This time a year ago we were in the process of trying to sell our sailboat Nordic V after spending 4 months working on her and losing the best cruising time in 2020 to boat projects. Now, a year later, we are living on land trying to do a bunch of refit work on another boat, but this time with a year of amazing adventure under our belt and much more optimism for the future.
For those of you who may be new here, I'll give you a little refresher of why all of that is. In May 2020 we bought a 45 foot custom built sailboat that ended up being a can of worms that led to some things that, for us, were deal breakers. So after less than a year of ownership, 4 months on the hard doing repairs and thousands of dollars put into her, we decided to sell our sailboat that was also our home.
At this time last year we also had our eyes on a different boat named Papa Rumba. Papa Rumba is a steel Van De Stadt Norman 40. She is a reputable boat who was designed to sail around the world, and to do so quickly and comfortably. But she was out of our price range and we knew that we not only needed to sell Nordic in order to afford her, but we also needed to sell our house which we had owned for seven years. But we knew that Papa Rumba would be the proper boat to take us on the adventures so we greatly want to experience, so at the end of 2020 we listed our house for sale, listed our boat for sale and we began 2021 living at Logan's parents in a complete state of limbo waiting for our two homes to sell so we could purchase another. Well, actually two others. Part of the deal with selling our current home was that we were going to buy a cheaper house so we could safely keep our foot in the housing market while having less of a mortgage.
By February of 2021 we had sold our old home and purchased our next house and we were in the process of testing out the boat we had our eyes on.
But Nordic still hadn't sold.
Yet a really cool thing happened when we decided to move forward with buying Papa Rumba anyway. As soon as we decided we were going to move forward with a survey, we had an offer on Nordic. I literally stepped onto the dock at the boat lift for our survey on Papa Rumba when I received a phone call that we had an offer on Nordic V. How crazy is that for timing?! That offer went through and at around the same time as we bought Papa Rumba, we had sold Nordic V.
Selling Nordic was a huge relief for us. Although she was a beautiful boat who was great for living on, providing us with plenty of space and warmth, she was never going to be the boat we needed her to be in order to safely travel where we wanted to, and because of that she had turned from a dream into something that was costing us money monthly with very little benefit. So when she sold, it was a relief to know we wouldn't have an extra marina bill to pay every month.
It also meant that we had more time to dedicate to exploring and learning our new Van De Stadt Norman 40- Papa Rumba!! On April 10th, after owning Papa Rumba for just over a month, we left the dock and started our sailing adventure that lasted six months and took us on over 1000 nm of adventure. We went as far south as the end of Finlayson Arm, as far north as McKenzie Sound in the Broughton Archipelago, as far east as Princess Louisa Inlet and as far west as Port McNeill.
The trip wasn't without its hiccups though. When we bought Papa Rumba, we knew there was some steel work that was going to need to be done, but we hoped it would be minimal. However, we stopped in Cowichan Bay in hopes of being able to repaint our chain locker and quickly found out that there was some fairly serious steel work that needed to be done.
After having spent our previous summer on the hard doing boat projects, we decided we weren't going to let this setback stop us and instead we temporarily patched up the problem and set our plans to cruise for the summer and haul out in the fall to fix the issue. We spent the summer exploring new places, learning countless lessons about the ocean, her currents, winds and flora and fauna. We saw some of the most amazing places and felt like we accomplished things we had been working towards for years, such as learning how to more effectively live off of the land.
Now we are looking into 2022 and on the hard once again. We are fixing the chain locker issues as well as a few other steel issues that we knew might be there, but had hoped wouldn't. We are once again looking at months of work to bring our boat up to speed for the travelling we want to do on her, but this time we know that the repairs will make her stronger and into the boat we need for our future adventures. Our summer escapades have given us enough life and energy to carry us through the tough boat work, and we have so many dreams for once we are back on the water.
If you want to follow along with our adventure, you can do so through our YouTube channel, which is currently a few months behind, or through our Patreon which we post real time updates on every week! We love to share this wild ride with you- the good stuff, the crappy stuff and everything in between!