Television reporters Jon Duncanson and Sylvia Gomez were enjoying the view at Belmont Harbor one fine spring day about three years ago, watching sailboats as they cruised lazily by.
“We were kind of daydreaming,” Duncanson remembered, “saying, `Wouldn’t it be nice to be one of those people (on a boat)?’ I think probably at that point, there was no question that the end goal would be to take off and sail. It wouldn’t be just to sail out on Lake Michigan and sail back in.”
The two, anchors and reporters at WFLD-Ch. 32, are sailing right out of Chicago, and out of the United States. After Duncanson’s last day at Channel 32 on Friday (Gomez’s final day at the station is Wednesday), the couple will start an adventure Saturday with the goal of traveling the world.
“We had been, almost from the day we met, talking about someday taking off and setting aside the business of television,” Gomez said, “and getting on with the business of living.”
The couple, married since October 1995, will have their 42-foot sailboat (which they bought soon after that lovely spring day) shipped to San Francisco while they take a month-long drive exploring the West.
When they reach San Francisco, they’ll hop into their boat, the Aviana, and travel along the coasts of several countries, from California to Panama, through the Panama Canal, out to the Caribbean Sea and across the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea.
Duncanson, 41, said that portion of the trip alone will take between one and two years. “Maybe at that time after the Mediterranean, whether we go down the Red Sea, or on to India, or down the coast of Africa, or sink the boat and say to hell with it, that’s up in the air right now. But that far, we’re very committed.”
Gomez, 33, said the pair will “be making stops in between. . . somewhere off the coast of Belize, we might like that for a while, so we might stay for a couple of weeks.”
The fact that Duncanson and Gomez are even thinking of taking the Aviana away from their high-paying, high profile jobs may sound crazy to some. They’re TV journalists working in one of the largest markets in the country (Duncanson is an early-morning news anchor and cut-in anchor for Channel 32’s “Fox Thing in the Morning”; Gomez is a weekend and fill-in anchor and reporter for the station).
But the two are pursuing a dream, one that dates back to childhood for Duncanson. The Minneapolis native used to lie in bed listening to freight train whistles blowing in the distance, with a longing to be on one of them.
Duncanson started hopping trains and taking trips at the age of 16. He traveled the world years later as a member of the environmental activist group Greenpeace, bumming around Paris as a “starving artist” and roaming Europe in the process and covering wars in Central America and Croatia in his first jobs as a journalist.
Duncanson said the adventuring is “in my blood.” Gomez said it’s in hers as well, “I just never acted on it; I didn’t know how to act on it.”
“It wasn’t until I met Jon that I learned that dreams are something that you don’t have to just tuck away in the back of your head. They’re actually something you can act on.”
Gomez, a native of Gainesville, Fla., who has worked at WMAQ-Ch. 5, WBBM-Ch. 2, and Channel 32 since coming to Chicago in July 1992, added the couple may not complete their trip on the Aviana.
“We joke about this, but we fully believe that when we say we’re going around the world, we’re not just going sailing around the world. We’ve laughed that this might be a trip around the world probably three times in three different ways–by air, by car, by boat.”
The couple, who met while covering a prison escape at Cook County Jail in August 1992, realize they’re floating away from jobs that other journalists would give several body parts for. But they feel theirs is sound reasoning for making the life-altering decision.
“I’m not living to be a TV personality or a TV news person; I’m living to be a person who is exploring what is here on the Earth,” said Duncanson, who has been in Chicago since joining Channel 2 in February 1992.
The two assert they’re leaving the business (but not really, since they expect to file various news reports for different agencies while on their voyage) while still in their prime. So “if we do this and don’t like it,” Duncanson said, “or if we fail in some way, in five years we’ll still be marketable.”
But Duncanson added that “right now, we fully intend. . .”
“. . . to not come back,” Gomez finished.
Gomez and Duncanson have buried worries that their decision may be faulty, although Duncanson as late as a few weeks ago had a short “what-are-we-thinking?” attack. The apprehensions were lessened because for their quality of living, the journey is right.
“Everything that we’ve planned,” Gomez said, “has been because we wanted to get busy living.”
