I Hired a Yacht in Goa After Retirement — Here Is Why I Should Have Done It Decades Earlier

 I retired fourteen months ago at the age of 63, and one of the specific gifts of retirement that I had not fully anticipated was the quality of attention it makes available — the capacity, finally and without apology, to give complete presence to an experience rather than processing it through the filter of what needs to happen next. When my daughter organized a Goa trip for the family and suggested, with the gentle insistence she has deployed throughout her life to very good effect, that we should Hire Yacht in Goa for the day, I agreed with more willingness than I might have managed at any previous point in my working life. I had nowhere else to be. I had no next thing waiting. I had only the present, and the present turned out to be one of the finest days I have experienced in recent memory.

The Family

My daughter, her husband, their two children aged eight and eleven, my wife of thirty-eight years, and me. Three generations and five decades of age range, gathered on a private catamaran on the Arabian Sea for reasons that, in retrospect, require no justification whatsoever.

My wife had concerns about her knees on an unsteady surface. The catamaran's stability resolved this immediately and completely — she moved around the deck throughout the day with greater ease than she manages on many uneven land surfaces. The crew's attentiveness to her specific needs, communicated in advance to the operator, was consistent and considerate throughout without being intrusive or condescending. She was treated as what she is: a capable, interested person who happened to have a specific physical consideration worth attending to.

What Retirement Brought to the Experience

I have been on boats before. I have been on holiday in Goa before. I have watched sunsets and eaten excellent seafood and experienced natural beauty in various forms over six decades of life that have, on balance, been generously supplied with good experiences. None of this prepared me for what retirement brought to the specific experience of being on the open Arabian Sea on a clear November morning with the people I love.

What retirement brought was the complete absence of the background thinking that has accompanied almost every leisure experience of my adult life — the persistent, low-grade computation of professional obligations that ran continuously beneath the surface of every holiday, every weekend, every supposedly free morning for forty years. This computation was so habitual that I had ceased to notice it as a distinct thing separate from my ordinary consciousness. I noticed its absence on the water that morning with genuine surprise. There was nothing to compute. There was only the sea and the sky and the movement of the vessel and the extraordinary quality of the November light on the Arabian Sea.

My Grandchildren and the Dolphins

I want to write specifically about what happened when the dolphins arrived, because it was simultaneously the finest moment of my experience and the finest moment of my grandchildren's, and the combination of the two — being present for one's own extraordinary experience while watching it happen to people one loves — is a specific quality of joy I have not often had access to.

My eight-year-old granddaughter was at the bow when the pod arrived. She has been frightened of dogs her entire life — a specific, manageable fear that her parents handle with patient consistency — and the dolphin arrival triggered, for approximately two seconds, something resembling the same activation. Then a dolphin leaped three meters in front of her and the fear became something entirely different. She grabbed the railing with both hands and laughed with a complete and total abandon that I have not heard from her in the year we have lived closer to them.

My eleven-year-old grandson, who considers demonstrating enthusiasm to be incompatible with his current sense of himself, maintained approximately forty-five seconds of composed observation before abandoning this position entirely and spending the remainder of the dolphin encounter shouting questions at the captain about species, behavior, and the probability of a pod this size indicating a fish school below. The captain answered every question with genuine engagement. By the end of the encounter, my grandson had decided he wants to study marine biology. His parents are cautiously supportive. I think he should do it.

The Snorkelling Decision

I had not planned to snorkel. I am sixty-three years old, I have had my left knee replaced, and I had attended to the charter primarily as a beautiful setting for watching my family enjoy themselves rather than as a personal physical adventure. I changed my mind when I saw my grandchildren in the water at Grande Island and observed, from the deck above, the quality of what they were encountering — the visibility through which I could see the reef system below them, the fish moving around them, the general magnificence of the underwater environment they were inhabiting.

The crew fitted me carefully, checked my comfort with the equipment thoroughly, and helped me into the water with the specific attentiveness of people who understand that not all guests have the same physical starting point. What I found underwater adjusted my understanding of the world in a way I was not expecting at sixty-three. The specific visual experience of hovering above a living reef system — the colors, the movement, the extraordinary complexity of the biological community — is not something I had a prior framework for. I was in the water for thirty-five minutes. My knee was fine. I came up with my mask pushed to my forehead, which my daughter later told me was the expression she uses to distinguish a very good experience from a merely good one.

The Lunch and What My Wife Said

My wife is not a person who makes grand statements about experiences. She is a person of precise observation and considered language, and her assessments of things tend to be more reliable than enthusiastic ones for this reason. She ate the prawn curry in something resembling the silence that very good food sometimes imposes, and then she said: "This is the best prawn curry I have eaten in thirty-eight years of marriage, including every restaurant I have visited with you in Goa, which is several." She then returned to the curry without further comment.

She was not wrong.

The Afternoon and the Sunset

The afternoon passed in the specific, complete relaxation of people who have been given a genuinely perfect morning and who understand, collectively, that the appropriate response to such a morning is to receive the afternoon with equivalent presence rather than filling it with additional activity. We sat on the deck. We watched the coast. My grandson asked the captain seven more questions. My granddaughter, who had been cautious about the sea in the morning, fell asleep on the deck in the warm afternoon sun with the same complete ease that children fall asleep in places where they feel safe.

The sunset on the return journey was the kind of thing I will not describe because description of such things tends toward the kind of language that I find unconvincing even when I know it is accurate. I will say only that my wife took my hand as the sky began its final sequence of color, which she does not always do unprompted, and that this small, particular gesture was the finest moment of the day for me.

Why I Should Have Done This Decades Earlier

I have been asked this question, by my daughter and by myself, since returning from Goa. The honest answer is that I was too busy, for forty years, to give an experience like this the quality of attention it deserves and that now, in retirement, is finally available. The charter would have been beautiful at any point in my life. It was extraordinary at this one — because I had the time and the presence and the specific freedom from preoccupation that allowed me to receive it completely.

I am going again in February. My wife is already researching which of Goa's restaurants will be optimal for the dinner before and after the charter.

For travelers of every age who want to discover what the sea has been holding in reserve for them, visit Luxury Rentals — where the Arabian Sea welcomes every traveler who chooses to come and find it.