With all the talk and focus on the Wannabes, how about talking a little about what happens to all the Hasbeens?
I bring this topic up because cruisers plan and plan and plan for the ultimate dream cast off but then like all
Cruise Dreams eventually do one day it ends. It was much easier mentally for us to cast off cruising than it was to come back, even if we are still
living aboard. All the armchair
advice is about casting off with very little said about going back! There is a general feeling and view we saw that no matter how long you stayed out or how far you went you somehow "failed at the dream" when the
cruise was over and very few people want to open up about the process of ending a cruise with a plan. We were so "afraid" to come back that we actually extended our cruise for a year to buy some more time to figure out the Re-entey Plan. With less than a week before our
Baja Bash back from
Mexico to
California we pushed the Panic button and stayed out another year. Casting off on the Cruise for us it turns out was the Easy part....ending the Cruise was much harder and there was no real Ra-ra you can make it type of support.
There are no cruise end cast off parties.
There are no cruise end celebrations.
You just drop out of the cruising community that you loved one day and your
VHF doesnt call out all the time for an impromptu dinner and drink get together.
To speak honestly for myself one of the reasons I like my "job" and keep active in lots of cruising
forums and groups is to stay connected to the cruising community. Its hard to explain what the community is and why its so great to someone who hasn't yet experiences it, but those that have I'm sure understand the withdrawal symptoms when you leave it.
I've kept in contact with many of the cruisers we cruised with, some are still out there going and some (the majority) have
sold their
boat and went onto something new. Sure they may one day again get a
new boat and
head back out, but the norm isn't a 10yr
retirement cruise, I'm guessing it is a 2-3yr cruise window with much more life to live post cruise.
So come on you Hasbeens...what are you doing now? What happened to all of you?