Headfirst

Sometimes, You Just Have To Go For It.

Rance had been joking for years that he wanted to buy a boat and “Captain Ron” our way down to Belize. But every time he said it, I would shake my head and reiterate that we couldn’t afford a boat, all of the maintenance, and the slip fees that come with owning it, on top of paying for an apartment. This was especially true after we’d moved to San Fransisco two years prior.

Since arriving in the city, we had spent all our time exploring, eating, and drinking our way through each area. We’ve always enjoyed visiting new places and had made getting to know everything about San Francisco our favorite pastime.

But COVID-19 changed all of that. With the city shut down and social distancing in full effect, we had only one logical option left. Live vicariously through others on YouTube.

We started out watching travel destination videos. Titles like Top Ten Places To Visit Before You Die, and Explore Incredible Australia! But the videos were a bit too curated for our taste. They were more like tourism board advertisements; we wanted the real deal, good and bad.

But then, an interesting thumbnail appeared in our feed titled What Does It Mean To Have Enough? It was about a young couple who had brought their sailboat to Panama from Florida, stopping by Cuba and Mexico along the way.

We were immediately hooked and began binge-watching their channel. The couple lived on their sailboat and traveled around, making money as they went. They called it cruising. We had no idea that people could do this.

Even though Rance had joked about finding a “Captain Ron” to take us to Belize, we didn’t realize you could live on a boat full-time. We weren’t boaters to begin with, and being from Michigan, this wasn’t something that had ever crossed our path.

We spent a couple of days binge-watching their channel and even found a few more sailboat cruising channels we wanted to watch. On October 31^st, I looked at Rance and said, “We could do this.” Obviously he’d been thinking the same thing because he immediately replied, “Yeah, we could!”

At that moment, we both knew we were going to buy a boat and go cruising. All that was left was logistics. We turned off the TV and took a walk to the waterfront, discussing what it would take to make our new plan happen along the way.

This might seem like a strange leap, but for us, it was the answer we had been looking for. Both of our children were now adults, and we had been trying for a few years to figure out a way to travel the world.

However, since we are not independently wealthy, we struggled to come up with a way to be nomadic while still being able to support ourselves. Frequent travel means paying for apartments, hotels, or other accommodations as well as expenses for airplanes, trains, food, medicine, etc.

While many of these same expenses exist when you live on your boat, a few of the really big ones aren’t as heavy of a burden. We could live on the boat and anchor for free or at a minimal cost in most places. Aside from plane tickets back to the United States to see family and friends, we would sail to places we wanted to travel to, saving on many travel expenses. We would still need to make money to support ourselves, but the amount we would need would be much more manageable.  

So we went all in. Within two weeks of making our decision, we had made a five-year plan, set up an appointment to see some boats, and figured out how much it would cost to get a liveaboard slip in a marina so we could immediately move aboard the boat and get rid of our apartment.

On November 11^th, we put an offer in on a 42-foot sailboat, and after negotiations, surveys, and waiting on red tape, we brought the boat to our new home (marina) on December 25th. We were completely moved onboard by mid-January and had immersed ourselves in boat life.

We had a lot to do in the next five years to make our plan succeed. We would need to save money, outfit the boat with all of the equipment we needed to go offshore and figure out how to support ourselves along the way. And, of course, there was one other small issue we would have to address before we left because...neither of us knew how to sail.

Headfirst Part 2

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