Sailing the Azores - Day #0

One year ago, I was sitting with Kaki in Santa Rita beach, and discussing one of my favourite weltschmertzs: how we, sons and daughters of the best educated, most prosperous, war-free generations, have come to live so uninteresting, vulgar and monotonous lives.

Sure, the stories of our parents, grandparents and ancestors always have a golden halo around them, told in the distance, with foggy eyes (there is a word for this in Portuguese, its called saudade).

So in that week of sun-bathing, octopus-rice-and-fillets eating and boca-doce drinking, I told Kaki: "We need to do something different for our leisure time - we should go sailing the Azores!"

A bold Portuguese man as Kaki is (one could call him reckless), he joined my adventure right there. We were only missing a crew and a skipper... and a boat!

Fast forward one year, as we talked excitedly in our dull daily lives with our friends, and one by one, the crew came around! Boys-only-club, that was a requirement - my good friend Pedro Geirinhas (who will from now on be known as Geirinhas, or G) was in right from the start (clearly not knowing what a week trapped in a boat with Kaki would be), and then João Mareco (the Captain, Skipper, Admiral and Commodore of our trip) who really made the whole thing happen, as he was the only guy who really knew how to sail.

Then came Ryan Schemmel, the Yankee, who I hosted in Lisbon due to a request coming from London, and (Pedro) Bizarro, who casually said "yes" either when we were drinking beers in London or having dinner in Luxembourg.

As I write these words down, driven by the need to have something more set into bits and bytes (stone is so old school) than just endless photos to populate Facebook, I pledge myself to capturing the essence (as it is perceived by this observer's scope) of this nautical trip - it's participants, it's encounters, it's ephemerides.

I know not what we will encounter, but I somehow feel that when we come back to our mundane lives, nine days from now, we will carry with us much more that what we have today.