Here’s to something new

As some of you might know, over a year ago we signed a contract for a new Fountaine Pajot 40 foot Catamaran. What we were thinking at the time I am really not sure, since neither one of us knew anything about sailing. But the idea of learning something new together was intriguing, seeing different parts of the world by way of the water was exciting, and joining the elite club of the sailing world seemed adventurous. For anyone that knows us, we are not patient people and we already had our list of islands to visit and trips we wanted to take.

Once we were assigned our hull number (23), we had a timeline of the proposed handover date. Mike will write more about this I am sure in one of his technical blogs, I will focus on the fun stuff :). So by our timeline we were expecting to have our new Lucia 40 in our possession sometime in September. Lucky for me this timing worked out perfectly, since October is my favorite month of the year. There are a lot of great things that happen this month…my birthday, our wedding anniversary, and this year it just so happens that Adele was playing in Miami 1 day after my birthday. This sounded like a perfect birthday present in my opinion. So in order to convince Mike of my opinion, I might have mentioned that we could sail to Miami and make a great first trip with this new catamaran that we now own. Since we have been together for 18 years, I knew he wouldn’t say no!

The planning began, research on anchorages, marinas we might want to stay out, deciding how many days we needed to get from St. Pete to Miami. To be honest it was all pretty overwhelming for me at the time. I just wanted to go sail.

Well eventually a year went by, quicker than I realized actually, and the next thing I knew I was on our boat. All that planning now became reality and I was learning to study anchorages based on wind direction, how skinny the waters might be, places dogs can go, what groceries were needed, and of course how much wine could I pack before Mike would start to tell me no more.

I will write more about the actual trip in another post because there is so much that we need to catch up on and a lot has happened between that memorable day of signing on the dotted line as a bunch of novice sailors…to where we are today feeling like the sailing life is second nature.

We have had some trying moments, scary times, maybe an argument or two. But we have also learned a lot, logged in some serious sailing hours, seen some pretty amazing sights, met some fun people, and have some great stories to tell.