Last day of sailing for a while, We are retiring in May and we'll be back down to the Keys in June.

So today we have to put the boat "on the hard" (dry dock).
Then we need to go back to Colorado and sell the house and work for a while. I will be picking this blog up when we come back down in June.

We had a good night the last night. We saw dolphins, A mother and a calf, they swam around the boat next to ours for about 10 minutes,
I switched the dingy from the rear to a side attachment but I must have not done a good job because the dingy got away last night. We looked around for a little while and found someone else picked up the dingy and had it attached to there boat. So we got our dingy back.

We got the boat into the dry dock without much trouble and then we just closed it up.
I'm sorry I have to leave the boat, But I'm looking forward to coming back down in June. 
 

I finally got my own sign in working to add to this blog. Thanks for the help Karen. From now on both Karen and I will have our own posts in this blog. So you can tell who is writing.

2nd day sailing

February 9th,  80 degrees. 7:30 at night

Today was a trying day, but I still would rather be sailing than back on the main land.
I found out that I blew out my starter on the port side engine. It had overheated the other day because it didn't have enough coolant in it. By the time I figured that out I had burnt out the starter.

The dingy engine also needs some work. One of the plastic gears is shot. This is the one used when you pull the starting cord and it engages the main fly wheel, it was chewed up. So I will need to get a new one of them.

Also I ran aground today, that was fun. but we found that two dingy's operating at full engine speed are enough to pull a 32 foot catamaran off of some shallow mud. Thanks to the folks that pulled me out of the shallows.

The good news is we sailed 6 hours and made it to Boot Key. The weather was really nice and we had a great sail.

Our first day sail

Wow what a day. We stayed the night off Taverneir on anchor. We got up pretty early so we could sail towards Marathon.  When we went to put up the mainsail we didn't realize the rope wasn't attached to the mainsail until it was too late.  The clasp was almost all the way up the mast. Now what do we do???  Wes tried to climb up but could only get about halfway up. So the only way up is to use the boatsman and I was the lucky one that got to go up. It was going good until the winch that the rope was tied around snapped off and flew into the water and I started to drop.  Needless to say I wasn't able to get the rope but I did get down safe.  Then while we were trying all of this the port side engine overheated and wouldn't run.  Ryan (the previous owner) has helped us tremendously-thank goodness and he explained another way to get the mainsail up which worked and we were able to head towards Marathon.
When we stopped for the evening in a nice quiet bay off Long Key and we were getting ready to try to go up the mast again Wes noticed that the line had worked its way down low enough where we could hook it. Nice ending to the day.

Picked up the boat today. Feb 7th; temp 84, Tavernier, FL

One day in September, my wife Karen and I were sitting in the Old Spaghetti Factory having a nice dinner; the Colorado State Rams had just given away a game to the Colorado Buffalo's, when a thought hit me. I did not want to work at my job any more.  It was actually a little profound.  I tried to image what my life would be like if I took a different way. How about sailing?

I sat there and looked at my wife, we had talked about retiring on a catamaran in the Caribbean, but we were not ready to do that financially yet. At least I didn’t think we were ready.  That didn’t seem to matter to me at that moment. So I announced to her that I was going to retire, or something like retire, and buy a boat and move to the Caribbean. To my surprise she simply said “when can we go”. “When can we go”, this took me a little by surprise. When could we go?   We have to sell the house, I have to tell my boss, they need some time to replace me. We have several hundred small details to take care of. But this time next year I want to be in the Caribbean. I think we will shoot for next April. But as long as I’m living in the Caribbean next September I will be happy.  If I’m lucky I can work part time as a builder for our project while we are down there.

So I was going sailing, it’s not like sailing was a life time dream.  In fact I had never really sailed a boat until seven years before this. That was in 2007. At that time some acquaintances from Karen’s work were going on a bareboat sailing trip to the BVI’s and one of the couples that was supposed to go could not make it. Karen asked me if I was interested. That seemed like a dumb question. Someplace warm in October, with rum, to sail around for 10 days. I think I could handle that. What I didn’t know was just how much fun that was.  I loved every minute of it, the diving, the snorkeling, and the dinners.  The actual sailing was one of the best things. After that we went on two more trips and I started thinking that we need to learn how to do this ourselves.  So I booked Karen and me a trip to learn to sail. We took that and passed the test. We were “CAPTAINS”.   At least we were after I rented a boat in the Grenadines and sailed for eight days. That’s when I also started thinking that this may be a good thing to do for retirement.

As I said it surprised me that my wife was so supportive.   I didn’t know if that was just because she didn’t think I was serious or she really wanted to do this. I think at first that she didn’t believe me. But after it sank in I think she really wanted to do this. She is a banker, which is not the most glamorous job, I should talk being a programmer, but she had been working in banking for 34 years and I think she wanted the break.  Anyway we both agreed that we would be going on a sail boat in the Caribbean by this time next year.

Tuesday came and I still had the same feeling.  I was at work and I figured now was as good a time as any to let them know. I went to management and told them that I was looking to retire or work remotely about 10 hours a week. But the real thing is I want to be sailing in the Caribbean by this time next year.   I think one of my managers was a little surprised because he asked how old I was. I told him I was 50. He said that was awful young to retire.  I think he was wondering if this would be a trend. I said it wasn’t the years, it was the mileage.  Beside I want to do this while I could enjoy it.

I have three kids and we had just married off our youngest daughter. My son and Karen’s daughter had bought a house the year before so there was nothing really to keep us in Colorado.  So now was the time to go. We aren’t “supposed” to have any grandkids for at least three years. So far that is holding up.

Management came back and said that they couldn’t offer me remote part time work. Now I really had to think.  I had already decided that I was going. Nothing was going to change that, but I had to re-run some numbers and figure out if we could still afford this move. We figured that if we got an average of 4% on our retirement and that we spent less than 100 grand on our boat purchase that we should be able to sail for quite a while. We may have to work again someday but that is something we will figure out someday.

Now I had to find a boat. I searched the internet and pretty much settled on a boat in Florida. Karen was set on a catamaran and that was the only reasonably equipped cat that was under 100 grand that I could find. So in November we went down to Florida.  We looked at the boat, we sailed the boat and we bought the boat. Well we put a down payment on the boat. That brings us to today. We are headed to Florida to pick up our boat.  The rest of this should be more like regular blogging with weekly  updates etc.