Doesn’t it sound kind of crazy? That is, planning on running away to the tropics to live on a sailboat, when we have neither the money nor the skills to make it happen? That’s right, we don’t even know how to sail!!!
Yes, it does sound crazy! But just in case there are other people out there who also dream big, we are going to document our progress on how we make it happen. Stay tuned…
Now it actually feels like a plan instead of just a dream!
While shopping online for more sailing books we stumbled across a link for Offshore Sailing’s “Fast track to Cruising” course. Instantly excited by the course’s description we fired off an email looking for more info. We were both shocked and impressed when within 2 hours we received a phone call from Carrie, a rep. at Offshore Sailing, calling to give us info on the course. We were even more shocked to find that one of the few times we can actually get away for an extended period, Christmas holidays, was available to us for the course. Did we hesitate to book it? Of course not! We are now counting the days until our first HUGE step forward in achieving our dream.
Quite possible the last nice weekend of the year has come and gone and we were extremely happy to be by a river where an old Laser was begging to be let loose on the water. The post title said this was our first sail even though that is not completely true. I have been out with others a couple of times in the past. Rebecca has even sailed a Laser solo as a young girl. I described this as our first sail because with all the reading we have been doing this is the first time we actually had a grasp on what we were supposed to be doing. How to tack and jibe, the points of sail, which boat had the right of way, all of the things we have been reading about. We didn’t even dump the boat (fortunately the winds were light because the water would NOT have been too pleasant)!
The mysteries of the web continue to perplex me. I spent the last 24 hours troubleshooting this Blog and our other websites. It is quite frustrating when you get different results from different computers. It all seems well enough now (even though I am not completely certain why). Although I am certain life on a sailboat will be filled with challenges too, hopefully they will be much more tangible and easier to see!
Taking a break from our “learning to sail” studies we relax in the hot tub with our new toy catamarans, quizzing each other on which boat has the right of way.
