Falling in Love & Sailing Around the World

A Dream Come True

With summer blooming all around me and needing time to enjoy it, I thought I’d share with you a fun, breezy blast from the past about how I fell in love and came to make our dream of sailing around the world come true.

What follows are parts of a Sea Saga series I wrote in the summer of 2012.

How It Started, Falling in Love

The wildest, bravest, and most romantic thing I’ve ever done was to fully embrace my boyfriend’s dream of sailing around the world and make it my own.

In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s why I married him.

I was already falling in love at this point and the thought of sailing around the world with him someday pushed me over the edge.

But there was more to the sailing dream than that. I’d always been fascinated by the ocean and as a girl I loved reading books about kids who grew up around boats. I loved films about high-sea adventures and swash-buckling sailors. I was wild about pirates.

In a Junior High Home Ec class, we had to put together an album about our future lives, and mine featured a long, elegant yacht. When I showed my mom she declared, “You’ll never be a sailor—you’re far too lazy.” (Yay for moms with dire predictions you can rebel against!)

But I can see why she said that. I was a dreamer, not a doer. I’d rather read than go swimming. I gave up trying to surf because it was too exhausting (and cold!) getting the board past the breakers. To be fair, it was just me and a girlfriend winging it. I had no wet suit, it was winter, and the board was ten feet long.

So when I met this handsome, adventurous man who was a doer and dreamed of sailing around the world, I fell hard, all the way.

Dale was already a man of the world at age 21, a Viet Nam vet. He’d enlisted because he wanted to go to sea. He tried joining the Navy but they wanted a 4-year commitment and he was a man in a hurry, so he went next door and joined the Marines. You know–-Marines—the sea—right? Clearly he hadn’t thought this through, but risky behavior was in his blood. His dad was a bull rider before becoming a high steel worker, and later a mountain climber.

By the time we met, Dale was racing off-road vehicles in the Baja 500 and Mexican 1000, and earning a living walking high steel beams like his dad. He drove a Porsche. He had a mustache and sideburns. He looked like a pirate.

I was still a senior in high school. I wore pigtails and sang in the choir. I drove my grandpa’s old Rambler.

He was the opposite of everything me. Exactly what I was looking for.

Our Honeymoon Sailing Adventure, Bailing Water

We married on the fly. I had no wedding gown, no ring, no cake. No one thought to bring a camera. Our parents were given an hour’s notice to meet us at the altar. I’m still amazed the minister agreed to tie the knot on such late notice. We were married standing beneath a giant heart covered in roses in a chapel decorated for another couple’s wedding.

We drove off to Santa Barbara later that afternoon with all our worldly belongings piled into his Porche to spend our wedding night with our best friends, Steve and Kathy. They graciously gave up their bed to us, a mattress on their bedroom floor, and slept on the couch that night.

The next morning we rented a 10-foot sailing dingy and headed off toward the oil rigs in the Santa Barbara channel, even though storm warning flags were flying. No one knew how to sail, but how hard could it be?

We made it half way to the oil rigs before the steadily building waves began swamping the boat. Kathy and I frantically bailed water with our straw sun hats while the guys managed to get the outboard engine started and the boat turned around. We finally made it to shore, wet and cold with ruined hats, but undaunted by the adventure.

That afternoon we headed south to find an apartment while Dale looked for work. Meanwhile I enrolled myself in the local high school. Although I’d already turned 18, I was still two months shy of a diploma when we eloped. I lasted about a week at the new school, and then enrolled myself in a community college. By the time I finally took the courses needed to get my long-delayed High School diploma, I’d already earned a BA in English.

A retired Port Captain at Long Beach Harbor eventually taught us to sail. Not long afterward we moved back to the Central Coast where we bought a small sloop that we launched and sailed at Lake Lopez, Morro Bay, and Santa Barbara.

Our next boat was a Columbia 26 named Dulcinea that we kept at a slip in Santa Barbara. By then we had two children, and we’d put our dream of sailing around the world on hold, thinking we should probably wait until they were grown and we were retired.

Bareboating in the Caribbean

It wasn’t until we took a bareboat charter in the Virgin Islands and later in the Bay Islands off Honduras that the dream we’d put on the back burner moved front and center. Meeting Rocky Cooper helped. He was a 12-year-old boy, a descendant of the pirates who had settled in these islands two hundred years ago. Each morning while we were anchored near his home, he rowed his canoe out to chat and try to sell us Mayan relics found in the hills. Watching him, I pictured our own children navigating the waters as easily and with such confidence as he did.

Later we met the Hansen family, an American couple with two young children living on Cochino Grande island. They ran a supply boat between the mainland and the islands and often entertained sailors like us visiting the islands. Their children told us they loved living on the island and never wanted to leave. 

They were home schooled in the Calvert School system, a popular K-12 correspondence course used by the children of diplomats living overseas. Both children seemed older than their years, independent and self-reliant. That’s when we knew for sure we could do this—live fulltime with our children on board, sailing from one island to another . . . forever.

When we returned home, I couldn’t wait to get back to sea again. But it took another two long years to find, buy, and equip a boat for deep blue-sea cruising. My husband took a celestial navigation course and I studied to be a Ham Radio operator while we searched for a sailboat that could accommodate a family of four.

Our dream of sailing around the world that had been put on hold for 12 long years was reborn.

But what did our children think about this dream? Find out in the next chapter of our sea saga: Sailing with Kids, Dream or Nightmare?