Help me plan!

[ATCPinto]

My wife and I are approximately 3-5 years away from starting our retirement on a sailboat. We plan to remain in the Caribbean for at least one year before making the Pacific passage, or perhaps the Atlantic passage - ultimate goal is circumnavigation. I obsessively search for boats and don't want to turn this into a debate on the particulars of boat types, so will leave that for a different day...I've come up with a budget (two actually - one for buying a boat, the other for cruising expenses), bought some books on Caribbean cruising as well as Nigel Calder's book on boat maintenance which I've read almost in its entirety.

What are some other things we could be doing???

[psk125]

Lots of time to read, then.
Coles’ Heavy Weather Sailing (some techniques perhaps dated)
Dashew’s Circumnavigator’s Handbook (common sense and logic prevail)
Moitessier’s The Long Way (A cautionary tale? He left his wife and child...)
Conrad’s The Mirror of the Sea (philosophical and metaphorical)
Knight’s Atlantic Circle (A woman’s point of view. Well written and candid.)
Knox-Johnston A World of My Own (quite)
Roth’s Two On A Big Ocean and After 50,000 Miles (How HE did it. She came along too.)
Rousmaniere’s Fastnet Force 10 (What can go wrong)
Anything by the Pardey’s. (Fun, on their terms.)
Hiscock’s Two Yachts, Two Voyages (outlines how different designs impact results)
CCA: Desirable and Undesirable Characteristics of Offshore Yachts (succinct and to the point)

[LittleWing77]

Sorry if this sounds harsh, but stop reading and start sailing.

Fair winds,
LittleWing77

[tkeithlu]

Do both. Read when you can't sail. Realize that the one year may be very optimistic, and staying in the Carrbbean may not equip you for higher latitude messy sailing. Perhaps a coastal run to New England and back is in order.

Leave room for deciding that you can have all the experiences you want in less than a circumnavigation, or that one of you may not really like the deprivations that can come with it.

I'm not saying don't dream. Make as much of that dream as satisfies you come true. Do tell the rest of us about it.

[ATCPinto]

Great stuff - thanks for the reading list...I wish I could leave it all right now and start sailing but two factors prohibit it: I'm still active duty military (18 months from 26 year retirement) and I don't have the funds to buy our desired boat outright yet. We plan on using this boat as our snowbird home after a long sailing journey, and as a pensioner, need to have no mortgages...I'll be 49 when I retire from the military and if I save aggressively, I can have enough for our dream boat in 5 years.

If there's a better way - I'm all ears!

[JPA Cate]

Plan B: by a 30 ft. keel boat (like a Yankee 30 or a Catalina 30 of some antiquity) and sail it almost every weekend for a year. Sell it for about what you paid for it. If you and your good lady still like sailing, start crewing in club races for different skippers. Learn what you like and don't like in boats, and skippers. Use that knowledge to inform your choices when it comes time to look for the next boat, and do not anticipate it will be the only boat. We kept our 36 footer for 18 years, before we bought this one. Enjoy.

It really is important to get sailing. It is important to have the fun of it, to help you put up with the times when it isn't very fun. It is important to learn about boat handling, and I would encourage your wife to learn separately from you, because you'll inevitably learn complementary things, and there's good evidence women learn sailing better when they learn separately from their spouses. Not always true, of course, but that approach does eliminate a lot of difficult spousal interactions. Ymmv.

The sailing is the easier part, learning good seamanship is more important, and also picking up a multitude of maintenance skills, mechanic-ing, electrician-ing, plumbing, as well as bottom painting and varnishing. Lots to learn about line, rigging, and materials....and you can start reading CF threads on anchors, and Col-regs. There's also a CF thread, written by a surveyor, called Survey 101, that will help, comes the time you're ready to go boat shopping.

Cheers, guys, and have fun with it. The fun part is really important.

Ann