It started six years ago...

I was lucky.  Four months after I finished Graduate School I had a good job making some money in sales.  Despite a little early success I could not shake a strong sense of foreboding.  Something wasn't right.

I couldn't put my finger on it, but something had to change.  That's when I began searching myself and the web for an answer.  Eventually I heard the name Slocum and started digging in.  Joshua Slocum was the first to ever sail a small craft around the world single handed.  He documented the voyage in the book, Sailing Alone Around the World in 1900.  Ninety six years later it would profoundly change my life.

Not long after reading Sailing Alone I came across a little website called Project Bluesphere.  It told the story of a modern day Slocum, Alex Dorsey.  Alex was showing in detail through video and blogs how to break free from the safety and security of the status quo and forge a life of rewarding experience and adventure on the sea.  It was then that I knew what I had to do.

For over five years as I learned to sail and struggled through the corporate world I pulled inspiration from Alex and his updates.  I was hooked and it was a rare day I didn't log in looking for a new post.  The navigation and layout of his site was as familiar to me as my own home.  It was that familiarity with BlueSphere that prompted the shock I received this afternoon.

David Wilson is the man behind the technical scenes of Project Bluesphere.  Through a brief conversation with Alex I later met and recently began working with David.  Amazingly he lives just down the road from me.  David has taken the template of my new website and is turning it into the tool I will use to document my own circumnavigation.

David sent me an update today that incorporated all the advanced blogging features a cruising sailor needs.  What astonished me was seeing the all too familiar navigation of BlueSphere, from which I've drawn so much inspiration, incorporated on a site of my own.

I was shocked at my own reaction to seeing the site.  In many ways it is the technical realization of a plan five years in the making.  David and Alex, Thank You.

(The new site should go live in the next few weeks.)