The seasons of life
A friend of mine saw a picture of me in the newspaper and asked me a simple question over a pint, do you miss it?
He meant the sailing at such a high level, the offshore and ocean races, the headlines and the trophies.
And the answer surprised him. I actually do not miss it. Not because it was not incredible, because it really was. Those years shaped me, challenged me and gave me memories I will carry for the rest of my life. But they belonged to a season of my life. I lived it fully and I finished it properly. And I think that matters.
The same goes for yacht building. People ask if I miss it. The answer is still no I don't. I look back with pride but not with longing.
What I carry with me are the lessons. The resilience built in storms or even super light airs. The teamwork forged when things went wrong, the discipline of starting something and finishing it and the understanding that a victory is never yours alone.
But somewhere along the way, those same lessons started pointing me somewhere new. The shift itself didn't happen overnight. It started as awareness, years of working with fibreglass and carbon fibre and simply noticing where it all ended up once a yacht's life was over. Awareness became concern, the numbers on composite waste are genuinely hard to look away from once you've seen them. Concern became action, and action became DANU, a material developed to solve the exact problem I'd spent years watching pile up. A yacht build relies on decades of established data, known material specifications, tested engineering codes, a body of knowledge the whole industry can lean on. DANU had none of that. Every number, every tensile test, every degradation rate had to be built from zero, because the material itself was new and nobody had written the book yet. That took some relearning. New networks, new skills, new setbacks, new discoveries and new victories. But the foundation is the same, the mindset, the teamwork, the passion, the willingness to push through when others give up.
Seasons change, passions evolve. What remains is what we learned along the way and the people who helped us grow.
Because if you hold on too tightly to one chapter, you risk missing all the others that could have shaped you even more. When you finish something properly and allow yourself to step into something new, curiosity stays alive, your heart stays young, your mind stays sharp, and your energy keeps moving forward.
Growth does not come from repeating the same victory but comes from daring to begin again.
If there's one thing I hope never changes in me, it's the curiosity. Wanting to understand how something works, why it fails, what's underneath it, that's what has carried me from a cockpit to a workshop to a lab, and I don't think it's finished with me yet.
Do not chase what is gone, but stay curious about what's next.
