Leaving date moved up

We have made the bold decision to leave early next year!


Did you hear me? Early next year, that is just around the corner and ...calm down Lola, don’t panic this is not a snap decision…

We have been contemplating this for many months choosing whether to leave as planned and “retire” or go for a shorter time and either return or set up a “new life” in another part of the world. We have decided to go for a shortened time and thus the earlier leaving date. Our trip will last between 3 and 5 years and we will either return to South Africa after that time or resettle in a country we fall in love with.

We are currently doing major research on the purchase of our yacht. We have a couple of catamarans we are interested in both a little larger than our original plan at 39 and 40 foot respectively. We will be looking at them over the next 2 months, one on the trip to the Cape in March and one next weekend when we plan to take a trip to Richards Bay to have a look. We should officially purchase the boat that we prefer at the beginning of April just after we return from the coastal.

It will be full steam ahead from then. We have to stay in Johannesburg until the end of December to allow the kids to complete the school year without an upset, but we will spend a large amount of time, being all holidays and long weekends, on the boat changing, completing and adding the items we are looking for on an extended cruising yacht.


I finally found a suitable home-schooling syllabus, which I believe will fit both our lifestyle and the kid’s university entrance requirements. I am still doing the final checks and balances but with any luck we will be enrolling the kids in August, ready to start the new school year as a home-schooling family.

This morning we headed off to our Mega hardware store to buy some goodies, since our “move aboard” date has been moved up, we need to do the finishing touches on our house so we can rent it out as soon as we move aboard in December this year.

We bought a light fitting for the passage and for each of the kid’s rooms. Funny how the energy saving light bulbs cost almost the same amount as the light fitting itself. How they expect people to get the mindset change and save energy when they hit us so hard in the pocket for the privilege of being a good citizen is beyond me.

We also got some copper piping, bends, t-pieces, flexi-hose, tap ends etc to complete the plumbing pipes for our bathroom. We spent some time picking out the exact tap/mixer for our shower.

We even managed to get a R125.00 discount before we paid. That goes straight to the boat kitty. Not often you get a bargain like that in life anymore, especially since the recession started.


Tomorrow morning I have decided to use up my “Post-it” pad and write down a sale price for all the items in our house. I will stick the “post-it” note on each item with the price written in permanent marker and start listing items on for sale on Gumtree, the South African version of E-bay and see if we can start selling off all our furniture and “non boat-going” items that we have accumulated over the last 14 years that we have been together.

We only have 9 months left to sell it all, seems like a lot but if we start by selling the items we do not use very often and slowly progress to the items most used the job will go smoothly and easily.

We have been discussing all the items and some things will take longer to sell than others, we will put our yacht at the Vaal up for sail as soon as we get back from Langebaan as we will have made an offer on the yacht at that stage. All items not used in the last 6 months will go up for sale over the next 3 months. The used items will be put up in an order so that we will be able to manage until we leave. For example we will sell our lounge suite before our dining room suite. Our dining room suite is more useful than our lounge suite, we can use it for working (once my desk has gone) homework (once the kid’s desks are gone), eating (as we always do) watching T.V. (once the lounge suite is gone), reading (once the T.V is gone) as so on and so forth. The last thing we will sell up here in Johannesburg will be our fridge and the absolute last thing we will sell, down in Richard’s bay will be our car.

I can’t believe that I started writing about all of this 1 year ago. I was going through the history and realised my first post was on the 18th February 2009. Things have really moved, changed and turned quite a bit since then. I have a whole selection of blogs and web pages now, all relating to different topics.


I have been working hard on my different websites and blogs and am starting to see more traffic to my sites. This is very exciting as I always fancied writing as a career path and this is really helping me achieve that.

I also believe that the closer we get to leaving the more interest will be generated and once on our way, the travel and tourist aspect with all the different destinations will draw the attention of many. We also have a great video blog idea that will start to develop early next year, so watch this space!