Posts Tagged ‘The Hillratt’s Voyage’

Aug 2011

What Sailing Across The Ocean Teaches You About Marriage

Long time readers will remember The Hillrat's Voyage. Sara and her husband Stof married in a blazingly honest ceremony in South Africa. Then, when they started to ponder what they wanted their married life to look like, the decided to dive into the most bravely adventurous thing they could think of: sailing (and otherwise traveling) across the Pacific Rim (and blogging while doing it). Sara and Stoff just finished their Pacific crossing in a sail boat, and Sara is here to tell us what she learned about her marriage throughout the journey (she wrote this post out long hand, during the trip). Without further ado, one of the APW Staff's favorite features:

Gosh! It has been an age. You'd think that I had been hiding out in the middle of the Pacific... (groan).

I last wrote for APW about being a wife in the thrust of travel adventure. My husband and I had landed in Mexico and finally reunited with our sailboat, the lovely Laura Takalani. We had a crazy two month period to work and get our boat ready for a voyage across the Pacific, then one Wednesday in mid-April (after hitting the organic market for a final provision) we finally set sail.

It soon became apparent that we had spent so much time preparing the boat for an ocean crossing that we (I) had neglected to mentally prepare ourselves (myself). Those of you lovelies who are following our adventure will know that I found it all rather terrifying. Of course, terror begets exhilaration and I have spent some time reflecting on how personally fulfilling it was to have done such a big scary audacious thing.

I have not yet written about what that ocean crossing did for our marriage. We spent some time "negotiating" power shifts. Stof sails like he was born to; I am cautious of physical challenges that are unfamiliar (like sailing) and somewhat awe-struck by the sea. This meant that we had to recalculate how to meet challenges. I had to learn some humility. Stof had to learn some patience. We both had to learn teamwork and serious trust. Twenty three days after leaving Mexico, we made landfall at Hiva Oa in the Marquesas Islands with a marriage galvanised by an ocean. We were in love with the verdant mountains, dramatic shoreline and cheap baguettes (in a country where everything is ridic expensive). Mainly, we were really proud of ourselves, of each other, and of Team Hillratt.

Since then, Stof and I have been swanning around a series of paradise islands. Welcome to our lives for 2011! We have also been spending a serious amount of time in each others' company in a rather small sailboat.

In order to illustrate what this has meant for us, allow me to steal an analogy I once heard: Finding a marriage partner is a little like finding the perfect pair of hiking boots.* Continue reading What Sailing Across The Ocean Teaches You About Marriage

Posted in: Reclaiming Wife | 39 Comments »

Feb 2011

Reclaiming Wife: Marriage and the Journey

Today is a good day, ladies! I am absolutely delighted to welcome Sara Hillratt back, who is writing about what she's learning about marriage as she sails around the world with her husband. This is episode three of The Hillratt's Voyage (you can catch up with past episodes here, and keep up with them at their gloriously re-designed blog, and flash back to their wedding graduate post). Right this second, Sara and Stof have made it from South Africa to their boat in Mexico, where they are learning about how marriage, all of marriage, is about the journey.

For the past six months, I’ve been explaining to people at home (Cape Town, South Africa) where our boat is. “If you follow the coast down from California to Mexico, a long finger splits off from the mainland. The area between the mainland and the finger is known as the Sea of Cortez. Now just inside the tip of the finger (before the fold of the first knuckle) is a beautiful bay where you’ll find a small city called La Paz. And that is where the Laura Takalani is right now.”

I felt like I was explaining a parallel universe.

Since we bought our boat in July, Stof and I have been preparing in one way or another for actually arriving in some other world called La Paz and beginning our journey across the Pacific. Our preparations moved into high gear in December when I finally resigned from the Bar and started “working” full time on wrapping up our lives, getting our admin in order for the voyage, handing over important projects, making sure there are sufficient safety nets in place for when we are on the high seas and trying to stock up on all the things we think we might need on the boat but (think we) won’t be able to get in Mexico. On top of this, we have thrown ourselves into Christmas and New Years and birthdays and weddings and dinners: there is something about the prospect of going away for two years that brings out the best daughter (son), sister (brother), aunt (uncle) and friend we could possibly be. It has been an exhausting and exhilarating frenzy of preparation for one immediate goal: getting to Mexico.

In the process of “getting to Mexico” our “team” worked well at times and at other times we bickered and battled. We’d vacillate between skating along smoothly whacking tasks off our to-do list, high-fiving at our joint success; and hacking along wondering what the bloody-hell the other person had been doing each day. We knew it would get better as soon as the stress had lifted. We just needed to get to the Laura Takalani. Continue reading Reclaiming Wife: Marriage and the Journey

