Hi!
I'm Sarah, and living in Port Moody, BC a suburb of
Vancouver BC. My boyfriend and I just bought our first "big"
boat, and the
boat which will hopefully take us across blue oceans. We're in our late twenties, and the plan is to
head off to the wild blue yonder in 2014 or 2015 to the
South Pacific, and beyond. We've both spend our lives around
boats, but are fairly new to owning one ourselves. We had (well technically still have, as she's not
sold yet) a older 24'
race boat. We finally accepted that there were only so many projects we could add to that boat, and alas she remained only 24'. Explorations further afield would require significant additions (fuel,
water,
battery power. etc.) and it made more sense to simply move up to the size we wanted now.
The new girl is Wildheart, a 1976 Douglas 32. She's a heavy cruiser, with a
full keel with a forefoot cutout. Somewhat remarkably, she still
sails beautifully. She's well mannered, balances well, and is a joy in heavier
weather (not that we've seen much yet!) Structurally, she's in great shape, though needing some love and attention, and extensive additions. I'm a very lucky gal in that the other half of this venture is an incredibly handy
mechanic, with a background in the
marine industry; we hope that all of the projects (excluding standing
rigging and sails) will be able to handled by the two of us. Hopefully this will keep costs to the merely cringe-worthy, as compared to panic-causing.
As the months pass, we'll have a variety of questions about
equipment choices and
installation options, skills to learn, places to visit,
living aboard before we
head off cruising, tips on not trying to intentionally throw each other
overboard and general
advice on "livin' the life".
Here's coming home from the August Long weekend crossing the
Georgia Straight just W of Porlier Pass. Please disregard the poor sail shape; we were pinching to try and round the boat that took this picture. (which is a
Cal 27 I think, and which we spanked btw

)We also had too much sail up, as we have no headsail
furling yet, and we were experimenting with keeping our massive
dinghy on the foredeck. We discovered that having that
dinghy there meant that access to the forestay to change headsails just wasn't going to happen. Yes, we were being lazy. tsk tsk. Lesson: perhaps have the smaller headsail up ahead of time!
Looking forward to the
advice this board has to offer!