I’ll start off by apologizing in advance for not communicating this to some of you before or keeping you in the dark after we started this process. The past 11 months have been HECTIC!
In 2006 we had a crazy idea of selling our home and going sailing in the Caribbean for a year. Thankfully, that lofty goal didn’t work out. We would have sold everything we owned, except our boat, and only been able to manage a year of cruising. I’m sure it would have been a wonderful year but we didn’t have the right boat and a year of fun isn’t much to give up all our appreciating assets.
The dream of sailing away has been with us ever since and in 2013 we decided it was time to find a boat that would safely and comfortably take us to the places we longed to go. That process is another story which is somewhere on this page, I’ll try to link to it another time. We also spent that time working on acquiring more appreciating assets (rental homes) so we could manage to go for much longer than a year, hopefully for 5. Our thoughts were that the best timing for such an adventure would be when our oldest was 10 and our youngest 8. We set a goal of casting off our dock lines in 2021 and after reading about many sailing families with younger children we moved it up a year to 2020.
Fast forward to November 2017… our kids are now 7 & 5 and the time is slipping away too quickly. Combine that with a work schedule that is hard on family life (if you’ve tried to ever get together with us on a weekend you understand) and things came to a head. We decided to put the house on the market spring of 2018 and just go for it. The new plan was to leave in September 2018. Commence the whirlwind. Selling a 3,000 sq ft, on acreage (with barns and outbuildings), and after living there for 14 years is no easy feat. We hadn’t done a very good job at keeping possessions to a minimum and there was a ridiculous amount of stuff. After a crazy summer we succeeded at selling our home, 3 vehicles, a ski boat and a ton of belongings (and donated more than we liked) and were ready to start our adventure. Which meant it was time to move onto the boat and start the next chapter! EXCEPT a project we were having done to the boat wasn’t complete and we had nowhere to go. While in limbo of the boat getting put back together (which doesn’t mean that the project was complete) we decided to change plans once again. The new plan was to wait out the boat project (which by the way as of November 1 still isn’t complete), Dan would continue to work and retire at the end of the year, and the kids would enroll at the school we love, which allows us to home school part-time, and leave in June 2019. This allows us to accomplish a few more tasks on the boat, at a not neck breaking pace, and hopefully see more of friends and family.
So, here is our plan as we sit today. We leave June 2019 to circumnavigate Vancouver Island, going clockwise, and spending a good portion of August in Desolation Sound. We’ve only ever gotten to spend 2 weeks in Desolation Sound and it’s never enough. We will leave Washington in September 2019 and make our way down the west coast at whatever pace feels right. We’ll head into Mexico in early November and stay there for the cruising season, which lasts until May / June when hurricane season starts. What happens then? It’s all TBD. We’ve never, ever, ever been able to just sail and explore without the ties of getting back to work, our house, etc. That’s all over for us and we’re now in a position that we’d like to be out cruising for 8-10 years and potentially longer. We want to spend as much time in any place that we fancy and change our plans as we like. We will visit (in this order probably) Central America, South America, the Caribbean, the Bahamas, possibly Bermuda, the east coast of the US, northern Europe and UK, Mediterranean, back over to the Caribbean (maybe more South America) and thru the Panama canal and cross the Pacific. This is all over 8-10 years. We plan to get to New Zealand or possibly as far as Australia. After that we’re just not sure. At this point we don’t have aspirations to see SE Asia, transit the Indian Ocean or go around the cape in South Africa. But that may change…
Apologies again for taking a year off in updating our page and keeping some of you out of the loop. We will be updating more and more now that things have finally settled. If you have any questions or would like to come see our “home” aka Samadhi V in Seattle let me know.
