Cause for Celebration

I have good news. Nay, GREAT news. After 2.5 weeks of waiting in Israel (mind you–we made the most of our time here, just look through some of my Israel blog posts), we have finally received our paperwork. Well, the soft copy via email. This gave us the go-ahead to start planning for our imminent departure from Israel and the start to our sailing trip. WOO-FREAKING-HOO!!

I’m not sure I ever fully explained what the delay was, simply stating ‘paperwork’ as the cause. Here’s my understanding of it: when my friend’s company purchased the boat (through brokers–kind of like real estate agents if you were buying a house), once the deal was agreed to and signed and paid for, the selling party was to start working on transferring the ownership over. With a boat, that means deleting it in the country that it’s registered in and sending over proof of the deletion to the new owner so they can get it registered wherever they want to. This often involves a documentation specialist as well given that it’s a lot of paperwork. When the guys arrived in Israel, the paperwork was supposed to have been complete so we could leave the day after I arrive. Turns out, it wasn’t. No one knew where the paperwork was, let alone if it had even been started, even though this was almost two months after the purchase of the boat. Nearly a week after I arrived, we finally had some answers and some documents in our hands, which mean we could start getting the paperwork processed that would let us leave. (If we left without the paperwork, our Captain, Chad, would be arrested at the port that we sailed into.) The paperwork was sent to St. Vincent so the boat could be deleted then to the US Coast Guard where it would get registered–and that’s the soft copy we received yesterday, with the hard copy en route.

This was cause for celebration, and celebrate we did! After sitting around just waiting, it’s incredible what having some information can do! Our spirits were lifted, there was a twinkle in our eye and a bounce in our step. It also means that we have a day to prep before we take off. That means doing laundry, going to the grocery store to stock up on more water and food, and doing anything we might need to do before we disconnect for the next week. (For me that means paying bills, or asking friends to pay bills for me, loading up the hard drive with some movies, making sure my Kindle has enough books, contacting my family and setting up our Spot Me device to check in/let people know we’re okay along our journey.)

It feels surreal. This is really about to happen! As optimistic as I am, I’ll admit, I was starting to lose faith and the realist in me was speaking louder than the optimist. But, everything happens for a reason and things happen when they’re supposed to, even if we don’t understand it. I found it really ironic that yesterday was my first day of officially being unemployed, or funemployed as I like to call it, and it’s the same day that we get the go ahead to prepare for departure. Coincidence? I think not. If things had gone smoothly from the get go, then I wouldn’t have had the chance to really think about if this was what I wanted to do–maybe I would have gone home if I realized that I didn’t want to do this. If I had left straight away, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to lean on my support system or experience the encouragement and supportive words that so many of you had extended to let me know that you were thinking of me, that you were sending me good vibes, and that you were looking at me as a source of inspiration. I can’t put into words how much that means to me–thank you only begins to convey my gratitude. If we hadn’t been delayed, we wouldn’t have met all of the incredible people that we did meet over the past 2.5 weeks. What an incredible group of beautiful souls–you guys are all awesome and though our time here and now has been limited, I hope we get to reconnect in the future and continue to build upon the memories we’ve already created. Thank goodness for being able to stay connected via social media. It will have to do until we can get together in real life again.

So that’s that. Tomorrow we’ll sail out of the marina that’s been home for the past few weeks. Tomorrow we find out if I get seasick or not. Tomorrow we disconnect from the rest of the world. Tomorrow my journey continues. Here’s to enjoying the beauty of the present and looking forward to the adventure of tomorrow.