In the Summer of 2000, Rod tore an ad for a Caribbean charter company out of an international business magazine. It was the picture that caught his attention, not so much the charter company. A 45 foot catamaran anchored in turquoise blue waters off of a white sand beach in some amazingly tropical location. He pinned that picture to the wall of his corporate cubicle and his fantasy wheels started to slowly turn. He left that job a few years later and along with his GAAP books and Chinese language tapes, that torn out magazine page was packed up and brought home. By that time we had purchased a 1995 Hunter 26 and were sailing on our nearby reservoirs and lakes. We figured if we were going to “sail away” someday, we better learn how to sail. Call us crazy.
In the Fall of 2003, after subscribing to numerous cruising magazines and investing a small fortune in books on All Things Sailing, we established a departure date of Fall 2005. We had two years to meet our self-imposed financial goals and find a boat to serve our needs. Rod did all of the boat research and he did it really well. He and the Internet were very close and I was insanely jealous. In the last year of our boat search Rod had contacted some brokers to establish relationships so they could help us out. We were pretty sure that Boise, Idaho wasn’t going to offer the kind of boat we were looking for. We ended up finding our boat in Tampa, FL with the help of a wonderful broker, Stan Dabney of Offshore Atlantic Yachts, in the Spring of 2005. Fortunately, we were ahead in reaching our financial goals so we were going to move ahead with the boat purchase and face the ensuing dominoes that were to fall from that decision: selling our house, selling most of our possessions, stepping away from our careers, leaving our family and friends, and moving across country to make the biggest change in our lives that we were yet to experience.
Moral of this short story: we established a goal and worked toward it. We are professional, working class people that have faith in our employability and are willing to take a chance at leaving our careers to breathe deep, live life, and grow from our experiences outside an office.