S/V Adventurer

This big idea that I'm going to share with you today all started with an email from a good friend of ours who happens to be thousands of miles away. As you may or may not know by now, we have gotten hooked up with the Oregon Lions Sight and Hearing Foundation and have been stocked up with roughly 2,500 pairs of glasses for us to give away during our travels. We give a free basic eye exam, find someone the right pair of glasses out of our stock pile, and then hand them over a free pair of glasses. Yes, it's all free. That's right, there are no strings attached. None. It's not only great for the recipient, it's been a great experience for us as well. While we were in these little remote villages along Mexico's Baja Peninsula this past winter, giving out these free eye exams and glasses, we had been noticing quite a bit more need that could be filled. So, we had been making plans to pick up some supplies for when we returned to the Baja this summ...

So, my good friend Jason and I were out surfing the other day. Call it a last hurrah if you will. Jason and Jenn are heading south for Hurricane season and we are heading north. We had a few days to spend with these good friends in Bahia Tenacatita before we broke up and went our separate ways, and the waves in Tenacatita, well, they were calling our names. I probably don't have to mention that Jason and I are...ahem...older men. And I probably don't have to mention that we are 2 amazingly fit and astonishingly good looking men for being...ahem...older. And just because we are...ahem...older, doesn't mean that we can't tear up some waves like we used to when we were younger. After having another epic surf session with Jason (AKA the “Big Kahuna”), the trouble all started with one simple phrase. “This is going to be my last wave.” In my...ahem...older age, I should have known better. Never call anything your last. It's way too concrete and fi...

These days, our lives revolve around weather. As you can probably guess, the ocean can be a nasty beast if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time. And since our little floating home lives on the ocean, you can also probably guess that we do our best to avoid anything that resembles nasty on the high seas. Which brings me to what is coming our way pretty quickly – hurricane season. Hurricane season in Mexico starts, depending on which source you read, somewhere between May 15 th and June 1 st and continues to approximately November 31 st . If you are doing the math, that equals roughly 6 months. For half of the year, there is a pretty good chance that somewhere in Mexico, a hurricane may be forming and knocking at our door, and I can't stress this enough, that's a knock that we don't want to answer. So the big question is what are we going to do about it? Well, there are a number of options and they all basically mean the same thing – we need to ge...

I would like to think I'm a pretty patient guy. When trying to take the dinghy to shore to meet up with some friends and Brenda is changing her t-shirt for the 8 th time because it's “not comfortable”, I will generally just sit in the dinghy with the engine running and not say a word. Sure, I'll grit my teeth, but being together for as many years as we have been has taught me that saying something like “hurry up, everyone is waiting for us”, well, it will only make the process slower. When we are itching to go to a new anchorage and explore but some threatening weather has us pinned down, I have no problem sitting on the boat and watching the weather pass us by. When we need to check out of a Mexican port town and the official has run out of ink for the stamp that needs to be whacked onto our papers, I don't even flinch. I'm completely happy to sit and wait while he spends over an hour in the back room looking for some ink. In general terms, I am pretty pati...