In the Beginning ...

A man, a woman, a boat and a dream

Teresa and I both fell in love with sailing later in life, but boy did we fall hard.  She had been in a previous relationship with a man who sailed.  When that relationship didn’t work out, she decided to see if it was the guy or the sailing that she fell in love with so she did the next logical things: join a club and buy a boat named Vela.  OK, the first one is logical, the second one might not be.  

She spent every weekend on Vela cleaning, repairing, and most importantly sailing with her friends from the Oregon Women’s Sailing Association (OWSA).

At the end of the dock where she kept Vela was the Island Sailing Club (ISC) clubhouse where I had learned to sail a couple years earlier.  I was racing two nights a week: Mondays at ISC and Tuesdays on another boat “Cool Change” based at another yacht club.  I was also serving as the cruising group commodore at ISC where I organized several overnight trips on club boats throughout the summer.  

With that proximity, it was probably inevitable that we would run into each other, but it took a while for that to happen because I spent a lot of weekends hiking and preparing for a backpacking trip in the High Sierras.  After my trip, ISC was having a dock party at the clubhouse.  OWSA had organized a race earlier in the day and Teresa found her way to the dock party that evening.

At some point a friend from the club asked me if I wanted to go night sailing.  Little did I know that it was Teresa who instigated it in the first place.  Our fates were sealed.

Let’s buy a boat

A little less that a year later, I was selling my house in Wilsonville and considering buying a condo in Portland.  This was about halfway between work and racing so it sounded logical to me.  Teresa pointed out some flaws in the plan: specifically where was I going to park since she would be taking my space.  Moreover it wasn’t what we really wanted; it wasn’t a sailboat.

I was a regular consumer of online boat-porn.  By which I mean I regularly looked at boat listings and dreamt of various boats that were listed.  I would ogle the photos and pour over the specs as if they were the centerfold of certain magazines.  By this time, we had done quite a bit of sailing and racing on different boats. This gave us a fairly broad perspective on the pros and cons of different configurations. 

And then it happened: A beautiful C&C 115 popped up within our targeted price range.  On paper, it checked a lot of the boxes that we were looking for in a boat.  It was a racer-cruiser with a tall rig and modern sail plan, yet it appeared to have enough comfort down below for us to make it our home.  We decided to take a look at her in person and decided that she was the one. 

The dream

We wanted to spend our lives sailing together with some ideas for very long trips.  The trouble with this is that we couldn’t afford to retire yet and no jobs would give us the kind of time off that it would take to do some of those trips.  We thought of doing a

YouTube channel, but decided that I would look terrible in a bikini and Teresa wasn’t going to do it for the cleavage clicks.

I guess we will have to do it the old fashioned way: work, save and invest.  We had a dream of 5 years, which was stupidly aggressive and we knew it.  7 years later, Teresa retired and I followed suit 6 months later.

In the meantime, we added a camper van to the dream which we would use for our first post-retirement trip.