S/V Adventurer

If you know me well, then you'll probably know that I'm not one for holidays, birthdays, or anniversaries. They are just dates on a calendar to me. And no, it's not because I don't care that you were born or that Valentines Day is supposed to be all about our love for each other. It's because I don't like to be told to do something nice for someone on a specific day. I think we should be nice to each other every day, and if I want to get you a present because I saw something and thought of you, I'll do it. Not because it's a specific date on a calendar (I'm getting fired up and off topic already...sorry about that...back to the subject at hand). For some reason, May 31 st of 2014 is a day that sticks with me and screams out for me to remember and celebrate it. Before you get too excited and rush out to get me a nice gift, no it's not my birthday (even though I don't like holidays, I do like gifts...good chocolate is really hard t...

Since we're all friends here, I'm going to level with you. I've been bored. Before you get your panties in a bunch and start worrying that we are going to hang up our sailing gloves and take up competitive knitting – no, I'm not bored with Mexico or cruising. Mexico is great and cruising couldn't be any better. I've just been bored. If you know us at all, or if you've been following along on our little adventure for a while now, you probably can tell that we don't sit still very well. We have to move and we have to explore. It's in our DNA. We just can't do anything about it. Having some broken tosies has forced me to sit on my butt for a few weeks and wait for the healing process to happen, and it's been, well, boring. Sure, I can hop in a taxi and go get some tacos, I can slowly hobble through town, and I can even take care of some needed boat maintenance, but, none of those things really dig deep and scratch the adventure itc...

Before I get into what's happening with us, I just want to quickly respond to the handful of emails and texts I've gotten over the last couple of days regarding tropical storm Adrian which formed near Guatemala and is heading toward Mexico. As you probably know by now, Mexico is where our little floating home and us are currently residing. If you are following the news on this weather system, you have probably heard that it is officially the earliest formed tropical storm in recorded history, and that by all estimations, it is expected to be upgraded to a full fledged hurricane in the next few days. Before I go any farther, I should tell you that we are perfectly safe and a long way from this storm. If this storm would have formed a week ago, before we made a big hop north to La Paz, I would have been sweating bullets, but from where we are located now, I'm not too worried...at least not too worried for us. Every sailor cruising Mexico's waters has to make some...

Before I get started today, I just want to make one point perfectly clear. I love sailing. It's one of my favorite things. But since we started living our lives as full time adventurer's, sailing just for the fun of it hasn't happened. Sailing for us is now about transportation. It's about getting from point A to point B and bringing our floating home and all of our worldly possessions along with us. Back before we left on this big adventure, I used to spend a whole lot of my free time sailing. I could generally find 2 or 3 after work sailboat races per week and the occasional weekend race where I could waste my time on the water, going round and round in circles with good friends. I loved everything about it. The tactics, eyeing the water for extra little puffs of breeze, trimming the sails for an extra tenth of a knot of boat speed, and the feel of the helm on a powerful boat with a well oiled crew – simply amazing. But being rail-meat is where the most ...

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...