We’d been nurturing it for while.  Several years.  I’d bang on about it whenever I was disillusioned with London.  Rachel was gradually won round, or maybe realised the inevitable...

We wanted to go on an adventure together.  All too often I went to far flung places for work, while Rachel was busy in London, or at times Amsterdam/The Hague.  (And the last time, Rachel was also left gutting and rebuilding a kitchen... not such a great deal).

Sailing seemed like the right sort of all-in-one hit of transport meets adventure; plus it was how Rach and I met, so why deny fate its part? Not keen on wearing icicles while sailing, Rach ruled out the Chilean coast or the North West Passage... but then I was lucky enough to visit Vanuatu several times for work and was hooked by the South Pacific’s irresistible lure.

An initial plan was hatched to buy a boat in the States and sail it to Vanuatu via the Caribbean, Panama, Galapagos, Tahiti etc.  Then someone pointed out that this was an awfully long way, adding that we could have a whole lot more time to explore the part of Pacific we really wanted to visit by starting in New Zealand.

We decided we needed a year.  Rachel’s work, after initially being rather surprised and going away to explore a dusty section of their staff handbook, amazingly offered her a year long sabbatical. The edit of my latest series finished in Dec 2009.  So 2010 it is.

Just to check we did really want to do it, Rach and I spent our first week with just the two of us on a boat, chartering a little ‘Sadler 32’ from Falmouth in July.   We made it all the way to the Scilly Isles and back without killing each other: if we can spend a week in some islands a few miles off Cornwall, a year bobbing around the world’s largest ocean should be a piece of cake, right?  It wasn’t intended to be a way of sealing the pact, but later in the summer I asked Rachel to marry me and she said yes.  Suddenly, we were lining up an adventurous engagement, in all the right ways, we hope...

The house - the infamous “No 69” - in central London finally had its (7 year long) refurbishment completed in a flourish of activity; some banker/lawyers unwittingly opted to keep us mangos and pina coladas by renting it; job projects were hastily concluded; family Christmases were Christmased; and, exhausted, we boarded a flight to NZ just as snow began to smother London.