'The owl and the pussycat went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat. They took some money, and plenty of honey, wrapped up in a five-pound note...they sailed away for a year and a day, to the land where the Bong-tree grows...and hand in hand, on the edge of the sand they danced by the light of the moon.' snippets from an Edward Lear nursery rhyme


Some newly weds dream of starting families, others of amassing wealth and possessions. From the day we were married our dream was to live on a sailboat, someday sailing away to tropical, gritty and exotic ports.

Any dream worth its salt needs a good set of teeth in the form of a plan. So during the course of all that daydreaming we needed to work hard, earn money and learn to sail. Adopting the mantra in the title of the book by Richard Bode, First You Have To Row A Little Boat, Becky attended sailing classes, learning on a 13' Sunfish. Ken got his feet wet racing, as crew, on a San Juan 24.

We bought our first little sailboat, a San Juan 26, a year after we wed. She was the perfect boat on which to learn. She was tender, she was responsive, she was cheap, and, to our dismay, she became engineless soon after we brought her home-a good thing disguised as a bad one. Not having the funds to repair her outdated inboard we were faced with either staring at her tied off our houseboat or learning to maneuver her, by sail alone, out of the slip against a strong current, into a busy narrow channel, out onto the mighty Columbia, and then back into her slip behind the houseboat. We took the later option-and sail her we did. Every day that summer, and for many summers after, we took her, sans engine, out to play. Sometimes for the evening, sometimes for the weekend, whenever we could, as often as we could. And we learned to sail...really, really well!

By 1990 we graduated to a bigger boat. In the days before Internet we scoured cruising rags knowing we wanted a center cockpit ketch around 38 feet, but little else. If Ken found anything remotely interesting he'd call the broker for details. In May the fax came in on the boat of our dreams. We took an overnight road trip down to southern Cal to see her and bought her after the sea trial. Polaris was her name and with her purchase our dream grew legs.

We shipped our 37' Northern to Oregon, and proceeded to give her very little time off during the precious days of brief northwest summers. For ten more years we worked harder, dreamed louder, paid off our debts, and waited for the day when we could shed our ties and set our sails south.

That day came in August of 2001. After seventeen years of dreaming we had sold our houseboat, our stuff, our businesses, said good-bye to friends and family, and untied our dock lines. We traveled down the Columbia River to its mouth and, once on the Pacific, hung that long awaited left!

A fast and furious decade of voyaging found us gunk-holing down the Pacific Coast to Ensenada, MX, skirting the U.S. Gulf coast twice, planting our boat name on many a bar wall in the Florida Keys and atop Boo-Boo Hill in the Bahamas, motoring up the ICW to Georgia's Barrier Islands, anchoring off Miami's glamorous South Beach, basking in warmth and merriment for months in Mexico's Isla Mujeres, exploring every nook and cranny of Belize, Guatemala and Honduras, renewing our passion for Mexico five years later in Puerto Morelos, finally returning to the southern US for some much needed TLC in 2010 before frolicking once again in the crystalline waters in the Exuma chain of the Bahamas last season.

Throughout we discovered the exhilaration of having no homeport, only the next anchorage, with all its possibilities. We own little, but ooze with the richness of experiences. Thoreau was right on when he wrote, "The person with the fewest possessions is the freest."

From the onset of cruising, we are often asked how long we intend to do this crazy thing. Our answer has always been the same - as long as we're having fun. After a decade of living our dream, that time has come. It isn't really that we're no longer having fun. Oh my goodness, we are! We just don't get the same adrenaline rush we used to get at the start of each season. Bob Bitchin says, "The difference between an adventure and an ordeal is attitude." And so it seems that after ten years our attitude towards cruising has changed. What was once an amazing adventure now more often seems like an ordeal.

How do we bring our treasured dream to a gracious close? We stop cruising while we still love the life and the boat. Polaris has tenderly released us and is now on the market from a berth in SE Florida. She has been a valiant little vessel and a hardy companion and she still has much spunk left. But it's time for her to find a new owner, one with the proper attitude, to ride her towards more fun at sea.

In her book about her brief stint in Antarctica, Icebound, Dr. Jerri Nielson sites an old polar adage that I think transfers equally to cruisers. "The first year you come for the adventure. The second year you come for the money. The third year you come because you don't fit anywhere else." For nearly a decade we've lived life without all the background noise... lives free of alarm clocks, telephones, televisions, microwaves and dishwashers. We're so enraptured with that silence that we are unwilling-maybe even unable-to step back into the noise of our old life. Don't look for us to settle down anytime soon.

We need a new dream. But, short of that, we have designed a new path to follow. We are both still highly infected with wanderlust. It is a huge world and we have seen so little of it. Our goal for the foreseeable future is to spend our cruising season traveling, by air this go-round, to new destinations. Living in one spot for extended periods we'll explore by foot, bike, bus and rail various countries we've never before visited. This year that country is Thailand, from where we write this now. But that's another story for another time.

It is with utter awe that we bid farewell to our dream, giving a final satisfying nod to the amazing experiences we've shared, the daunting lessons we've learned, the incredible sights we've seen, the exotic places we've anchored, and the wonderful friends-wow, the friends- we've made along the way. We will truly and madly miss it all.

Shakespeare wrote, "Parting is such sweet sorrow." How true his words are to us now.