| Profile for S/V Ruth | |||
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| Captain: | Al & Jennifer | ||
| Hailing Port: | Collins Bay Kingston Ontario | ||
| Home Page: | http://www.sailblogs.com/member/ruth | ||
| The Crew: | It's all about having FUN. We would love to hear from other Redwing owners, & any others for that matter. suggestions or comments are more than welcome. | ||
| Something Extra: |
About the crew. ( Author Jennifer ) In reality the crew consists of Alistair (Al), Jennifer is the fluff!!. Here is our story in first person. Al and I are a new relationship having met early last march 2007. On January 2006 I (Jennifer) at age 47 survived a stroke. This left me paralyzed on my left side. I spent 3 � months in a rehabilitation hospital (St. Mary�s of the lake) in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, where I relearned how to talk, walk and live life as a one arm/handed person. During my hospital stay my husband of 28 years was diagnosed with terminal cancer and he passed away in early December 2006. Al and I met in March 2007 and it was pretty much love at first sight. Al was an avid sailor; I had never set foot on a sailboat in my life. Al had a dream of returning to a boating life in the Carribean. Having lived through two challenging years, I decided that I would be pleased to be part of his dream, and Al was happy to take me on, with my limited abilities. Because I still have ongoing private physiotherapy and with my determination and spirit for living, I am not as disabled as you might think. I walk fairly normally now and have remarkable balance on the boat, and I am most excited and proud of the amount of mobility I have gained back in my lefty hand and arm. I now talk well, my cognition is good, I still have some slow mental processing. But all in all to the untrained eye you would not even know there was anything wrong with me. I still have limited dexterity for fine motor skills but gross motor skills are still improving. So for any stroke survivors, who might be reading this, know that anything is possible. Your health care providers will paint a grim prognosis but I am proof that desire, optimism and even stubbornness can prove them wrong. Although I will admit to having many moments of frustration and feeling somewhat hopeless, I was determined that this bump in my life road was not going to ruin what life I had left. So in June of last year Al and I started our search for a suitable boat, one that I could learn on. We found our pretty boat on eBay, of all places. Since it was only about 200 miles from where we live we went to see her condition. Since I had zero boat purchasing knowledge I left that completely to Al and totally trusted his judgement. After watching the new man in my life methodically inspecting every nook and cranny of this vessel in front of us �he deemed her to be a great find and worthy of the money we would put forth to make her ours. We won the bid on eBay and moved her to her new home in Kingston.After a couple of overnight voyages, it was immediately evident that although i was an eager learner, my limitations as a beginner would need to be assessed and addressed. This started Al�s earliest modifications of making Ruth more single-handed sailable. It seemed that one modification lead to desires to upgrade Ruth to be the best and safest she could be. So now our goal is to ready Ruth and me for a Bahamas adventure sometime in the future.�I will now let you read the ongoing mods authored by Al. I�m sure I will poke my head in from time to time. |
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| Vessel Make/Model: | C&C Redwing 33' | ||
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