In late October 2013 we purchase a 50′ ketch rigged sailboat. After letting go of all strings in California we boarded her while she was brand new to us and started our new adventure. Many of you know I work with many families with special needs children and have done so for years in the ocean. Well, since they do so well in the ocean atmosphere, why not bring them on sailing trips? This idea has been brewing for years. Sometimes ideas do nothing but brew, not this one! Yippee! We are on our way to taking special needs children on sailing trips!!
Many of you don’t know but sailors like to refer to their vessels as she, so I will do this as well. We have become very knowledgable about every nook and cranny in her as we scraped her underside to the gel coat and then prepped and refinished it (sounds simple haha). We set about making sure everything was good, servicing all of the through hull fittings, replacing pumps, getting spare parts, checking everything..then checking again. Within 3 weeks we had her lowered into the water (checking things again a few times) and with the help of Captain Jeffrey Moorman, we sailed her down the coast to Florida to warmer weather (I had no idea how often it freezes in Jacksonville) to finish fixing her up.
We have removed a very leaky teak deck along with thousands of screws, drilled and filled the holes, fixed wet balsa core, and finally primed, painted and sprinkled non skid and painted again. A new toilet, and many other things being done still.
Soon we will be ready to sail, we will do a “shakedown” sail then… Hopefully we will be ready to have our special guests. At first, because of where we are right now, we will be doing local sailing. Once we get moving there’s no telling where we will go. I will keep everyone posted as to what city we will be near and how many spots are available!
This is as of March 2014… I’ll be posting our progress on the blog!
It’s July 3rd 2014 and the steering is almost finished and she steers like she has power steering! No more fighting the wheel! I’m posting mostly on our Facebook page, please visit and like our page www.facebook.com/voyageintohealing so that you can see how we are doing. I am so new to this web thing that I find myself avoiding it. I will try hard I promise! Happy day!
August is almost half over. Doing electrical while still waiting to receive the part to secure our anchor to the boat! I feel like saying we are almost ready to sail is a jinx. 🙂
September is here! We are ready to sail but the weather is not cooperating 🙁 so.. While the weather is not cooperating we will add things and redo things that are for our overnight voyages that we will offer. We will add our solar and inverter so that when off at anchor we will have enough power to charge devices watch a video etc. these changes do not effect our being able to go out for a day! Yippee!