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Nov 2010

Reclaiming Wife: The Hillratt’s Voyage – Money & Independence

Today Sara is back, talking about her concerns about giving up her income and being supported on her husband as she embarks on her journey around the world. When Sara first wrote me about this dilemma, she kept beating herself up about struggling with this, when she was lucky enough to journey around the world in the first place. And I told her to be kinder to herself. Because first of all, who among us doesn't admire someone brave enough to give it all up and take a life changing adventure? I don't envy her that, I applaud it, because it makes me braver just by hearing about it. But more to the point, I suspect that most of us will have to deal with this thorny question at one point or another in our lives as wives. Maybe we loose a job, maybe we have a baby and are on maternity leave, maybe we hate our jobs and decide to quit. But when the moment comes when we are dependent on someone else's income to eat, we run hard and fast into some serious questions. And with that, I'll let Sara (of Stofnsara) take it away:

The other day I explained that my husband (Stof) and I are about to embark on a bloody marvellous voyage across the Pacific with nobody other than each other (well, for most of the time). As should be expected, this has raised a number of ‘issues’. While my current quandary has arisen because I’m a lucky fish who gets to sail half-way across the globe, I think there may be many more women who grapple with the same tension between her income (or lack thereof) and her identity as a ‘strong woman’, but for different reasons.

I currently work as a lawyer – as I have for the past five years. For those familiar with the legal profession in (most) commonwealth countries, I am a barrister. This means that I am largely self-employed and I specialise in court work. It can be enormously intellectually and financially rewarding. BUT I have had enough: there is too much of my capacity that is not being used while I am my lawyer-self. Even if we weren’t embarking on our adventure, I would be making some kind of professional shift. As things stand, I am immeasurably grateful that I can “bow out” of the profession with grace and a jolly good excuse.

Stof is also self-employed, but his business is internet-based and easier to maintain while voyaging. Before we became a serious couple, he bought a house with gorgeous ‘bones’. Together, we renovated her into a beautiful home and filled her with splendid art and furniture. Earlier this year we moved the art and furniture into storage and sold that house. With a portion of the house money, we bought a boat in Mexico…

OK! Here comes the juicy bit: Because we both run our own businesses, when we married we kept our finances separate. Now that we are embarking on a Pacific passage, I must (and willingly do so) give up my work. Stof, however, will continue to earn money. We will both be dependent on that income (as well as the income generated from the balance of money from the sale of [his] house). I am about to become (at least while we’re travelling) a “kept woman”.

PANIC!!! Continue reading Reclaiming Wife: The Hillratt’s Voyage – Money & Independence

Posted in: Reclaiming Wife | 138 Comments »

Nov 2010

Reclaiming Wife: Introduction to the Hillratt’s Voyage

Today I am jumping around the living room, because I'm that excited to introduce you to a new series for Reclaiming Wife. Long time readers will remember Sara & Stof's rather amazing South African wedding (Sara is also a regular commenter, who comments as Saartjie). Well, the wedding was just the tip of the iceberg with those two. Since then they've been cooking up plans to sail half way around the world together and documenting it all on their blog Stofnsara. I've been excited by this project, and thrilled at the way the Hillratts are breaking the mold of what a marriage can be, and expanding my horizons. Because of that, I asked Sara if she'd write a little series about what she's learning along the way. Well, actually, I planned to ask Sara to write the series, and the very same day she emailed me with a question about money and marriage, that we'll tackle on Thursday. But today, Sara is introducing the project. The Hillrats leave at the beginning of February, and she'll report in as she can. That way, all of us get to learn what she's learning, and follow along as she sails around the world. What could be better?

Stof and I married last year in September. Like so many of the people who read this blog, I stumbled upon APW looking for wedding inspiration. Within a couple of weeks, I’d practically stopped even looking at all the “wedding porn” I’d been addicted to for months of wedding planning. I realised that our wedding would look like no other wedding out there (or, thankfully, that no other wedding would look like ours). I stopped being interested in what other weddings looked like, but in how other brides felt and thought.

We had a four-day wedding extravaganza at a venue that had never been used for a wedding our size (the reception hall had not been used as anything really for about 50 years). 180 of our friends and family trekked out to a nature reserve at least three hours away from their homes for a celebration that was full of copious laughter and memory-building. It felt like we had pulled off a party that was both spectacular and unassuming and so close to our personalities.

I re-hash the wedding story, because we felt like, together, we could do anything we set our minds to.

So we began to talk about the life we want to live: the family we want to grow into. Adventure, tolerance and the pursuit of fresh perspective were (are) central to many of those discussions. We want to introduce our children to a certain kind of life-philosophy for which travel will be the tutor of many lessons. But we decided that if we want to travel as three or four or more, we’d best be in the habit of adventuring as two.

At about the same time as we started mulling about these things, we were inspired by friends who had taken their own year-long adventures as couples. One couple lived in a small town in Argentina learning Spanish, another rode around India on a classic motor bike and another took off around Africa in a 4x4. Two more friends are just now coming to the end of a two year sailing circumnavigation. If our friends could do it, we reckoned, so could we.

We dreamt the craziest dreams about the trip we could take. We fantasised about the places furthest away from home (South Africa) and, on a semi-whim, we decided to travel around the Pacific Rim using all manners of different transport. Continue reading Reclaiming Wife: Introduction to the Hillratt’s Voyage

Posted in: Reclaiming Wife | 61 Comments »

Posts Tagged ‘The Hillratt’s Voyage’

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