Today I have been thrown into the wonderful world of yachting and feel the need to share my new found adventure with the world.

A few months ago I was a half respected individual with a lovely partner, a good job and a stable home in Wiltshire. This all changed after an announcement by the company I worked for which meant that there was a risk of our jobs being downgraded and a call for voluntary redundancies.

Having been a bit of a… fickle person in the past, I always moved around and this was the closest I came to settling down in my life. This development threw me completely and as a result I made the decision to do what I’m good at and run away – apparently this is my way of taking control of things.

I chose to move closer to my rather eccentric Russian parents and young siblings who live in Devon – people I have seemingly avoided for the majority of my adolescent and adult life. Shortly following this, the cracks in my relationship with my partner became more and more apparent, I had a mishap which resulted in me losing my driving license and transport and subsequently – my relationship.

I fled again to a different part of Devon, getting myself a job in the industry that always welcomed me whenever I have nothing else to turn to – hospitality. This gave me the opportunity to keep afloat financially and a welcome distraction whilst I watched my family plunge into complete crisis – sparked by mine and my fathers volatile relationship, his drinking and a lot of suppressed emotion we came to have a horrendous row with my loving mother taking my side. As a result of this, they came to the decision to separate  – thankfully this was only a temporary glitch and after a few months they reconciled and returned to their very familiar, rather strained but relatively stable co-existence. In the meantime, I coped with the stresses of my complete downward spiral by doing the only thing that made sense as the time – bottle it up and turn to drink. The wake up call came when I realised that I have not had a sober day in over a month and I could no longer sleep.

This gave me a good chance to sit back and reflect as well as a bit of motivation to try and set myself some goals to get my life back on track. I gave up my bar job and drink and took up eating to an excess. I also did something I never thought possible, I spoke to my father and after a long and surprisingly civilized discussion we came to a truce and decided to try and patch up our relationship for the sake of the only people we have in this country – each other and our family.

Apologies for rambling on with that not-so-jolly story, but there’s the background.

Moving on to what this blog is going to be based about – the boat

During the drama that was unfolding between my lovely parents and with a bit of booze thrown in, my dad decided to deal with the crisis in his own way. He bought a boat… Not just a little dinghy, but a 43′ yacht costing 50k.

I’m still in shock, seeing as I never knew him to be much of a yachtsman. The only time I’ve seen him sail was when I was much younger at the Royal Docklands, something I rather not recall too often. He took me out on a two-man sailing boat and after spending half an hour getting the boat out into the open water he proceeded to torture me by not telling when he was turning the boat resulting in me getting a surprise whack in the head with the boom. He found this hilarious and looking back on it… I can see why. I quickly learnt, became observant, nifty and did a good job of avoiding these indirect attacks.

However I did start to relax towards the end and made the mistake of standing up without thinking – I got fished out by a group of children in kayaks 5 minutes later as my dad’s man overboard drill skills were clearly not up to scratch.

As he speaks only the most basic English, so I have now been roped into becoming an active part of this new craze of his. The boat is still with the owner in Wales, it has not been surveyed, I have not sailed since narrowly avoiding brain damage and drowning the first time… This will be a challenge.