How to Become a Sailor in Under 25 Years
We came from Central British Columbia, Canada’s westernmost province, but still a long way from any ocean. The journey here was long, challenging, and yet magical at times. Our sailing chapter began in 2011, but the tale of the Sailing Infidels’ began much earlier. In those days the question was not “how to become a sailor”, the question was how to survive.
Wendi and I first met in 1987 at the reception of her cousin’s wedding. We were 25 years old and single. Wendi was a single mother, and I was the drummer in the band.
The late eighties were pretty rough on both of us. Wendi had recently left an abusive husband, and I had been through a hotel fire and lost everything, including my livelihood—my drums. A few months after we met, we shacked up and within a few years we were married. Soon after our marriage we added another little girl to the world.
The next couple of decades were pretty mundane. There were highs and lows, of course, but we continued to work and progress through it all; our wages rose, and our homes kept getting bigger and better, with our debt load always increasing.
When our second daughter finished high school and left for university, we found ourselves alone in a home that was too large and in the wrong place. It was too far north. We were too far north.
In the spring of 2011 we sold our fourth and final home and hit the road, pulling our travel trailer behind our old pick up truck that I had converted to burn vegetable oil for fuel.
Our last month in that house was spent packing. We sold what we could, gave away, and threw away a ton of personal belongings. Despite our best efforts to downsize, we were left with more than we could move.
We built a plywood shell over an old car trailer, and loaded the rest of our life into it. We hired some random guy to tow it south to Kamloops for us—where we first started living together, so many years before.
We chose Kamloops because it is a central location. We could store the trailer there, inexpensively, while we travelled around looking for a path forward.
After leaving the trailer, we continued on with our travel trailer in tow and went to visit my brother and his wife in the Okanagan.
We had been talking a lot about what our near- and long-term plans should be. We thought about buying a small business—maybe a small eatery or store—something that would need only the two of us to run. We looked at a few places, but nothing really excited us.
While talking with my brother and his wife, the conversation came around to sailing. He had a McGregor 26 in his garage. Something stirred within me—a memory.
In 2005, our two families took a vacation together to Mexico, and on that trip, we took a day charter on a sailboat. Neither Wendi nor I had ever been on a sailboat before that day, and we liked it a lot. We also went scuba diving one day. That was another first and made a big impression on me. When we returned to Canada, I was all fired up about learning to sail and dive. The problem was that at that time we were living in a landlocked province, and it was winter, and I had to work.
My brother pulled some sailing books down from his shelf that day, and Wendi and I must have looked like a couple of kids as we leafed through them, asking all the dumbest newbie sailing questions. Then finally, Al asked if we’d like to go sailing with him the next morning. That was when we stopped thinking about what we wanted to do, as it related to making a living, and started thinking about what we wanted to do for fun.
I started looking at used sailboats on Kijiji and Craigslist that night, and by the time we stepped ashore after sailing for an hour or so the next day, I was fully committed. So was Wendi, I think, but that really didn’t matter.
The way I lived my life prior to meeting Wendi was pretty much one day at a time, with no plan for the future. I simply took opportunities as they presented themselves, and everything always worked out—well, almost always. I suppose that when the kid moved off to university and we sold the house, it left a void and taken away our grounding.
I think that once establishing oneself as a reliable and responsible worker, parent, and money manager, there is adequate pressure there that provides a good solid grounding, and after maintaining that for so many years, when the pressure of having to provide for a growing child and make those mortgage payments and still invest in the upkeep of the home, transportation, and paying taxes—once all that is gone—its absence provides a veritable springboard to freedom.
But we still needed a home, so this sailboat that we were going to buy would have to be big enough to live in.
Then it hit me: we could actually sail to other countries. Stay in one country until our visas expire, and then go to the next country. Had anyone ever done this before? We had no idea. Wendi lived half her life on the coast, but she didn’t know either. I was a landlubber and never even saw an ocean until I was eighteen years old. I thought we would be breaking new ground, setting a new trend, doing something radical.
When we got to the coast to go look at boats for sale, we found a whole new world that we had been completely oblivious to. There were people living on boats! Sailboats, powerboats, big boats, little boats, all kinds of boats. We began talking to people on boats about boats. They told us stories of their past journeys to places far, far away—really far away. That was when that crazy idea we had took on a whole new meaning. We needed a boat.