Sailing - Our First Year: Changing from landlubbers to sealubbers

We Head South in About Three Weeks

The house sold in January and since then we’ve been living in a 1-bedroom basement apartment while we get our “stuff” in order. Mostly that means ditching almost everything.

We’ve had two big garage sales and are trying to get the rest of the things sold on Craigslist. The minivan and utility trailer go up for [...]

Dinner Between 2 Sailors

Last night at a technical conference dinner I sat at a table next to someone — and then a few minutes later someone sat down on the other side of me.

Shortly I found that the guy on my right had taught sailing for umpteen years and the guy on my left had skippered a 65′ [...]

The Sailboat / Catamaran We Want

My kids have started scouring the web for possible boats for us to liveaboard (even though we’re months away from being able to afford it) and Tom found this one today:HibiscusTake a look at those pictures — that’s a boat we could live on! =:)Yeah, It’ll probably be gone by the time we’re ready, but [...]

Wife is *almost* on board

My wife and I have had a few chats this week about my dreams and it looks like it’s boiling down to…

…if I can show how it’s going to work financially, she’s willing to take the leap and see how being liveaboards will work.

Woohoo! =:)

That’s a big change from the “I don’t want to talk [...]

Update (Not Much)

I just got back from a business trip to the Caribbean and I liked it a LOT more than I thought I would. It actually hurt to see boats sailing away — without me on board!

Right now we’re moving out of our house and into a small, temporary place. We’re getting rid of a lot [...]

Me and the Kids? WTF?!

My wife and I were just chatting with our daughter and she (my wife) mentioned that after we sell the house she didn’t mind if we bought a sailboat and me and the kids could go sailing off somewhere.

She’d go stay with her sister or something.

That kind of defeats the purpose of a “family adventure” [...]

Winter Winds a Blowing

Still no word on the job prospect that would move us to the shores of Lake Michigan, so I probably didn’t get it. However, the thought of it has sparked an interest in making a move like that whether it’s job-related or not.

At this point our first-choice is the Muskegon area of Michigan — just [...]

Not A House - A Home Instead

We’re selling our current house in order to “downsize.” While 3800 square feet of house on 5 acres is pretty nice, there are other things we’d rather do with a big chunk of that monthly mortgage.

So, what about our next house? The plan right now is to rent for a while so we can be [...]

Wait, I Didn’t Talk About The Ignorance

Yesterday I said I needed money, agreement from the wife, and knowledge before we could go cruising, but only talked about the financial end of things.

Besides working my tail off to create residual income, the other thing I can do right now is to gain knowledge about sailing. I’ve started that by raiding the local [...]

Overwhelming Amount of Ignorance

There are three things that keep us from taking off next week and sailing away…

Lack of money. No agreement from the wife. Know almost nothing about sailing.

Now, those aren’t in actual order — because I’m not sure any one is less important than the others. Well, if there was no lack of money then the ignorance factor [...]