At long last, we shake the cobwebs off the docklines

As I sit here in the creaky brown leather reading chair in my parent's living room, I contemplate the new concept that we are actually leaving, after many false starts, unwelcome setbacks and lots of good old-fashioned lagging. After more than 10 years of dreaming and scheming, the last 3 of that spent rebuilding and outfitting the boat, tomorrow marks the beginning of a new chapter for me, and hence, a blog. Early in the morning my brother Boz and I will awake, shower, shave and catch a ride with our dad to Pillar Point Harbor where Cadence II, my 37' sailboat awaits, packed and ready to go. With a forecast of sunny skies and 10-20kts. of wind (12-23mph), it should be a beautiful downwind sail all the way to Santa Cruz, where we'll anchor near the pier, cook up that frozen freschetta pizza I've been saving and wash it down with a bottle of celebratory wine. From there we sail to Southern California, and presuming all goes well, we'll be off to the South Pacific Islands sometime in the next couple of weeks, first stop the Marquesas islands in French Polynesia. After that, for as long as the money lasts, we'll go wherever the wind blows us (that hopefully means west, say, to New Zealand). In my experience, very little ever goes as planned with boats, but hopefully the powers that be will make an exception this time and we'll get off the mainland before May. Waiting much longer would mean facing northern hemisphere hurricane season as we make our way south. However, there's still a couple of projects that should be done before the big 'puddle-jump', and I look forward to knocking those out while at anchor under a warmer southern-california sky.

How I got us into this mess:

In my first year in college I got it into my big head that some of the greatest, most fascinating places to me were out on the open ocean where huge expanses of water rendered them largely inaccessible to most people, except those with boats or money to fly out and charter them. This intrigued me so, and having neither boat nor money, I fell sucker to the romantic notion that sailing the ocean blue to all of these exotic locales sounded grand indeed. It would of been much cheaper to have chosen the latter option, and I'd probably have a great tan by now. However far out of reach the notion of world cruising seemed, I decided I might as well learn to sail, because failing calculus due to incessant daydreaming and guitar playing was starting to bore me, and besides, UCSC offered free sailing lessons to students.














Some years later I found a cheap boat and in my scheming, realized that living on a small boat during college would save me enough in rent over two years to pay for the cost of the boat. It was a no-brainer, and besides, I like camping. That first boat was an Ericson 29, a fine coastal cruiser of a boat that would have taken me to Mexico for the winter and back about three times by now, or even across the Pacific, but I had the boat bug and fell in love with an old beautiful fixer-upper with beautiful lines and stout construction, ready to cross oceans. Or almost. I got a wonderful deal on her sold the Ericson to my now dear friend 'Halachee' Steve, and stepped aboard my new boat on the first hour of the new year, 2005. Cadence had been closed up for a while so she got a thorough bleaching sanding, scrubbing and pressure-washing, then a new interior paint-job. About then, my younger brother came into the project. He made Cadence look good. All that wood on the outside, he got her 'pimped out', per say. The engine wasn't installed so I rebuilt the engine beds and put it in, rebuilt the water system, redid the wiring, blah blah... We hauled out and he and I spent a month and a half in the boatyard grinding, epoxying, sanding and painting until her bottom was almost better than new. We added a battery charger, wind gen and solar panels. Three years later, and countless thousands of dollars later, I've been long out of college and we're long overdue for a change of latitude. Having to do it all over again, I may have just stuck with the Ericson, but on the other hand, we've got a bitchin' boat to go cruising in now, and it's my home, and our home for the next while. They say that a simple boat out cruising is better than a fancy boat tied to the bank. Cadence turned out to be a great balance between the two, both fancy-ish and relatively cheap by boat standards, and I probably learned as much rebuilding the boat as I did in 5+ years of college. I think a boat rebuild is something everybody should do. Once. (More than that would border on pathological.)

Now that we're finally off, I can get back to that guitar I've been neglecting for so long, and I've got lots and lots of reading to do. With the amount of books we've got onboard, Cadence is like the bookmobile of the sea. I'll be keeping a semi-regular blog of our progress so if you're interested, you can click on the subscribe link below and stay in touch, or just check in every now and then. Comments and questions are always welcome, and although I'll only be having sporadic internet access, I'll keep in touch as best as I can.