Ch-ch-ch Changes

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I read a quote a while ago that starts like this, “Everyone calls it delusion until it works.” Brad and I have been scheming for a while now… what started as a mission to simply shift our work life balance to favour the living bits and not the working bits, eventually evolved into buying a sailboat and spending a year cruising. Our five year plan was shortened to three years and now, to call it three years would be generous rounding. Along the way, we’ve crunched the numbers hundreds of times and always end up asking ourselves, “Who gave us permission to do this?” Like, who do we think we are to pull this off? But the numbers add up and here we are, shaking our heads in disbelief that our delusional dreams are coming to life. 

At the end of February, we’re going to pack up our tiny house on the prairie, hand the keys over to our new tenant, Laura, and move our lives onto Splash! We planned to wait until I finished the school year but the reality is that a few extra months of work wasn’t going to make us millionaires and what we were earning in money, we were losing in sanity. Burnout is a very real thing and we both knew it was simply time to make this happen. 

We’re hoping that a couple of weeks on the dock in early-March will be enough time to get Splash ship-shape and then we’re going to set sail north. We plan to head towards the more remote areas of Vancouver Island and the coastal mainland for a few months. For over two years we’ve been working our butts off to make this happen: Brad has been picking up buckets of extra hours while I’ve been buying, selling, and training project ponies and tutoring in the evenings. We hope that some time off-grid and away from the hustle of regular life will give us the space to unwind and reset. Come June, we will haul Splash out of the water in Lund for new bottom paint and while she is on the hard, we’ll scooby back to Alberta to work for a few weeks, visit with friends and family, and dance our socks off at the Fowalenko wedding! At some point we need to get a rigging inspection done, and that will determine how long we stay in Alberta… if we end up needing a comprehensive replacement, I expect we’ll roll back to the island mid-July. The rest of the summer is up in the air! We’d love to have some friends out and of course, we’ll continue to explore the Gulf Islands and beyond. Come August, we’ll start keeping a close eye on the weather to start making our way south towards Mexico.

There are three ways to make it to Mexico from the Pacific Northwest (PNW). The ‘Big Jump’, the ‘Two-Step’, and the ‘Hop’. As it stands, we’re leaning towards making the BIG JUMP (AKA, taking the offshore route all the way from Washington to San Francisco) or the Two-Step. Why? Well, in truth, we don’t have any offshore experience. This seems like a great opportunity to get our feet wet (figuratively, hopefully not literally) on a six day passage (~800 nautical miles). We will likely check-in with US Customs in Port Angeles then point the bow south until we can shift southeast to make our eventual arrival into San Francisco. If our best laid plans come to fruition, a friend will drive Cinna and Lhotse down to us so we can focus on the boat for this big, milestone passage! The alternative is heading less offshore, and making a pit-stop at Crescent City or Eureka to rest and reset. The third option, hopping down the coast, has come up a lot recently. Maybe it is the fast pace we've been living, but the idea of slow travel down the west coast is sounding more appealing than before. Our final decision will be impacted by a number of factors so it’ll be interesting to see what we end up settling on! 

From San Francisco it’s a cruise down the coast until late October, when hurricane season draws to a close and we can jump on a weather window to make the final hop across the US border and into Mexico! At this point, our plans are really fluid and only constrained by the return of hurricane season in mid-May. We are very excited to see what the seven months between November and May will have in store for us! It is an incomprehensible amount of time right now and we can’t really fathom what this freedom will feel like!