Liveaboard Sailing- Let the journey begin!

Where do you start when your goal becomes mak­ing the jump to the live­aboard sail­boat lifestyle?  For us, it began when we first heard the call of the sea. We decid­ed there is no oth­er place on earth we would rather be than cra­dled in the waves of the ocean. The idea of wait­ing until we were of “retire­ment age” sim­ply would not do! After liv­ing blocks from the ocean and spend­ing every free moment at the beach watch­ing sun­ris­es, light­ning storms, and play­ing in the sand with our kids, we could not inagine liv­ing any­where else!

Time Waits for No Man- or Woman!

As they say, all good things must come to an end. Leav­ing the ocean became a neces­si­ty. Part of our deci­sion to move away from the beach was to pro­vide the chil­dren with a more fam­i­ly-ori­ent­ed loca­tion away from traf­fic con­ges­tion and zero-lot lines. We relo­cat­ed to a more cen­tral area of Flori­da. As  expect­ed, we suf­fered with­draw, miss­ing our dai­ly tidal vis­its. But we had no idea of the extent to which we would suf­fer! The pangs of long­ing stem­ming from a sep­a­ra­tion far too abrupt could not be eased with infre­quent vis­its to dif­fer­ent beach­es, now at least an hour away.

Still, many years passed. Almost ten years of birth­days, band prac­tices, and book reports lat­er, we were ready to con­sid­er tak­ing some time off to sail with our chil­dren before they grad­u­at­ed. No longer did we have the lux­u­ry to wait. Soon enough the kids would no longer have the time, or incli­na­tion, to live aboard a cramped sail­boat. We want­ed them to expe­ri­ence trav­el­ing with their par­ents as the wind blows, with­out need­ing to fol­low a schedule.

Making the Jump: Liveaboard Sailing Lifestyle

We decid­ed to take an inven­to­ry of where our lives were head­ed. We thought about whether our paths moved us in the direc­tion we want­ed to trav­el. Did we want to play it safe or did we want to live, real­ly live? Could we even man­age co-exist­ing with­in the space lim­i­ta­tions required of those seek­ing to make the jump to the live­aboard lifestyle, know­ing we would be giv­ing up the acres of space we now have? For­tu­nate­ly, we have some things already on our side: David is a mechan­ic by trade, I am a teacher, and we have grit, or fear­less­ness, what­ev­er you want to call it! Hav­ing remod­eled sev­er­al “handy­man spe­cial” hous­es, we weren’t afraid to buy a sail­boat that need­ed work, as long as it was the type of work we could do our­selves, or learn to do. Research is our forte, so we uti­lized web­sites, blogs, vlogs, forums, sail­ing mag­a­zines, and books to learn all we could, before we would even think about actu­al­ly pur­chas­ing a sail­boat. We dis­cov­ered an end­less amount of pros and cons for the many sail­boats avail­able, the biggest con of course being price. That alone would not stop us although the process seemed to take for­ev­er. Before we knew it, we were the proud own­ers of the right sail­boat for us, at the right price. But more about that in the next post!

What’s your story?

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