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 sale tomorrow. Even though the F150 gets 7-8 MPG less than the minivan, the truck is paid off and it will give us enough room to pack stuff into. I’m going to hate pulling into the gas stations between here and Florida — or Texas — or California.

Yeah, that’s right, we don’t yet know where we’re going to be at the end of this year. The tentative plan is to visit relatives in the Seattle area until the end of June. Then, get a camp trailer and go to…

Michigan for July, August, September Missouri for October, November Florida or Texas or California for December

And by the end of the year, if the Lord keeps my business growing, we’ll shop for a sailboat and move onboard.

“Yeah, that’s right” part two — we don’t have nearly enough money at this point to buy a sailboat. Or even a dinghy. So we’re doing this on a wing and a prayer.

The year 2008 is going to be an adventure, one way or the other. My plan is for us all to look back on it as the start of the best times of our lives.

Technorati Tags: cruising, sailing, homeschool, travel

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′ catamaran and lived on a sailboat in the Caribbean!

I couldn’t have planned it any better.

I got some good advice from the guy on the right, including, when going shopping for our boat be *sure * and get someone who knows what they’re doing to look it over first. He told me a horror story fo a couple who failed to do that and really paid for it.

The guy on the left suggested that we buy our boat in the Eastern Caribbean and get our sea legs there instead of starting from Florida and heading east. He said the Gulf Stream crossing can be no fun and if my wife is apprehensive about the whole thing, making it fun and easy at first is really important.

Sounds good to me!

After this week I really want to get this thing done by the end of the year. In fact, I’m thinking maybe I need to set an actual goal — something like, we head for the Caribbean to look for a boat on my 46th birthday, December, 24, 2008.

By April 1 I’ll fiure out the goal and set it.

…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 about it” vibe I’d been getting for the last couple months, so I’m pretty happy.

Okay, I still have to ramp my business up to the point where we can buy a boat that’s big enough, but I’m pretty close to being set with our monthly needs as far as being able to work on it every few days from a wi-fi connection. I just need to come up with a way to generate $100K in one chunk to buy a (used) boat (we’re not ever going to buy a home on time again).

That’s for a monohull. We really want to catamaran so if I can get a $200K windfall we’ll go for that. So that’s what I’m working on right now.

I’m also lining up some ASA courses for my wife and I and son to take this summer — so far the leading candidate is a place in San Diego where you live aboard a sailboat for a week while you take the classes.

My hope is that by this time next year we’ll be living aboard, or at least shopping for our home — in a much warmer climate than here in Alaska. It’s been below zero for the last few days and I’ve been OD’ing on pictures of the Caribbean. =;)

Right now we’re moving out of our house and into a small, temporary place. We’re getting rid of a lot of things and in the next few months (while we wait for the snow to melt) we’ll weed out more.

What I’m starting to do is to look at things and say, “Are we going to take that on the sailboat with us?” If the answer is “no” then it’s a major candidate for ditching. We’re not ditching everything that fits that, yet, because we don’t know how long it will be before we can move on to a sailboat.

My goal is to have us knowing how to sail by the end of the summer (my wife and I and 14-year old son will take ASA certification courses, and my 11-year old daughter will learn to sail a small boat) and then do a bareboat charter in the Caribbean next winter.

If that goes well, the plan will be to look for a boat to buy immediately afterwards. Of course, I’m keeping my eyes open for opportunity before then — I don’t really have a problem moving onto a sailboat even before we learn to sail. I just wouldn’t untie from the dock until we knew what we were doing. =;)

She’d go stay with her sister or something.

That kind of defeats the purpose of a “family adventure” I think. =:(

Hopefully she wasn’t serious, but who knows?

One adult and two teens on board would make a difference in where we’d go, I think, but might not make any difference in what kind of boat we’d get, so I think I’ll go ahead with boat dreaming (~40ft catamaran), and leave the itinerary until things like the above are decided.

At this point our first-choice is the Muskegon area of Michigan — just right across Lake Michigan from Milwaukee, but Michigan has better homeschool laws than Wisconsin. =;)

The snows are coming down the mountains very quickly — it seems winter is arriving in Alaska faster this fall than last. So we may not get out of the state (if that’s what we decide to do) until next sprint/summer. In which case, I’ll fall back on my previous plans to use the winter to study navigation, etc.

Just kind of “hit the books” since I can’t hit the water.

