The Plan (Part 3)

It was during dinner the first evening on Sark that The Skipper told us of his intention to return to the Arctic circle the next summer. He had talked a company into making it a commercial venture and his tales of whales and seals and Innuit had me hooked. The venture would last for seven weeks. The trip would take place over the limited Arctic summer in late July and August, to enable us to penetrate Scoresbysund in Greenland up to the Innuit village of Ittoqortoormit.

Being a teacher, I get late July and August off. My dad had recently given me some money - not a fortune, but enough to more than cover the trip. Mrs SteerRollDash wouldn't contemplate going herself but saw how eager I was to go. At the Southampton Boat Show I negotiated a 20% discount for booking all seven weeks of the trip with the the company and from that moment my life revolved around what would be happening the following summer.

After paying the initial deposit, I still had enough money to go on 'mile-building' weekends with the company organising the trip. I spent several weekends trolling around the Solent and across the channel, diving down to Porsmouth straight after work on a Friday and returning to London late on a Sunday. I really loved the life on board and began planning my next weekend almost as soon as I left the previous one.

However, by March the following year I still hadn't had any more details about the trip. A phone call to the company reassured me that, yes, it was still going ahead, there were just some details to finalise. By Whitsun I still hadn't heard anymore and was now decidedly nervous. We had gone away for a week down to Lyme Regis with my dad and I was standing in the graveyard of the church on Gun Cliff when I got a phone call from the company. Two of the people who had provisionally booked had pulled out citing inability to get the time off. It was no longer viable so they had reluctantly made the decision to call it off. Sorry. I have never been so disappointed about anything in my life. This was going to be my future. My great adventure, my gap year squeezed into seven weeks, my Yachtmaster miles that would open the door to other things for me. And there it was, in the words of the old comedian, gone. The last nine months of dreaming and scheming and planning were buried in the graveyard at Lyme Regis.

I didn't lose interest in sailing the bigger boats but the disappointment was such that for a while that I couldn't face getting on one. I knew that I would be saying to myself 'what if' all the time I was aboard. I carried on dinghy sailing at the club and then events conspired to fundamentally change The Plan.