A Blog about Sailing Blogs

25 January 2013

 When Karen and I made our life changing decision to walk away from the 9 to 5 world and run away to sea we also resolved to set up a blog to make it easier for our family and the friends that we were leaving behind to keep up with where we were and what we were getting up to.

The first chapters of our Dreamtime Sail blog were all about the frustrations we were experiencing as we tried to sell up and turn our cruising dream into reality. The story then progressed to our forced decision to delay buying our own boat but how we intended to keep the dream alive by sailing away as crew on someone else’s.

We longed to sail away into the sunset

At that stage the actual process of writing the blog was probably more effective in steeling our resolve to continue pursuing our dreams than in actually communicating our story with all that many people. To be honest the readership statistics that the blogspot site provide showed there were all of twenty or thirty people reading what we spent hours committing to the electronic screen.

Then it all became real as we finally said our goodbyes, jumped on a plane, flew to Cairns in northern Australia to join a 57 foot yacht as crew and sailed off around the top end of the great south land headed into south east Asia with over a hundred other boats on the annual Sail Indonesia Rally. Whether it was the fact that we were no longer writing about what we were ‘gunner do’ but rather about the places we were seeing and  what we were out there experiencing on the boat but the blog was suddenly of interest to more than just our amazingly supportive, loving family and very close friends. Heck, our readership more than doubled to reach a still extremely modest fifty to sixty.

We actually discussed if the blog was worth all the time and effort or if it would just be simpler to just send an email out to people at home about what we were up to. However, even at this very early stage of our life afloat, we could see that the blog was coming together as a good record of our wanderings. In years to come we would be able to refer back to it regarding the places we’d been, the people we met, the fun times and the not so good days we’d lived.

And so the Dreamtime Sail blog avoided the executioner’s delete button. As we travelled further through Indonesia making many, many new friends along the way, thousands of words accompanied by hundreds of photographs recorded our journey. More importantly it recounted how our dream of casting off the lines and embarking on a life of cruising the world’s oceans had indeed become reality. We didn’t really care who or how many actually read our scribbling. This was our blog, our story,  written for us. A funny thing happened though. As weeks became months and the word count continued to grow, slowly so did the readership. At the time we put it down to the fact we’d met so many new people that some must be following along.

We have sailed to some amazing places over the last 18 months

Fast forward 18 months and we’ve now sailed over 7,000 nautical miles as crew on four different boats, and covered more than 1,000 miles cruising the western Mediterranean with our crewmate Marc on Alcheringa. Now our blog readership has grown from the twenty or so a month when we started to almost two and a half thousand and is still growing fast. What we’ve come to realise is that, as we sat at home in Ipswich, Australia dreaming of sailing away, living vicariously through the pages of cruising magazines and sailing blogs we eagerly sought out, we were not alone. There are tens if not hundreds of thousands of people all over the globe just like we were.

Although even now we still find ourselves avid followers of the twenty or more sailing blogs we have listed in our favourite websites, we still struggle to fully  comprehend the phenomenon. These days when we look at the statistics blogspot provide, we scratch our heads as to how the 40 Germans, 31 Canadians, 30 Russians, 25 Brits, 19 Frenchman, and the list goes on, who read our blog this week discovered us in the first place. For two Australians that simply yearned for a better lifestyle, it’s also a little surprising that over forty percent of our blog readers come from the USA, a country we have visited a number of times but where only a very, very small handful of our friends live.

All we can say is, welcome and thank you to our new American friends and to those from literally all over the world that are now following our adventures. We certainly hope that if you too dream of a new life it can happen for you. Until then, please continue to sail along with us on Alcheringa. We look forward to meeting some of you in the real world as we make our way around its seas.

If you're already a fellow wanderer of the oceans, we hope our tracks cross and we get the opportunity to enjoy a 'Sundowner' or two with you.

Come along with us on Alcheringa

UPDATE: 2nd May 2015

A lot of water has passed under the keel since we wrote this blog chapter and the reach of our little tale has continued to grow. Today we passed the 80,000 page views mark which is incredible considering it took almost a year to reach our first milestone of just 1,000. We now average four to five thousand blog reads a month with the audience literally coming from all over the world. These are very modest figures compared to some of the leading sailing blogs around but we are very appreciative of each and everyone of the readers who have joined us on our journey. Cheers, Rob and Karen.

This week the top ten countries in order reading our blog were the United States, Australia, United Kingdom, Russia, Canada, Ireland, France, China, Netherlands and Germany. The U.S. regularly provides around 50% of our total readership.

We love to receive comments on our blog from readers. If you do leave a comment and you also have a blog, please leave a link as well. We'd like to click over for a visit and leave you a comment too.

To stay right up to date with what we’re up to  and see lots more photos check out and 'like' our Dreamtime Sail Facebook page at Dreamtime Sail

 

If you have only recently discovered our blog and would like to read how it all started, or work through our previous adventures, click the link to go back to our first blog entry. Stuff it. Let's just go sailing anyway. 

We hope you enjoy reading the previous posts to catch up on our story.