Technorati Tags: sailing

So, what about our next house? The plan right now is to rent for a while so we can be sure of what’s right for us. And at this point, I’m hoping our next home will look a lot like this…

That’s a Privilege 39 catamaran, and yes, I want to buy one of those (instead of a house) and live on it. Where? The US West Coast for starters, and then hop down the coast to Mexico, into the Sea of Cortez for a while. Then down into Central America to hit Costa Rica, etc. And when we’ve seen everything we want to see on the west side of the continent…

…we’ll sail through the Panama Canal and head for Nicaragua and Belize, then over to the Bahamas, Virgin Islands, Bermuda, etc., and then over to the US East Coast.

After that, who knows?

As long as I can hit a wifi spot every 3-7 days, I should be able to work from anywhere. And if we decide at some point in the future to head across the Pacific to the South Sea Islands, I’ll just hire someone to watch my business for the 3 weeks it takes to get from one wifi spot to another. =:)

My kids are 11 and 13 right now and if we wait too much longer to do this, it’ll be too late to do it as a family — and I really want to give them a taste of life that’s out of the mainstream.

After all, anybody can do mainstream — that’s simply what happens when you do what everybody else does. It doesn’t take any effort to be mainstream.

Don’t get me wrong, if you’re not going to sell everything you have and wander the world, please do NOT think I’m putting you down — some people like mainstream. Some folks like the normalcy of living in one neighborhood, raising their kids with the same group of people, etc.

I don’t. At least not right now.

So I have my work cut out for me, because a used boat like the one above costs as much as a house. We’ll probably need around $200K for that, plus there’s usually some kind of hefty outfitting needed — but even before that expense, I told my wife we’d pay off everything else we have, vehicles, etc.

That’s my dream — debt-free and sailing with my family while I continue working my internet-based business from ports around the US and world. That’s a big-honkin’ dream.

But it’s a cool one! =:)

Technorati Tags: cruising, sailing

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 libraries of all kinds of books about sailing, reading sailing magazines, and surfing sailing and cruising forums.

I’m reading a lot, and understanding some — there are a lot of things I don’t get, but I keep going through everything and often come across something that answers a question I have. I’m also pretty good about figuring things out based on the context.

We’ve also been listening to sailing/cruising podcasts — yes, I said we. My son seems especially interested, and even asks for me to turn it on when we’re heading down the road for football practice, etc. And on a trip to Anchorage the other day, all four of us listened to two episodes of the Furled Sails podcast — the interview with the crew of Exit Only.

That was a really good episode for my wife to hear, I think, because of Donna Abbott’s perspective on being a wife/Mom/woman while cruising. The next day I made some remark about a sailboat and my wife said, “No, we need to get one of those catamarans, I don’t want to go sailing tipped way over.”

So, the educational process has begun! =;)

– My Other Plans –

One of the other things that we’ll need to know in order to go cruising is navigation — how to read charts, plot a course, figure out where we are using a sextant, compass, whatever. I know GPS units are a dime a dozen, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable at ALL if I had to rely only on that to figure out where I am and where I want to go.

So my plan is to learn to do all of that (of course, at this point I don’t even know what “all” of that encompasses) without a GPS unit, and then probably use a GPS when cruising. But I’ll KNOW that our safety doesn’t reply on something that requires batteries, or that can be accidentally dropped overboard.

I know there are online courses for navigation, but the one I looked at tonight is more than $200 — and if I’m going to be able to afford to go cruising, I think I’ll have to hit the library and see what they have available.

Also, the sailing/cruising forum I found has been really helpful — I know that I can get even “dumb” questions answered quickly.

There are other things I’ll need to learn (for one, I want to learn Spanish since we want to cruise Mexico and Central America), but that’s enough for now.

Later on I’ll create a To-Do checklist and start going down it.

Technorati Tags: sailing, cruising

1. Lack of money.
2. No agreement from the wife.
3. 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 could be overcome easily with lessons and (paid) mentoring. As far as that goes, with enough money to handle everything, spousal agreement would probably be more easily obtained.

Honestly, my wife and I haven’t discussed this idea in any way more than a passing reference. She tends to live in the “now” and I tend to live in the “what could be” so my plan has been to get closer to being able to leave land before bringing it up as a solid possibility.

Which means of my list, numbers 1 and 3 are what I’m working on now.

There are three big parts to the financial end of things:

1. Pay off all current debts.
2. Save enough money to buy the boat. (Ouch, that’s like saving up to pay cash for a house!)
3. Have residual income to support our cruising.

Optional for #3, is to have my current business running in such a way that I still have to work, but can check in once a week or so from an internet cafe, wifi in a marina, etc.

In order of “difficulty” I think it’s saving enough for the boat, paying off all debts, and then getting a residual income stream in place.

And when I look at that list, I can almost find myself thinking, “There’s no freaking way I’ll be able to pay off everything and save enough for a boat before I’m dead.”

However, that’s not an option, so I need to come up with a plan. Soon.