Suddenly Sailing - Part 1

Just over two weeks ago, for reasons that are quite complicated – which I’ll elaborate on in future posts, my fiancé and I have decided to become liveaboards. Which would be well and fine if we had been brought up sailors or sailed as a hobby or really, were anything more than a couple of gaming landlubbers who hold desk jobs and make pretty average wages.

So, we’re in for a challenge. One that I figure will amuse some, be laughable to others, and maybe even inspire a few souls out there. So, as I’m able, when I have the time and energy (which I’ve got very little of at the moment), I’ll be blogging about it.

What have we been up to the last 2 weeks? Learning – lots and lots of learning. We live in Seattle, and know nothing of boats. So, we’ve been diving into books and blogs and an online safety course, emailing marinas and finding coworkers and remote connections that might be able to impart bits of invaluable knowledge on us.

What we’ve done so far:

• Decided we want to live on a sailboat that can sail.
• Read The Essentials of Living Aboard a Boat, Revised & Updated
• Completed a free online course through the Boat U.S. Foundation for Washington’s State’s mandatory Boat Education Card.
• Read a lot of blog articles and forum posts about living aboard – links to come.
• Enrolled in an ASA 101 course at a nearish-by sailing school
• Bought tickets to the Seattle Boats Afloat show that included an intro sailing course, then realized we were going to enroll in the ASA 101 course and ended up refunding the intro lessons with the help of the incredibly considerate staff of the show, so that we could just go to the show. With this many moving parts, there are bound to be some hiccups and snafus.
• Looked at basically every sailboat listing in the area.
• Begun downsizing around the house.

So, right now on the horizon we have our first proper sailing lesson, and our objective of checking out as many boats in person as possible. And on that note, it’s back to studying sailing terminology and practicing knots for me.

More to come soon!
If you have any questions for me, or just want to hang out with some cool folks, feel free to hop on the Creaturista Discord server!