Let me start out with – No.  I’m not always going to put Our Current Somethingorother in the title.  It’s cheesy, I know.  But it entertains me for now, so I’m going with it.  🙂

Wanna know how we’ve ended up searching for a catamaran?  Or wanting to eventually live on a boat in general?  Well, it was actually a pretty drawn out process.  Snuggle in, this post will be longer than most.

About a year ago my most fabulous husband came home from his job (which he loves, by the way, regardless of his occasional grumblings) in a foul mood.  Now, I’m sort of a sponge of a person. If someone is happy, I’ll soak it up.  And that’s lovely – energizing, really, and it makes me want to be around that person more and more.  But if they’re negative or grouchy or mean – well, it’s just draining.  It sucks the life right out of me.  This took me years to figure out, and now I’m very particular about who I spend my free time with.  Considering we’ve been married for almost 17 years, I don’t see me cutting him loose just because he’s in a bad mood.  I had to do something.

We started talking about fun things to do – jobs that we could love so much that we would jump out of bed each day to get started.  An Un-Job, if you will.  And  that got the ball rolling.  We’d discussed living on a boat for eons.  But it was always just a  passing comment here or there.  Now that we were Seriously Discussing it, we started looking at boats and talking/researching all of the ways that someone could truly live on a boat.   I started following blogs – one in particular (ZTC) – that really made it clear that it was possible.  We zoomed all over town looking at the boats in the marinas, and decided we’d go with a trawler.  They’re an economical choice, and as we both have smaller power boat experience, we thought it’d be pretty similar to zipping around in our wakeboarding boat – just bigger…

We kept on this path for several months.  We would occasionally hit our favorite websites or drive thru the local marinas to see what was available.  I started Culinary school in January, and he got back to work on his scuba certifications.  Along with his MBA and my fitness certifications, we wanted to be sure we had some marketable skills.  But we were still biding our time, not really making any major decisions regarding The Plan.  Keeping in mind we could live on a boat tomorrow, but the retirement/work part has to wait.

Then March arrived.  I was diagnosed with super early (stage 0) breast cancer.  I’d been tested for a decade, and was not surprised when the positive diagnoses happened.  I had a double mastectomy a few weeks later and am currently in the middle of reconstruction.

The Diagnosis seemed to throw a wrench in our planning.  I had to finish up the semester early.  I had to stop working on my 200hr yoga certification (you’d be amazed how many yoga moves require pectoral muscles!) and we had to focus all of our attention on my healing.

As always – there was a silver lining.  I have time.  So, SO much time.  I’ve been researching like crazy.  I found more blogs (Bumfuzzle, Slapdash, etc) – and these people were all on catamarans!  We hadn’t even considered a sail boat.  We don’t sail.  We use motors and gas and whatnot.  I brought it up and we discussed it – and thought Why Not?! If we can learn to do all of these other things, we can learn to sail.

We looked into monohull designs very briefly.  When we realized we could get so much more square footage in a shorter length boat, we decided to check out catamarans.  That meant more research.  Thank goodness I love the internet and have so much free time these days!

As you may’ve seen in a post from a few days ago, we headed down to St. Augustine to actually board about a dozen different sizes/models of cats.  We love them.  I realize the plan could change again, but for now we are 99% sure a cat is for us.

There are about a zillion Gemini’s out there – and at a decent price range, relatively speaking.  We saw one Saturday and felt like it could work if we go purely liveaboard.  But what if I want to get a 6pack and do some day charters around Savannah?  Probably not ideal.  We also saw a 38′ Lagoon – and several others.  I was AMAZED by how “4 little feet” could make such a huge difference in living space.  Basically, we’re still searching. We’re still weighing our options, doing our research and enjoying this beautiful city we currently live in.  While plans are fabulous, we still want to enjoy the here and now.

What are your dreams?  Any you think are “crazy” or un-doable?  And how are you enjoying your Here and Now?  I’d love to hear/read your thoughts, so get busy with those comments.  🙂

About Author

Jennifer

Artist, food nerd, SUP/yoga enthusiast and travel obsessed blogger – chronicling the process of going from land to sea. Selling all of her worldly possessions so that she can set sail into the sunset with her husband and two dachshunds – searching for that next sunrise paddle. Follow along. It’ll be fun 🙂

See author's posts