The honest answer is that I did not plan it. A Swedish man — generous, experienced, the kind of sailor who has crossed oceans before and will cross them again — needed help getting his boat home to Sweden. He hired me as crew. I said yes before he finished the sentence.
That is how it started. Not a grand philosophical choice between two modes of transport. Just an opportunity, and the presence of mind to take it.
What you sign up for
Antigua to Horta. Horta to France. Up the English Channel. Through Germany's Kiel Canal. Into the Baltic. Stockholm. Fifty-five days. Twenty-two of them at sea crossing the Atlantic, where there is nothing to look at except the water and nothing to listen to except the boat.
I had never spent that long at sea. I had grown up around the water in Antigua — that gives you a relationship with the ocean, but it does not prepare you for the mid-Atlantic at night, when the horizon disappears and the only thing between you and the deep is a hull and someone else's seamanship.
"Slowness is not inefficiency. It is a different relationship with time — one that permits the kind of thinking that speed forecloses."
The flight home
When we reached Sweden I flew back to Antigua. Six hours. The contrast was almost funny — 55 days to get there, six hours to undo the distance. But the distance was not the point. What happened in those 55 days was not reversible by a flight.
I came back with something I could not have bought a ticket for. I would do it again. I might do it again. If the right Swedish man asks.