We’re done sailing, but it’s been an interesting adventure:
2004: Bought a 30ft S2 boat and learned to sail with 5 half day lessons with captain Greg Morash aboard our own boat ‘Toodle-oo!’
2005: Took a 2 week holiday around Martha’s Vineyard in Toodle-oo! and when we returned to our mooring, Laurie announced that “that was good but if we’re going to do more, we need a bigger boat!” That was the last time we sailed the S2.
I had already picked out our cruising boat – a 2003 37ft Pacific Seacraft to be named Toodle-oo!
We spent a lot of time preparing Toodle-oo! making sure she was solid and well equipped and slowly increased our sailing experience – sailing to Maine and doing our first ocean passage to Bermuda and back.
On the return from another trip up to Maine, right after a tropical storm had blown through, we had a rotten passage, unable to get any speed up in the large swell and not quite managing to point in the right direction and I got terribly seasick… It was during this passage in that we decided we needed a bigger boat!
A long search and visits to multiple boats, yielded the insight that an Outbound was the boat for us – if only it would fit our budget!
We bit the bullet and in 2011 purchased Toodle-oo! a 2007 Outbound 44. It was located in St. Augustine, FL and our very first sail aboard her was 950 miles (insufficient to qualify for OCC full membership!) to Tiverton, RI. We had Mike Eslinger and Pete Sterrett along as crew and had a fantastic 6 day passage – right up until day 6 when a nor’easter hit us and the whole crew got sick – just as we entered the Sakonnet river with only an hour left in our passage!
In 2013 we took 6 month sabbaticals and did our first Atlantic crossing – from Boston to Glengarriff, Ireland by way of the Azores. From there we cruised around to Whitehaven in Northern England where we parked the boat for the winter.
In 2014 we took another 6 month sabbatical and sailed up to Scotland (were we bent the rudder), through the Caledonian and across to Denmark. We followed an OCC cruise in the Baltic – about 3 weeks behind them – and had a fantastic summer. We ended that year by cruising through the Standing Mast Route in Holland to Amsterdam, then sailing west along the English Channel to Cornwall and finally back to Southampton where Toodle-oo! was loaded onto a ship and returned to Newport, Laurie and Bill destined to go back to full time work for the nest 3 years…
3 years turned into 18 months and in 2016 we retired and moved aboard Toodle-oo! full time and we sailed up to Newfoundland then down to the Caribbean, back up to Newport and down to the Caribbean again. In 2018 we crossed the Atlantic again from Antigua, sailed up to Shetland and across to Norway, then down through Holland again where Covid hit. We escaped Holland and fled north to enjoy the pandemic in the Yorkshire Dales. As soon as we were set free, we came down the west coast of Scotland via the Caledonian canal and crossed Biscay from Dingle in Ireland to A Coruna in Spain then carried on down the Atlantic coast of Spain and Portugal overwintering in Lagos. 2021 saw us do a loop out to Madeira and the Azores, and we finished our voyages with a 2 year stint into the Mediterranean and a winter in Turkey.
Statistics
Our sailing career has seen us visit 44 countries or territories in our 45,000+ miles of sailing. We’ve met countless new friends along the way that we will keep forever.
We visited 25 different Greek islands – some of them multiple times.
Since cruising full time, beginning in 2016, we have anchored 541 times, we’ve sailed overnight 88 times and we’ve had 107 nights on free docks or moorings.
Sadly, since 2016, we’ve used 1,395 gallons of diesel – which means we only averaged 21.5mpg! (My mini did better than that!)
It’s been a great adventure, one neither of us will ever forget. Now, what’s next?
