Inspiration

No clue where to start. I just wanted to get this thing started as a place where we can point people who might be interested in our plan to spend every moment of roughly five years or more growing together as a family.

We have no misconceptions about our plan to sail. It will be hard. People will try to convince us not to go because it’s too dangerous, or our kids will miss out on the positive aspects of a strong social circle at home, or any other number of reasons. We’re going anyway.

Beyond hard, it will be scary. It will be expensive. Sometimes it will downright suck. But, these are not attributes solely of a life on a boat, away from our homeland, these same traits exist in our everyday lives ashore.

Anyone who has met me or Grete knows that we are not always too concerned with what other people think. We have made and continue to make decisions that even our closest friends and family vehemently disagree with. That’s fine. That said, we’re far more interested in support than nay-saying, so if all you want to do is thrust your history of failures to execute upon us…please don’t.

We have 18 years with our children before they leave and become a (hopefully) frequent phone call and annual visit. That’s life, and it’s not one of the good parts. Whether or not you agree, we think our kids are AMAZING. We want to spend as much time as we possibly can with them. Teaching them; learning from them; and just exploring places, cultures, languages and life together.

Our beautiful little girl

I have worked a minimum of two jobs for most of my adult life. I work hard and worked hard in school for nearly 8 years to gain a solid education that would set me up for a successful professional life. I have no reason to be sorry for that. However, the 50-70 hours a week I work is all missed time with my family.

I love what I do. I get to tackle interesting problems and basically solve logic puzzles all day. I work for a guy who is incredibly intelligent and is a visionary. On top of working together, we have been friends for about 15 years. It’s great. The only two things I like more than that are traveling and spending time with my family.

So, we made the decision a few years ago that we wanted to take a few years away from the workaday life of the modern world and explore and learn with our children.

“What about your kid’s schooling?” Grete (and vast numbers of other kids) have been home-schooled for many years. Some aspects of homeschooling are better than traditional schooling and some aspects are worse. We intend to enroll our kids in school before and after our sabbatical and home-school during. It’ll be the worst of both worlds.

In all seriousness, we know it’s going to be hard. Luckily, Grete and I excel in different subjects and both worked as tutors while going to college. I taught computer science as an adjunct professor for a couple of semesters and had the highest reviews in the department. I realize it’s different, but just throwing it out there that we are not a couple of bumpkins with no clue about what education can and should entail.

Dublin, 3 going on 20

How about the cost? It will be extremely expensive to do what we want to do. Starting in 2013, we started saving. Aggressively. We continue to do so now. We have read a lot of books and blogs written by others who have already done what we intend to do. Our favorite active one is http://www.sailingtotem.com. So, we may not know exactly how much it will cost us, but we have many estimates of what it has cost others and are using this as a general guideline.

$200,000 – $300,000 is what we need. We’ll blow through that (well, we’ll sell the boat at the end so some of that money will come back to us). To some folks, that is not very much money, to others, that is more money than they would ever be able to put aside. We are right in the sweet spot. We have to work very hard and make sacrifices every day, not keeping up with the Joneses, but it is attainable. We are on pace to do exactly that.

Our plan is quite rough: save all we can, buy and move onto a boat, spend a year (or possibly a few) outfitting the boat and ourselves, and then set sail. Right now we are leaning toward the east coast, and heading to the Mediterranean Sea to sail the entire southern coastline of Europe. We might prefer to stay closer to home and cruise the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. We might decide that the South Pacific is more of what we want. We are not trying to limit our possibilities at this point.

We are saving as much money as we can and reading lots of books and blogs about the cruising life. Some of them are helping to drive our “wish list” of where we want to go and what we want to do. We have taken a class on homeschooling, and will be taking first aid courses and offshore sailing courses to help better prepare us.

Enough for now. Half of this is off topic. I’m not a writer but no one wants to see a bunch of equations or code snippets.