Welcome, weary wanderers of the corporate jungle!
For many people the dream of escaping the rat race remains just that, a dream.
In our case it became a plan.
In our mid-30s we realised the traditional path of working for another 30 years simply wasn’t the life we wanted. So we decided to do something most people considered completely unrealistic: build our own sailing yacht and leave the nine-to-five world behind.
Over five years we built a 13.4-metre steel junk-rig yacht and in 2002 we finally sailed her across the Bay of Biscay to begin a new life in the Mediterranean.
If you’ve ever wondered whether it’s really possible to escape the rat race, we wrote about our own experience in this article:
How We Escaped the Rat Race by Building a Yacht.
For years we followed the path most people do: work hard, build a career, and assume that one day life would slow down enough to enjoy it.
But somewhere in my mid-thirties I realised something uncomfortable. The sensible life everyone seemed to accept meant working another thirty years before we could finally live the way we wanted.
At 36 I made a decision that would change everything.
Instead of waiting for retirement, we would build a different life ourselves.
That decision eventually led to one of the most unusual escape plans imaginable: building our own ocean-going sailing yacht and leaving the nine-to-five world behind.
Our plan sounded simple in theory but enormous in reality.
If we wanted the freedom to live aboard and travel, we needed a boat. Buying one was far beyond our budget, so we decided to build it ourselves.
Construction started in 1996.
For five years evenings, weekends and holidays were spent cutting steel, welding plates and slowly turning a pile of metal into a real sailing yacht.
The result was Ruffles Spray, a 13.4-metre steel junk-rigged yacht designed for long-distance cruising.
The boat was finally launched when I was 40 years old.
A year later, at 41, we slipped the mooring lines and began the journey we had dreamed about for years — sailing south toward the Mediterranean.
At 41 we sailed away from the UK.
Our destination was the Mediterranean.
The journey began with one of the most notorious stretches of water in Europe:
the Bay of Biscay.
The Bay of Biscay is famous for storms and powerful seas.
Our crossing was unforgettable. Two days of flat calm and then mayhem.
Winds reached gale force.
The boat rolled heavily.
And two dogs, Mitzie and Monty, held emergency meetings about how to manage their humans.
That adventure became the opening chapter of the book.
After crossing Biscay we reached Spain and continued east.
What followed became a fifteen-year chapter of our lives.
We sailed through France’s canals, crossed the Mediterranean and spent years exploring Spain, the Balearics, Italy and Greece.
Life aboard a cruising yacht is very different from life ashore.
Days are shaped by wind, weather and anchorages rather than office hours. Some days involve peaceful sailing across blue water; others involve storms, dragging anchors or unexpected adventures.
But the reward is a life that feels completely your own.
Those years of cruising became the heart of the story told in my memoir.
After many years in the Mediterranean we eventually returned to the UK.
Our sailing yacht had carried us thousands of miles and given us a life we never thought possible.
For several years we continued living aboard Ruffles Spray in Britain, eventually selling our sailing yacht and moving briefly into a flat.
We quickly discovered that land-based living did not suit us anymore.
So we did what boat people tend to do.
We bought another boat.
Today we cruise the British canal system on a narrowboat, continuing a slower version of the same lifestyle that began with one simple decision: refusing to spend the rest of life trapped in the rat race.
Our journey from building a yacht to sailing the Mediterranean is told in the memoir Getting Away – A Dog Narrates Our Wild Escape to the Mediterranean.
The story is narrated by our dog Mitzie, who watched the entire adventure from her unique position aboard the boat.
It’s a true story about chasing freedom, making mistakes, and discovering that ordinary people really can change the course of their lives.
If you’d like to read the complete adventure, our journey is told in the memoir:
Getting Away – A Dog Narrates Our Wild Escape to the Mediterranean
Read the true story behind this website.
Getting Away
A Dog Narrates Our Wild Escape to the Mediterranean
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