In a sparsely attended ceremony (Jason and Gail) there was much celebration for the signing of an Antares 44 contract. As a good luck token, the hull number will be 4444. The boat is designed in Canada and custom-built in Argentina. The expected splash date is December 2012 but boat-building shares some similarities with house-building in predicting finish dates! What steps did we take to get this far? Saved money to buy the boat. This was a multi-decade process as I am not a professional card player […]
Barefeet Party – Meeting Antares Circum-navigators
In 2008 while we were still living in London I started surfing the web for sailboat articles. This was when I started reading sailing blogs. I can not remember when I first ran across the blog for Barefeet, but once I saw the blog I was hooked. I was excited because their background seemed similar to mine and Gail’s. Chris also worked in finance and neither Chris nor Erin were life-long sailboat mechanics. The final clue was the Backroads T-shirt he was wearing. We loved everyone of our […]
Manhattan Yacht Club – Sinking at Sea
I have become a cruiser as opposed to a racer. As a result, I have become focused on building the skills of crossing oceans safely and comfortably instead of being the first around a collection of orange marks. I was dragged, kicking and screaming against my will into racing again for the company sailing team. Who can turn down an early evening sail in NY Harbor and the chance for some friendly competition? The team needed a skipper so I did what any good employee would do and […]
Colgate Sailing School – BVI
We have signed up for a grand adventure but have no clue about life on a boat. Actually, neither of us have ever sailed on a large catamaran. I have gone offshore for a few one week adventures, but this will be an entirely different experience. The natural next step for us was to go to shool. I was hoping spelling would not play a large factor in my grade. Gail was hoping she wouldn’t fall off the boat. Colgate offered a great program, Fast Track to Catamaran […]
Boat Work Order
Imagine you are sitting down at a classic pizzeria and you are very hungry. This particular pizzeria has 55 choices of toppings spanning all of your favorites and many you have never tried. That is how we felt when putting together our work order. Everything sounded great but if we didn’t watch out the ‘toppings’ would cost more than the boat, probably wouldn’t work well together, and, even worse, we would never make up our minds. We needed to control our enthusiasm and make some choices. […]
Diesel 101 – Gail is back to school
It is time to get serious about the boat systems. We have already divided up some of the boat tasks and I raised my hand for Engines. We will have three diesel engines on the boat – Port, Starboard and Generator. I have always aspired to be a bit of a tinkerer but up to now it has been limited to disassembling and sometimes even re-assembling computers. Engines are a whole other subject and a bit intimidating to me. But, since I had the time, I decided to enroll in […]
2011 Miami Boat Show – Boat Choice Done
The idea of buying a boat and setting sail had been with me, and later on Gail, for many years. But we knew that if we wanted to exit the dreaming phase and enter the do phase, we needed to act. Web searching played a big part in the selection process. It really shocks me how poor some of the websites of the biggest manufacturers are. They sell boats for the price of a nice home and include only a dozen photos. There is no pricing info. Le website […]
What is this crazy mission?
When does an idea start? Some ideas develop like the process of erosion, they start slowly and the casual observers just sees some water passing over a rock. Then over the passage of time, the passing comment becomes a fundamental part of one’s being. Years ago I told Gail, “I would like to move aboard a sailboat”. She was excited because she enjoys travel and my vision lacked any concrete dates that might create pressure. Like a spring river racing down a well worn canyon, our choice to move aboard […]
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