S/V Adventurer

I don't know about you, but there are times when I just can't sleep. And this boy needs his beauty sleep. It's impossible to look as good as I normally do without a good solid 8 hours of drool inducing slumber. Sometimes my mind spins on stupid things that have no bearing on whether or not I should be in dreamland. There are times when random thoughts keep me up at night, and the more I think about why these thoughts are keeping me up, the more awake I get. It's a viscous cycle. One of the dumbest and most common things that keeps me up at night is when we buy a lottery ticket for a huge jackpot. For some reason, my mind likes to spin in the middle of the night on which shiny new boat we would get. The only thing that gets me back to sleep is spending hours on the internet researching boats (I love boats). The bad part of this story is that we are without an internet connection most of the time now that we are floating around on the boat. But the good p...

It's almost time. In just over a week, we'll make the big left turn out of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and start heading south toward Mexico. We've given the boat a pretty good shake down during the last 6 weeks and we are nearing the end of our time in the great Pacific Northwest. But before we go, we have a couple of our good friends from Bend, Oregon who have joined us for a week on the boat and for one final lap of the San Juan Islands. The last handful of weeks of sailing around the islands have been a bit of a whirlwind for us. Not only have we been working like crazy on the boat, trying to get last minute projects and improvements completed, we've also been doing our best to just have some fun. Fun is what this whole thing is supposed to be about after all. Both Brenda and I sometimes have a one track mind and can't seem to look past our endless list of projects. We tend to get fixated on completing tasks and disregard the whole point ...

There are a few things we severely miss when we are traveling around on the high seas. If I were to list them in order of most missed things, I would have to say family and friends are on top of that list. Actually, if I'm going to be totally honest, fast and reliable internet access is on the top, followed by ice cream (our boat freezer doesn't get cold enough to keep ice cream frozen solid...a serious bummer), and then in a distant 3 rd place comes family and friends (sorry friends and family, but you're no tub of ice cream). When we get to shore in some random town, the first thing we seem to do is look for a wifi signal. Second, we get ice cream. Then after hours of surfing the web and eating gallons upon gallons of ice cream, we finally think about our family and friends (again, you come in a distant third...sorry, but I have a serious sweet tooth). After the ice cream is gone, we go back to the place with wifi, send out our emails and phone calls to check...

If you are someone who is reading this bit of nonsense and living in the great Northwest, you are probably aware that this summer hasn't been much of a summer. It's been cold, gray, and rainy. If you are reading this and from some other part of the world, you may be thinking, “It's the Northwest.  Isn't it always cold, gray, and rainy?” Touche. You may be correct, it's generally just like wintertime for almost the entire year here, except for a couple of short months we call summer. It's what a Seattle-ite looks forward to all year. Our pasty white bodies come out of hiding and become lobster red in about 15 minutes. We wear shorts and complain about the heat when it's barely above 70 degrees (21* C for you foreigners). But still, we love our summertime. For Brenda and I, summertime this year will be a little different. Mainly because it will be our last summer in the Northwest for what could be years and years. We were hoping to be a...

I've lived on a sailboat for about 20 years now. Brenda and I have lived together on a sailboat for about 14 of those 20 years. When Brenda and I first moved in together, I sold the boat I was living on and we purchased a boat of our very own together. Back then, we were basically broke and since Brenda was used to living on dry land in a huge house with some of her girly friends, we decided to purchase the biggest boat we could afford to ease her into the boating lifestyle and hopefully not freak her out with the lack of living space. We bought a semi-custom 48' overall behemoth of a boat named Stargazer that was as close to a house as any sailboat I've ever been on. She was a good sturdy boat and had tons of space (for a boat). You could actually turn around and not bang your elbows on all 4 walls as you spun. It was palatial. The main salon had what I considered a dance floor because it was so huge (again for a boat). The dance floor was actually the size o...

Brenda and I just realized that we have been back on the boat and cruising around the San Juan Islands for over 2 weeks now. We also just realized that in just a couple more weeks, we'll be heading offshore and making our way down the coast to Mexico. Time sure does fly when you are having fun. If you are some of the lucky few that know us well, you know that Brenda and I are a pretty good pair. We get along really well, we enjoy each other's company, and we both feel we are lucky to have each other. But if I'm going to be honest here, there are sometimes I just want to throw her overboard. Before you get your hair all in a tizzy about me throwing my lovely wife overboard, let me explain myself. First of all, if I actually throw her overboard, she probably deserved it (that was a joke...she definitely deserved it). And second of all, if anyone gets thrown overboard, I'm sure it will be me. Brenda is stronger than she looks and I have a pretty good ...

It's official. We are finally floating again and on our way. Even though we've been off of the boat for 10 months, the boat felt like home as soon as it was floating again. Many of you know that we actually left and started our adventure over 2 years ago, and to many of you, it may seem like we aren't any farther along than when we left originally. Even though we've seen and done a lot, and been to quite a few amazing places in these past couple of years, sometimes I feel like we are still right where we started. I have to remind myself that this adventure is a process and sometimes a process takes time. For the last couple of months, we have been frantically working on the boat, trying our best to visit with family and friends, get rid of our non essential junk, and do our best to stay sane. When the boat was lowered into the water and finally floating again, there was a huge sigh of relief from both of us. All of the sudden, things were looking like ...