Hi,
I have been lurking and making a couple of random post. I wanted to Make an
introduction.
I grew up in KY, never saw a sailboat until a moved to
New England. The first time I was able to sail on an 17' Oday on Lake Sunapee in NH I was hooked.
My partner Art and I have been sailing for over 20 years, we started out with sailboards and friends Laser, Sun
Fish and small day sailers on NH lakes. We then graduated to cruising around Boston Harbor with an occasional trip to
Martha's Vineyard, P-Town, or CuttyHunk on a friends Freedom 32. We are now fortunate to be sailing on an
Oyster 54. This is our 3rd Mahina Kai. We started with a
Hunter 34, and then a
Hunter 410 we had built in 2002. Finally we purchased the
Oyster in 2010. We mostly do costal cruising with an occasional
offshore overnight on our way to
Maine. We sail from early May through the end of October. We are pretty much out on the
boat every weekend in the summer (unless there is a Hurricane). We do a lot of 3-4 day weekends, 1 week to P-town for 4th of July, and usually 2 weeks in
Maine the beginning of August. We usually put 1000 nm a season on the
boat.
This year we made a 32 hour run from Gloucester to Roque Island, ME.
Our goal is to start using Mahina Kai, for what she was made to do,
water sailing">blue
water sailing. We plan to start getting her ready for doing a trip to
Bermuda, and then a
winter in the
Caribbean.
Work is the one activity that prevents the time to do even more sailing.
From a
training perspective, we have both completed the
Safety at Sea seminar, US Coast Guard Auxiliary safe
boating class, and I have completed all the
ASA classes for bare boat
charter way back in my youth. We learned to sail the
New England coast in the
fog when we thought a
Loran was a pretty fancy tool to have for
navigation. The
current year Eldridge is always on the boat.
Hopefully it gives you an idea of our sailing experience and goals, we basically just like being on the boat and going places. We have never been into the
racing scene unless it's watching the J-boats or the old 12 meters in
Newport harbor. Most of our experience has been in the Boston area. 2 years ago we starting berthing the boat in Portsmouth, RI at NEB, and have been exploring that area.