Sell Your House and Buy a Sailboat: Then Sail Halfway Around The World

The idea for this sailing adventure was planted with Tinkerbelle, a book by Robert Manry about a solo voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in a thirteen-and-a-half-foot sailboat, which I read in 1967. That seed lay dormant for thirty-six years, until the one day when I came home from my job as a marine biologist. "Raymond," my darling wife, Judy, said, "I have spent twenty-five years here. This is my last winter in Alaska. I am leaving." She paused. "I hope you will come with me." I considered her words and, after a few moments, said, "Yes." I then asked, "Would you live on a sailboat?" She quietly considered my question then replied, "Yes." It was as simple as that—the rest is history. It was soon after this conversation, in December 2002, that we purchased a forty foot sailboat in Bellingham, Washington, and moved from a 3,200-square-foot home to a space forty feet by twelve feet that tapered at each end to a usable space of about 200 square feet. Much of the stuff we had accumulated over the years was dispersed like it would be at an estate sale, as if someone had died. In a sense, we had died, but as the stuff went away we began to feel reborn.