Southern Boy Goes To Sea

 This was the start of writing about jumping off the metaphorical hamster wheel of life and sailing the islands...Still debating about finishing the story.  I've made a couple of failed starts sharing this complete story on Facebook and YouTube.  I've never gotten nudged or requested to finish any of them, so figure there is not much interest out there....see what you think.

Southern Boy Goes To Sea

Rubrum Terra Firma…that was my place and life.  My feet were firmly planted on the red clay soil of Georgia for 56 years until I watched some YouTube videos about people living their lives on the aqua waters of tropical islands.  With each video I became more transfixed at the possibility of a life at sea amongst the perpetually warm, sugar sand trimmed tropical islands.  Thus started my transition from landlubber to sailor.

While I’d been to and on many bodies of water; streams, creeks, rivers, small lakes, large lakes, seas and oceans I would have never be mistaken to be a seafaring man.  Canoes and ski boats were the most significant boats I’d ever been a captain.  Yet this lack of sea going history was not going to deter me from pursuing a vagabond life on a boat of my own as its captain.  If others could do it, then so could I and in the spring of 2017, with my wife’s buy-in, we declared to family and friends, “we’re going to buy a sailboat and sail away.”

Grandiose platitudes of the nature of turning one’s life on its head, and escaping the hamster wheels we all seem to live in typically die before the condensation ring from a cold beer evaporates off the table.  Yet this time, it took root and grew with each passing day.  Some days surging forward, other days being pushed back with a firm kick in the chest.  The proverbial three feet and a cloud of dust progress.  We struggled to unwind 30 plus years of adult life, which required the sale of our home, sale of everything we owned and sale of our businesses. Trust me unwinding your life is a much more involved endeavor than you could imagine, and truly a story in and of itself, but we made it happen and by October of 2019 we’d purchased a 41 foot sailing catamaran, a 1998 Lagoon 410.

For us, the day we took delivery of our boat, this dream/mission, started to become real.  Yet, it was received with a mixed bag of emotions, joy and fear.  The sudden relief, of the stress that had built up over two and a half years of wondering if this day would ever arrive. The pressure of the fortitude and time invested.  Combined with the ever present, mainstream, societal doubt, gremlins yelling, “What the hell are you doing?”  It all came forth in a storm of tears, followed by the onset of dazed, numbing shock.   The last time we were this lost was when we brought our first born son home from the hospital. “Now what?” was the retort we found ourselves repeating. 

The boat was docked at the northern end of the Chesapeake Bay, which even this Georgia boy knew that winter comes early at the Mason Dixon Line, and we needed to move her south, soon.  Not knowing a thimble’s worth about sailing, which was recognized by our insurance company, they limited us to staying at dock.  The boat could only move with a certified captain so we scurried to arrange for her to get moved south. Perhaps panic would be a better description than scurried, because October starts the mass migration of boats south as the weather gets nastier in the north and insurance restrictions lift for all the boats that want to be in the islands after hurricane season.  There is a flotilla of boats moving south this time of year which meant docks on the southern path and crews were in short supply. 

Finding a new dock home with all these southbound, transiting boats that needed places to tie up temporarily or permanently was like trying to find a parking spot at the mall on Black Friday and you are driving an RV.  We both searched the internet, worked the phones, left messages and waited responses.  Then, in much the same manner we learned about the pending listing of the boat we just bought, my wife used her social media prowess and discovered another similar boat was leaving a marina in Savannah that would put in a word for us with the dock master.   Dockage was secured.

With a place located to park our new floating home we could hire a delivery Captain to move her now.  Moving a boat is not like deciding to drive anywhere, short or long distance.  Weather matters.  It matters a lot.  Which now meant we were in competition with many other boats for the alignment of a good weather window and the availability of limited, qualified captains.  Fortunately, not without a couple of failed starts, we were able to hire a crew that got her moved to Savannah the first week of November and there she waited tied up, patiently waiting for us as we wrapped up the busy season for our businesses and the holidays. 

When the New Year arrived we are ready to kick into high gear our dream of sailing away.  But first things first, we needed to get cleared by our insurance company to captain the boat ourselves.  This would require bringing a training captain aboard for a few days and learning the ropes, so to speak.  We weren’t able to get this taken care of until the chilly latter days of February.  Learning how to sail, bundled up like Eskimos didn’t quite set the tone of, “Yeah!  We’ve made the greatest decision of our lifes!”  Quite the opposite.  My wife celebrated her 50^th birthday under gray skies, chattering teeth and enough ocean chop to mimic the Runaway Mine Train at Six Flags Over Georgia.  Yet we passed with flying colors and anxiously awaited the insurance company’s green light.  And just as we got the approval to captain our own boat, the world shut down as COVID arrived.  Sailing anywhere now was not going to happen anytime soon. 

The pause button had been pressed on our dream.  During the early days of Covid there was nowhere outside the United State we could sail to and any small port town along the east coast was shuttered to tourist so we did what we could.   We worked on the boat, weekend at the dock, self-quarantined for a couple of weeks and ventured out into the coastal Atlantic waters of the southern states to gain as much experience as we could about sailing a big boat. These coastal excursions mostly consisted of motoring a couple hours out the lengthy distance of the sounds and inlets that make up the southeastern coastline, then a couple more miles offshore where we practiced sailing.  Only going either north or south a few miles and a few hours and reversing the passage back to dock.  Occasionally doing an overnight anchorage for practice and to break up the routine, then back to the dock.  Not much fun.  Not quite the turquoise waters and sugar sands of tropical isles of our dreams. 

The overhanging pandemic also delayed the final unwinding of our life, the sale of our businesses, so our life back in Atlanta wasn’t completely wrapped up, which further put strain on our departure plans.   This condition lasted until July when, like opening an overstuffed closet, a cascade of pressing issues came tumbling down upon us.  We were informed by the marina, our dock home for the last nine months, would be invoking their right to cancel our slip lease. Then we got a qualified, very motivated buyer for the business.   Now we had to find a new marina, move the boat and be available to close the sale of the business all in a narrow few week time window.   

Evidently, a side effect of Covid was an explosive growth in boat purchases.  This lead to this private community marina developing a waiting list of slip request from community residents.  While all prior years they couldn’t fill all of the slips with just resident’s boats, now non-residents had one month to find another marina.  This was a major ordeal.  The explosion of boat purchases, the fact that all boats that would normally be in the islands had never left this year, and any Americans that had left were now back because it was hurricane season, all meant most marinas were full.  Throw on top of all that our catamaran width; our 23 foot beam, was not a size many marinas could accommodate.  Fortunately, with another round of calls, messages, emails and internet searches we found a new home, but we had to go 100 miles north, to South Carolina, near Charleston.

We were only able to rack up less than eight voyages and less than 300 nautical miles before we set our course south for bluer waters.

We, my wife, cat (Ginger) and I departed from Bohicket Marina, near Charleston, South Carolina where we had been keeping our new floating home as we struggled to unwind 30 plus years of adult life which required the sale of our home, everything we owned and businesses. Trust me unwinding your life is a much more involved endeavor than you could imagine, and truly a story in and of itself, but we made it happen.  By November of 2020 I untied the dock lines and set sail for the Bahamas.