In 2008 I took a blow to my core indentity. I had moved past my businesses and gone back into the construction field in Southern California a couple years prior. In 2008 the bottom fell out of the all the markets, but especially the housing market. I’d never been too proud to take a job beneath me to make ends meet but for the first time in my life, I couldn’t find a job. This really made me take a hard look at my values and what I wanted out of life. In business when you need to increase your profit or cash flow there are only two areas to find it, increase sales or cut costs. The “increase sales” part for me wasn’t working out so I looked at my “costs” with a new eye to value. This started me on a path towards minimalism and self-sufficiency that took my travels to living on an island in the Pacific and later moving to a foreign country. I had ground through life lessons and came back to American society with a new, energized perspective. I took these lessons and came up with a plan, taking my ideas on minimalism and self-sufficiency and coupling them with a new found enjoyment of sailing and wanting to find all of the “off the beaten path” places this world has to offer. Pass, fail or just squeak by – this is the documentation of that adventure…
The Man
I’ve always had a connection with water and especially the ocean. The happiest places I’ve ever lived have always been within walking distance of the shore. When I began looking at minimalism and self-sufficiency, the only way I could see doing this was in a sailboat. In 2015 I went to La Paz, MX and spent a week learning how to sail. I found out then that I really loved the act of sailing. Harnessing nature’s raw power to go where I wanted, and the physics behind how that happens challenged my natural tendencies to “understand why” and “there’s got to be a better way to do this”. I’ve done a number of sails out of San Diego and a couple deliveries of sailboats on the west coast. As of 6/2016, I’m the proud owner of a Cabot 36 sailing yacht. And so it begins…
The Boat
In January 2016 my previous boat (Palani) was struck and damaged by a larger trawler while docked at Beach Marine in Jacksonville Beach, FL. In April I finally received the settlement check. While waiting for that check to clear I decided to play a Sunday afternoon poker tournament placing 5th out of 72 entrants. The following Monday I decided to open up www.Yachtworld.com on a whim. When I was originally planning the first boat purchase the Morgan Out Island 41 continually came up on the top of my list but either they were out of the budget, used up, or I just didn’t have the funds at the time. I found one on this Monday located in Port Charlotte, FL for just under the amount of the settlement check. The Pomaika’i (poh-mai-kah-e) which is Hawai’ian for Lucky or Fortune, which I felt after placing in the tournament and stumbling upon the boat I really wanted, was purchased in April 2017.