New to forum - a landlubber here to learn :)

[black_sails]

Hello, I heard about this forum on some random radio show where someone was talking about it, so I bookmarked it, and wandered back to lurk around a bit and finally make an account to 'keep my feet wet'. By which I mean i'm living in minnesota, in my young 40's and stuck a long way aways from lifelong dreams of sailing around the world on the ocean visiting all seven continents.

And before I get further, no i'm not a pirate, yes i'm a fan of the Stars TV show and i'm amazed nobody took the name yuet. :^) And yes i'm not ashamed to admit that it helped rekindle things i've been fascinated with since childhood. (no, still not the piracy!)

My on water experience is pretty minimal - I live in the land of 10,000 lakes but I don't really consider going out on ~14 foot fishing boats under calm conditions to "really count". Work and 'second career' college is going to keep me away from even the Great Lakes for probably a decade yet and i'm mostly saving for what I hope is an early retirement - if I started doing what i've always wanted to do sometime in my 50's (instead of my late 60's like everyone else) i'll be content. And my chances for legitimate hardcore sailing experience and cruising the world is going to be pretty minimal until then. So I need something to remind me and put my head in the game, thinking about the future, or as I say "keeping my feet wet".

I know there are people that "live the dream" right now - maybe in their 30's, athletic, no responsibilities, buying an old boat to fix up and then just DO it... but right now i'm kind of stuck on all counts. So it literally is just a dream right now unless alot of things change. A dream I may be working towards, but still just a dream. One that cannot trump reality or family responsibilities or everything else I do. But rather a dream which i'm hoping will slowly grow and increase over time to motivate, educate, and maybe when the time is right even help open some doors. At the minimum I hope to be armed with knowledge! Well before I get my legs wet. (and again in my book if I can see land it doesn't count, I might have a few Great Lakes adventures some summer in a vacation over the next decade, but i'm pretty well aware that sailing the salty blue is not going to happen until retirement, and i'm primarily going to be working towards that retirement.)


And i'm well aware that my dreams could change between now and then too. Maybe i'll work towards it, save up for it, find my first steps outside of land too faltering, too difficult to maintain (if not recovered from certain injuries and stuff that make me fail the 'athletic' part of the spectrum), and similar. But that doesn't change that right here and now I still have an itch to scratch that doesn't seem to be going away, and spending my time thinking, planning, asking about, even engineering solutions for problems I may never encounter is the best thing I can think of to help keep my salty sanity right now. So i'll probably be here lurking for years, with remarkably little real world experience, hoping i'm not TOO stupid, or stepping on too many toes out of my ignorance, but still maybe even contributing something back from knowledge or research I have elsewhere that's useful to someone here so it's not just a one way interaction of take take take on my part, even if it takes me awhile to figure out exactly what that will even be.

Alot of my questions may even be a bit wierd, theoretical, pie-in-the-sky, or at the minimum outside of my budget to implement... alot of that is just me mentally playing. (what they call 'bench racing' in hot rodding terms, you drive a Miata but youre always talking about that 2000hp 3rd gen Firebird you want to make go 7's) Hard to keep my feet on the ground sometimes when the only ground I have is thousands of miles from the ocean so my mind will drift all over places in my imagination that it probably wouldn't if i'd just spent a few hundred hours at sea first to have a better compass of whats what. Just letting people know that in advance...


Well that's probably enough for the most basic of first intros or you'll be reading forever. :-P Other than sometimes i'm a bit of a private person and don't like to nail down RL too much over 'internet forums' with people I don't feel I know yet.

See ya!

[GordMay]

Greetings and welcome aboard the CF, black sails.

[HappyMdRSailor]

Welcome to CF Black sails!

Here's to hoping you feel like one of us in short order...

To maybe speed things along... Start living in your bathroom with a small cooler... put a sheet of plywood on the floor with a small round log under the center... And sleep in your tub with the showerhead set to a small cold drip landing on your face every 30 seconds... bonus points for an inner ear hit...

Have fun here and don't hesitate to ask questions!