The Dream

Hi, I'm Don, for purposes of this, a.k.a. skipper.

As I'm looking at the open water forecast off Virginia which today shows 21-28 ft seas and 35 knot winds I'm wondering, why did I want to do this?

Since childhood when I read about Columbus crossing the ocean in a 65 foot Caravelle, I dreamed of voyages of exploration. Give me a nautical chart I haven't seen before and I'm like a kid in a candy store. Together my family and I have sailed Lake Michigan and Lake Huron for years. We've chartered in the Caribbean and in Greece but we've never done a blue water crossing.

Since I'm still working, the thought of taking off months to years for an ocean crossing was out of the question. But what if I could cross part of an ocean? Since we had visited Bermuda in 1985, I knew of a beautiful sub-tropical destination that happened to be about 1/4 of an ocean off the East Coast.---The dream was born.

It incubated in my mind for some time. To charter or to transport? How to get the boat to the coast, by water or by land? What about the expense? And then the big roadblock. My family; my crew doesn't share my dream. They don't want to go out there in the big water. Then on a 2007 Labor Day cruise to Beaver Island I discuss my dream with Rod and Eric (affectionately known as the HarborBastard). Eric says, "We've got to do this thing"...The dream has a crew.

20 months later the myriad of details have been solved (mostly). The boat is loaded (mostly) and it's going to happen. This trip will be a pleasure, a trial, an adventure and an accomplishment. Friendships already forged will be tempered and burnished. We will see bigger seas than most of us have ever seen and will experience motion we may wish never to experience again. But we will survive and be wiser and richer for it. That's the dream.