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So, where to begin...
Bob and I grew up in different towns in Sullivan County, NY. Even
though we didn't know each other growing up, during our teenage years we both spent our weekends on Swinging Bridge Lake boating and waterskiing with our families. [...] We married in 1994, and in 1995 decided to buy our first boat, a 19' Chris Craft bowrider, to waterski and take the kids tubing on that very same lake. One weekend we wanted to take the boat on the Hudson River, and coming out of Rondout Creek (where we launched the boat) and heading out into the river the waves were coming over the bow! Our boat was too small for this river! After screaming my head off to turn around because I thought we were going to sink the boat and drown, we knew we needed a bigger boat. The next year, we purchased a 27' Chris Craft, which we named "Funds Aweigh" because that's where our money was going...away. We spent almost every weekend on the boat that summer, even taking a trip with the kids up the Hudson River and through the canal to Lake Champlain. We enjoyed spending time on the Rondout Creek and Hudson River every weekend, so the year after that we purchased a 32' Donzi cabin cruiser, which we named "Outta Control" because we were really out of control at this point. In 3 years we purchased 3 boats...crazy!!!...we were hooked. We took some great trips on the Donzi, down the river to Liberty Landing Marina in NJ to watch the fireworks in NYC, to the Long Island Sound, stopping in Montauk, LI, Block Island, Essex, CT, Mystic, CT, and all the way up to Hyannis, MA. In 1998, we went on a crewed sailboat charter vacation (with The Moorings--best vacation ever!!) in the British Virgin Islands and fell in love with sailing. We wanted to learn how to sail, so the next year we found Captain Dave on the S/V Glory out of St. Croix in the USVI who taught us how to sail and gave us a bareboat certification which allowed us to charter a sailboat by ourselves without a captain (pretty scary at first, but we got the hang of it!). We chartered many sailboats the next couple of years in the USVI and BVI, and this started our dream of someday living aboard a sailboat. In 2002, we purchased a Lagoon 410 Catamaran, named her "Bedazzle", and put it with a charter company in Belize. We kept the boat there for a little over 2 years, spending our winter vacations on it, and while we loved Belize and cannot wait to get back there, in 2005 we had to move the boat to the British Virgin Islands. Our hopes were to ultimately live aboard, but unfortunately, things didn't work out the way we planned and had to sell her in 2006.
Over the years, we chartered some more, but never gave up our dream. Within this past year, things finally started to fall into place, and we began our search for our new home. In October 2015, we purchased a 2006 Tayana 48 Deck Salon (to be renamed "Oasis"), which was sitting in Rock Hall, Maryland. Soon after closing, we moved her down to Zahniser's Yachting Center in Solomons, Maryland, to be refitted, and we are waiting for her to be put in the water so that
we can move aboard.
And that is where our blog starts. Welcome to our journey!
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