Frequently asked questions
A number of questions are pretty common when people find out what we're doing. Here are some of them.
- Q: What made you decide to change course and go voyaging?
- A: It's kind of a long story. See What got us started?.
- Q: What's your itinerary?
- A: It's always subject to change and has already changed once, but basically, we're now in Mexico and continuing south. Then we'll go through the Panama Canal and north to Florida. In the spring of 2008, we plan to join the ARC for the passage from Florida to Bermuda, Bermuda to the Azores, and the Azores to Portugal. From there, we'll go north in the summer and south in the winter. After a few years in Europe, we'll head west again and begin a more traditional circumnavigation. You can find a little more detail on our cruising plan page.
- Q: Have you been sailing a long time.
- A: Not so much. John took sailing lessons in college. Shirlee and her sister used to own and sail a Coronado 15, and Shirlee also crewed on a 505 in her younger days. See What got us started? for our more recent experience. We figure our experience is about average for people who decide to go voyaging.
- Q: How long are you going to keep voyaging?
- A: Until we don't enjoy it anymore. The plan is 10 years, but time flies. It's already been almost two years, and we're only in Mexico.
- Q: Are you going to sail around the world?
- A: Probably. Circumnavigation isn't the goal, per se, but we want to visit lots of places and some of them are on the other side of the world. The prevailing winds encourage circumnavigation.
- Q: What do you miss most about having a house?
- A: John misses the wine cellar. Shirlee misses always-on broadband Internet access.
- Q: What kind of a boat do you have?
- A: Solstice is a sloop. Specifically, she's a 1983 Sceptre 41, hull number 12. We've named her Solstice (and the s/v stands for "sailing vessel"), but previous owners called her other names. Sceptre Marine is still building boats in Richmond, BC, and there's a link to their Web site on the Links page. See About the boat for more details and a few photos.
- Q: Where do you live? Where's home?
- A: Really, people do ask that, including lots of official people like insurance companies. We live on the boat, wherever she is at the time. Our official home port is San Francisco because that's where we started, not because we think we'll end there. We have nothing left in San Francisco but friends. Our permanent mailing address is a mail forwarding service in Miami, FL, called USABox. (See our contact page for details.) We picked this service because it allows us to preview the mail we receive and discard junk mail instead of having it forwarded to us. Our extended families live in Oregon, so when we fly back to the States, Portland is generally where we go.
- Q: How long have you been doing this?
- A: We sold our house and moved aboard Solstice in October 2005. We began the voyage early on the morning of May 1, 2006, when we sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge and turned right.
