced, and we are often asked how we have managed to enjoy fourteen years of early retirement in this way, when many others have set out but have not managed to keep going. A good deal of the answer lies in understanding what you are trying to achieve, in defining your aim, in ordering your affairs to further that aim, and then finally having the capacity to cast off the last mooring and go.
This is not a book on technique — seamanship, how to sail, how to maintain engines — though we do indulge ourselves from time to time. It is about attitudes, about ways of ordering existence on the move.
We are not concerned with obsessive achievers speeding round the world on curried split peas, without touching land except to have their great sailor ticket punched at the more spectacular blue-water stopping places. Nor do we have time for bathtub sailors, navigators of barrels or floating bedsteads, or voyagers in re-cycled cornflakes packets and other unsuitable craft. Our advice to nautical loonies is to stay at home, buy a plastic duck and give the rescue services a break.
There are some who for various reasons can be only partially or temporarily committed to wandering. Those with a sabbatical and no time to waste, and others with a semi-annual approach, wishing to live aboard for perhaps six months at a time. Though not suffering from a terminal case of wanderlust as we are, they have a minor infection: perhaps we can help them too.
We are writing for people who are out to enjoy themselves. So we concentrate on those parts of the world to which the live-aboards tend to gravitate, and where our voyaging experiences are more recent.
We write also for dreamers, for most of us were dreamers to start with, and we hope we may encourage them to realise their dreams.There may be those unsure of their ability, of their endurance, or uncertain that the lust is real. Those too who have to cope with the wanderlust in a partner, and how it might affect them.We try to help these people analyse their attitudes in Chapter Two,"Test your I.Q.". The two of us have very different personalities and we see things in different ways. To some extent, then, this is two books for the price of one, for we both express (as much between the lines as in them) what drives us on.