'When I was sailing across the Pacific' : A guide to developing personal adventures : This project was completed in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Diploma in Recreation and Sport

Abstract

Occasionally one meets someone who, often unwittingly, depresses all and sundry with such casual tales of epic travels and expeditions. Such phrases as the above seem to spark many thoughts and feelings among listeners, not the least of which is something like "Gosh, I'd love to do something like that, but how do you start?" How indeed? It seems to have been all so easy for the teller.

In the following pages I plan to discuss some travels and expeditions I have been involved in myself, and hopefully to answer some of these questions. These trips include sailing my own yacht across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, cycling to Arctic Norway, leading a Youth Delegation to Japan, etc.

I am now 28 years old, and feel that my experiences have not just been the result of 'luck' (although luck has played a part), but are more the result of relatively uninhibited thinking, coupled with a positive approach, and perhaps a slight excess of self confidence. In the following paper I will try to review the background to some of these 'adventures', where the initial concept came from, how I gained the necessary experience, what planning I did, and then look at how the actual trip went. I will outline some of the lessons that I learnt, and try to show how this experience led on to further ideas.

Hopefully the reader will gain some insight into how such trips can be planned and run, and perhaps be inspired to do something adventurous himself.

As a supplement to the paper I have included as appendices a selection of published accounts of trips I have been involved in. The reader may gain more from each section if he reads the appropriate appendix before concluding the section.

In retrospect now I can see that my experience has developed in three stages whose pattern shows a logical sequence, which really anyone could follow.