There is a little bit of superstition or signs as I call them that brought about the purchase of the next boat.

The first car I bought had a registration number of 2022. Little did I know at that time the significance of the number. I shall digress a little from writing about Destiny to mention this. I used to always buy the registration number 2022 for my vehicles but changed them when my brother took ownership of my last car with that number before I went abroad in 2006. After that, all my cars numbered 7108 denoting my year and month of birth.

Beginning in 2014, for a strange reason, I started to see the numbers 2022, and 2202 always appearing to me. I was told that if we saw something repeatedly, it was what is called an Angel Number. Of course, being a cynic, I did not pay much attention to this. This number would appear anytime before a major decision or anything of significance. I can’t explain this but I chose to ignore this. Beginning in 2014, this was appearing a lot more than normal, and a voice in me started to think something was going to happen to me in 2022. Initially, I was thinking that I was going to die, that year, similar to the age of my dad when he passed away. I kept this thought to myself and I chose to ignore it. If I told Annie, she would not be too pleased about it and most people would call me mad.

Few decisions were made by 2016 in various aspects of my life which seemed to indicate that the number had a ‘hidden meaning to me’.

Back to the Hunter purchase story, it was after the regatta that I began negotiating with the owner about the purchase of the boat. One of the steps before buying a used boat is a hull survey. Being a certified marine engineer, this Is well within my knowledge sphere and was surprised to see the surveyors mainly being ship captains. Now coming from the industry, that sounded ridiculous as their field of study did not include material sciences, engineering, etc, so am really dumbfounded as to how these persons could tell me about structures, material tech, etc. So I decided against this and pushed for a sea trial.

Here I called two good sailors, a very seasoned Frenchman, Patrick, and my sailor guru friend, Dr. Param, whom I consider to be the most well-read and experienced sailor in my circle of the woods.

As we sailed out of the marina and when the main sails were raised, lo and behold, the sail number was MAS 2202, at which point I just turned to Patrick and said, ‘ I am buying the boat’ and he had a perplexed look on his face. I did explain this to him later on in my reasoning.

This was the reason also Second Serenade would come to be called Destiny. Although she had problems, it had taken me a few years and lots of heartaches later to start solving these problems. The journey to prepare Destiny had begun.

On another note – people also would also ask me why all my boats had the number 12 on them, Freedom was registered as Freedom 12, and Destiny was registered as Destiny 12.

So as a quiz, can you guess my birthday?