Ask a hundred people who have been talking about going cruising why they have not gone, and you will get a hundred answers. Sort them and there are four.
- Money. There is not enough, or not enough of the right kind, or it depends on something continuing that might not.
- Boat. You do not have one, or you have the wrong one, or the one you have is not finished.
- People. Someone in your life has not agreed, or cannot come, or needs you where you are.
- Permission. Nobody is stopping you and you have not gone.
Everything else is a symptom of one of those. Visas, insurance, the dog, the business, your knee — each attaches to one of the four. The problem is that people are unreliable narrators of their own blocker, and the misdiagnosis runs downhill, from the difficult blockers to the easy one, while feeling exactly like diligence.
Money is three pots, not one number
Most people ask "how much do I need?" and treat it as one figure. It is three pots that behave differently: the capital that buys the boat, the reserve for the year the boat needs something expensive, and the runway that pays for the life. Conflate them, compare the total against your savings, and you conclude you need another six years.
Two corrections move the picture further than six more years of saving would. The trip is scalable, and most people have only costed the maximum version — a six-month season is a different project from a three-year voyage, with different insurance and a fraction of the reserve. And if the plan needs somebody's income to keep arriving, the real blocker may be the fragility of that arrangement rather than the money. If the number is still out of reach after both, money is genuinely yours.
The boat is the most enjoyable blocker
The boat is the blocker people prefer, for good reasons. It is concrete, researchable, and full of right answers people argue about in forums. Best of all, you can work on it for years without changing anything about your life.
That last property is the problem. The boat is the socially acceptable place to store the other three blockers. Say "we're still looking for the right boat" and nobody at a barbecue asks a follow-up question. Say "my partner hasn't agreed" and they do. So the boat carries the whole load while the real obstacle sits untouched in another room.
There are signs that a boat blocker is really a boat blocker. You have a budget, a shortlist of two or three types rather than eleven, and a specification that has been stable for a year. You have made offers, or at least travelled to view. If instead your requirements keep drifting upward — bigger, newer, a system you had not heard of three years ago — you are not converging on a boat. You are keeping the game going.
People is not a logistics problem
This is where the real casualties are. The common version is a partner: one of you has wanted this for years, and the other agreed the way people agree to things that are not scheduled. That is not a lie — it is what agreement looks like with no date attached, and it will not survive a date being attached. The distinction that matters is between someone who wants the same life and someone who wants you to be happy. The second will come, will be unhappy, and it will surface somewhere miserable and hard to leave. A more comfortable boat does not fix that. A shorter first season, more flights home, a genuine veto and a defined exit do.
The quieter versions are more legitimate: ageing parents on a timeline you do not control, a child at a stage of school where moving them is a real cost, a business partner who cannot be left. We will not talk you past those. But a genuine people blocker has a shape and a horizon, and the response is to plan around the horizon rather than call it forever. And if you would be going alone but for the wait for crew, that assumption is your blocker.
Permission is the one nobody names
Permission never announces itself as permission. It arrives disguised as practicality: from a career that has spent twenty years teaching you continuity is competence; from money — not the absence of it, but the sense that spending capital on a life rather than an asset is squandering it; and most powerfully from inside, from the voice that says serious adults do not do this.
You can hear it in the justification. If you catch yourself explaining that the trip will teach you something, or that it is not really a holiday, or that you will keep working from the boat when you do not need to, you are not informing anyone. You are applying to a committee that does not meet.
A quick way to check: imagine it goes wrong, and notice which failure you dread. If it is the ocean — a rig failure, a bad night, a medical emergency a long way from help — your fear is about risk, and risk can be prepared against. If the version that makes you flinch is coming home early and the word people would use about you afterwards, your blocker is permission. You are not afraid of the sea. You are afraid of the verdict. And permission cannot be earned.
Test one: where your hours actually go
Two tests separate the blocker you are working on from the blocker you have. The first is arithmetic. For each of the four, write down how many hours you spent on it last month, and what concrete thing moved on it in the last twelve. Then read the pair together.
| Hours last month | Progress in twelve months | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Many | Something real moved | Genuine work. Carry on. |
| Many | Nothing moved | A hobby, not a blocker. Usually the boat. |
| Few | Something real moved | Already solved. Stop worrying about it. |
| None | Nothing moved | Almost certainly your actual blocker. |
The last row is the one that matters. Many hours and no progress is a hobby. No hours and no progress is nearly always the real one: you have been avoiding it, and the avoidance is the tell.
Test two: a free boat appears tomorrow
The second test is a thought experiment, and it is the one that does the work. Tomorrow morning a boat appears. Right size, right type, sound, certified for offshore, insured, paid for, nothing owing and nothing to do to it.
When do you leave?
Answer honestly, in writing, then pay attention to the form of your answer rather than its content.
- A date — "the May window", "eight months, once I've done a shakedown". Boat and money were genuinely your blockers, and what is left is a scheduling exercise.
- A list of conversations — "I'd have to talk to my wife", "I'd need to know about Dad", "I'd have to sort out the business". Your blocker is people, and no boat has ever solved it.
- A pause, then "I'd need to think about it", or "I'd want more experience first", or a reason the free, certified, paid-for boat is not quite right. Your blocker is permission, and always has been. The boat has been doing you a kindness by standing in front of it.
Where the two disagree, believe the second. The first tells you where your attention has gone. The second tells you what is in the way.
What to do with the answer
Whatever came out on top, the instruction is the same and it is unwelcome: spend the next ninety days working only on that one. If it is money, cost the smallest honest version of the trip and find out whether it is already affordable. If it is the boat, freeze your specification in writing today. If it is people, have the conversation, with a date in it, and do not manage the answer. If it is permission, there is nothing to research — the work is to act while unqualified.
Give it ninety days not out of discipline, but because three of these four get worse while you ignore them and only the boat waits patiently forever. That is exactly why it is the one you have been working on.
We refitted a 2007 Fusion 40 in 2022 and have run four consecutive New Zealand–Fiji offshore seasons since, under New Zealand Category 1. None of that qualifies us to name your blocker. It does mean we have watched a fair number of people go and more not go, and the difference has almost never been the thing they named.
Keep reading: if the substitution test put you in the boat-and-money camp, the practical work starts with buying a catamaran in New Zealand, planning a season around cyclone risk, the rest of the blog and buyer's guides, and the Catamaran Buyer's Pack. If you would rather skip four years of shortlists, Mā Tori is for sale now.