How many of you have either read or written an article on this?  Probably all of us. When we started this site, I think we had one primary purpose… to share our experiences.  Not just the excitement of travel, tantalizing new places – sights – tastes – smells, and the anticipation of distant horizons. We wanted to share the experience of the process of learning, its highs and lows, the fear of the unknown, the quest for truth, and information about/from the amazing veterans who have all experienced this before us.

Roughly two years ago, I stumbled onto a YouTube channel of a couple and their daughter who had sold most of their worldly possessions, loaded the rest of their essentials (clothes, tools, utensils, spices, and Legos) onto a sailboat, and headed south for adventure. At the time, I had just started a new job with a complicated and challenging objective and mission. Getting organized and aligned at this new work role was a herculean task, to say the least, and the idea of packing it all up and heading for the open sea was like ambrosia and nectar of the mind.

It wasn’t long after this discovery, that we started thinking more seriously about its possibilities and investigating what it would take to make this leap, originally thinking it was more like stepping off from dock to boat. Ok, we did think it was more complicated than that, but we had no idea what the path ahead had in store for us and that it would be more like jumping off a cliff into unknown waters with white cap waves crashing on jagged rocks below.

As we began the learning process, we quickly discovered the amount of information was overwhelming and the requirements were more than daunting.  We discovered that the adventure truly began from the very beginning.  We were storing and recording massive amounts of information and data, tracking sites and resources, taking sailing lessons, and going to boat shows.  We thought why don’t we take the opportunity to not only record it for ourselves but share it with others.

Making the decision to open our lives and spill all that we are doing and all that we may do was relatively easy, doing so, on the other hand, is rather intimidating. Many blog sites struggle with marketing or figuring out how to monetize their blog.  For us, it was more of just sharing information.  Finding good sources of information was challenging enough, trying to monetize was just not in our thoughts from the beginning.  As new bloggers, here are a few things we find challenging:

• The layout of the site.
• Content, Quality, and Frequency.
• With two of us writing, we have very different writing styles and interests. How do we maintain focus?
• What would consumer engagement be like?
• The worst for me… FEAR of publishing.

As new bloggers we know we will stumble as we struggle to figure all of this out. The only way to move forward with any of these challenges is to just move ahead, be grateful for the support we have and hope that our experiences are as helpful to others as Kim and Simon (SailingBritican.com) and Behan and Jamie (SailingTotem.com) have been for us.  As we move forward we will strive to share as much and as often as we can, make our thoughts consistent and write with one voice at a time, be open and honest with you and ourselves, and lastly smother the fear of being vulnerable to our experiences.

More to come, stay tuned.