Remembering back, oh many years ago now, our son had a classmate whose parents were going to take him out of school and sail around the world.  At the time, I thought that those people had lost their minds and I wondered if it was even legal.  There had to be some rule against that. There must be some law against just kidnapping your own children, shanghai yourself some wee deckhands, hoist a few bedsheets and off to the horizon you go.  Blimey mate, they must have completely been off their rocker. Yet somewhere in the deep recesses of my own thoughts, was a wiggling notion of how cool (is that dating myself?) it would be to just scurry myself aboard a craggy old windskiffer, hoist the main sheets, and let the wind carry me away. Being a fan of author Patrick O’Brien, the whole notion was deeply entertaining yet so far off the weather gauge from my reality that it quickly bobbed over the horizon and was gone like a green flash and a wink of an eye.

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.

Photo Archive

These images were taken during a trip to the Scottish Highlands in 2014.

Photo Archive

These images were taken during a trip to Tanzania Africa in 2011.

Once we’d decided to learn about sailing, it was obvious that we needed to find a conference, along with other ways of immersing ourselves in the information of the sport and cruising lifestyle. We were already taking sailing lessons and would sail in the open water in August, so a boat show or cruising conference was just what we needed to bridge the gap.