We were not experienced sailors when we moved aboard our 50′ sailboat – lets just get that out there.
Back in 2018, we were swimming/floating around the mooring field outside our apartment in Bonaire and we got chatting with the captain of a 40′ catamaran. He told us he had sailed down from Peurto Rico and would stay in Bonaire for most of the hurricane season. It was costing him $10 per day for the mooring in this slice of paradise (and our favourite place to scuba dive) – so the dream began to sail our own boat to Bonaire, and scuba dive off our own boat! Well that’s my dream anyway……
Back in Peterborough, Ontario, we set out to find someone to give us some sailing lessons and we found Andy McCabe down on Lake Ontario so our dive buddies Lynne, Randyl, Andy and I signed up for lessons! And let’s say I passed by the skin of my teeth (I might have fallen asleep during the navigation lesson) but I passed the provisioning part of the test with full marks. This did at least teach us how harrowing it can be to dock a boat, if nothing else!
Andy and I started looking for boats shortly afterwards, thinking that Andy could retire early and we could set off down the East coast for the Caribbean. Andy took this more seriously than me, traveling to the US a couple of times, and spending many hours on Yachtworld.com. We didn’t know anything about buying a boat and we were fixated on how much storage we would need (now living on a boat for 6 months we still brought way too many clothes and I’ve used the slow cooker only once). The boats we checked out in the US didn’t pan out (although 2 of them in hindsight would probably have been awesome), so we started looking closer to home and in the winter of 2019 (just before before Covid kicked off) found a Beneteau 461 in Quebec City that was on the hard (meaning we had to climb an icy ladder during a freezing rain event…..). Looking back, she was close to perfect – well perfect enough for us to learn to become better sailors on the Great Lakes. The owner would have helped us sail it back down the St Lawrence River to Ontario. On our way back home we stopped in at a couple of marinas to check the cost of moorage, and they told us they were being told to shut down because of Covid!
Andy probably would’ve bought that boat, but after hearing from the marinas, the boat surveyors and ominous news about Covid-related provincial border travel restrictions , I asked him “what would you tell the kids to do” and he said “I’d tell them to hold onto their money” and with a heavy heart we had to tell the really nice guy in Quebec that we could not buy his boat until Covid was sorted out. The moment passed, and not too long afterwards, a work opportunity on Vancouver Island came up… With our kids both being in Victoria already and a very healthy housing market (as people fled the cities), we decided to sell our home in Peterborough and move across Canada to Nanaimo, BC.
Arriving in Nanaimo in August of 2020, Andy immediately started looking for boats locally, and I started looking for a house!Long story short we brought an old 38′ Sparkman & Stevens designed sailboat in Victoria AND a new home in Nanaimo, on (by complete coincidence) the same closing day.
So now after watching YouTube sailing channels for the last 6 years we figure “how hard can this be, if all these young kids can do it, I’m sure we can too …..we have had way more life experience than they have ……”. WTF were we thinking ……… Andy still says that he was more nervous docking the boat for the first time than flying a plane solo for the first time! Still we had many neat adventures on “Elsewhere” and learnt a lot (and spent a lot) as we went. Good training for our current adventure:
Fast forward 4 years, and we’re trolling Yacht World again (Andy more than me). He found a 49′ Beneteau down in Anacortes, Washington so we embarked on a quick road trip – just “…to go and have a look how much bigger this boat is compared to our 38′ Hughes…”. What we found was a boat that was pretty much ready to go (previous owners had outfitted her with just about everything we would need to become liveaboards). A few days of nervous procrastination and I think one evening we just said “F*&^ it, lets do it!” and we put an offer in…. The rest is a panic-induced blur, as we set about selling up in BC and moving onto a boat!! Two stress-filled months followed, with several trips back to Anacortes (surveys etc.) and slowly coming to terms with what was ahead of us – selling everything (cars, bikes, beds, furniture, old boat, house ….. not the dogs – we kept them!). And the housing market wasn’t as hot as it was a few years ago so we had to think of other options too but in the end it all worked out!
We now have a few remaining posessions in small storage locker – which I think we’ll empty out when we next visit the Island ’cause we have figured out we don’t need all the crap we put in there. The rest of our worldly posessions are on board our new home – a 49′ sailing vessel. The crazy thing is, after 6 months on board, we miss very little of our old life (friends and family, yes, but “stuff” accumulated over 30 years of being together – absolutely not).
We moved aboard EOS at the end of July 2024 and haven’t looked back.
