Why we're doing what we're doing

A little history.

We had always said that when we retired we’d buy a yacht and sail to The Mediterranean.

Gordon had been sailing for a few years on Dart 18 Catamarans and when I met him, I either took up the hobby or the relationship ended before it began. Thankfully I did enjoy it, even if I wasn’t the most agile crew. We had many friends in the Dart crowd and Tofty (Allan Toft) was the first to purchase a 28-foot Dufour yacht. He took us for day trips to Cowes and we started to get the liking for it. Our friends Rick and Mads Payne took us out for our first weekend on a boat, a small Fox terrier and if you can survive on one of those for 3 nights, you’ll survive most things.

We obviously went on about how much we enjoyed it that when our friends Sandi and Colin invited us for a 10-day holiday on their newly acquired GK 29, we jumped at the chance. It was the life, no more squeezing into wet suits and hanging out on the trapeze, Gin and tonics in the cockpit was the life for us. Roll on retirement.

Our dream was brought forward by many years in the fact that we lost a couple of friends our own age, through cancer. It made us stop and think about what was round the corner and would we even reach retirement!

We were both getting very fed up with work and not really enjoying what we were doing anymore. The NHS had certainly changed and the more senior Pauline was getting the more stress that was involved. It was on one of those days that I came home from work in tears and said “why are we waiting till we retire?” That was it, the house was on the market within 10 days and we’d made a list of things to sell or pass on.

It wasn’t easy finding the boat, we must have looked at hundreds of different types and always thought we’d never afford a Westerly. Then we saw the paperwork for “Seasnake”. We looked, we liked. To be sure we made a journey up to North Wales to look at another Corsair and although it was newer we still preferred “Seasnake”, although not the name!

We knew the boat needed treatment for osmosis when we bought her a lot less than the asking price, so when we were having it done, we did a lot of replacing, fixing, adding and maintenance of things. This gave us the opportunity to learn the boat inside out and for me to realise what a handy person Gordon is to have around! All in all with the osmosis treatment and adding electrical gear we must have put another eight thousand pound into the boat, but we feel it’s all worth it.

We set a date for giving up work, April 2004, and this came round really quickly but the anxiety of actually going didn’t start until we’d both given up work. Or rather Pauline has a sabbatical and has the chance to go back to work on the same grade, in the same place in 3 years. We’d decided to see how we enjoyed it and how the money was going before we made the decision on that!