My wife and I have been married since 2005. I started sailing when I was about 12, cutting my teeth chasing tugboats in Durban Harbor, South Africa and surfing their wakes. I sailed and raced in various classes of dinghy: Mirror, Sprog, Dabchick, Fireball (my favorite) and eventually raced Hobie 18s for a number of years after graduating from college in the USA. My keelboat days started in college, crewing for a friend’s dad on their boat. That’s where I fell in love with the idea of living and traveling on a boat.

My wife hails from Pittsburgh. She started sailing much later in life – in the mid 90s. She bought her own Catalina 22 right before we met and we have had many a fun time sailing on her on our home lake in Columbus, Ohio – Alum Creek – as well as on Lake Erie where we keep and sail Southern Cross. We also took the ’22 to Atlantic City in 2015 and spent four days at a marina while day sailing the Atlantic Ocean. In ’21, we made the tough decision to sell Windermere – she had been idle since 2016 and it simply made no sense to spend $1000 per year storing a boat that was never being sailed. She was sold to a family and moved to a lake South of Indianapolis where I am sure she will provide many memories and fun adventures to the family that purchased her. She will be missed, but its better to sail a boat – it keeps them young!

We were both crazy about the idea of living on a boat, and in the Spring of 2017, we moved aboard Southern Cross in preparation for a year long trip. We took her out of Lake Erie via the St Lawrence Seaway to PEI, then to the Atlantic and sailed her South to Florida and then back up to New York, through the Erie canal and back to her home in Catawba Island. Here is a link to our first adventure. Future years will involve new adventures and we will keep the site updated as we journey.

Southern Cross is a 37ft John Cherubini designed Hunter from 1979. She is a heavy boat and well suited for offshore sailing. She has a cutter designed rig with a roller furled Yankee (77%) and staysail, and a double reefable mainsail with a Dutchman flaking system installed. The boat is fitted with bare necessities; we are purists and don’t believe in power-everything. We have an old analog autopilot (Autohelm 3000), a Std Horizon GX2200 radio which also doubles as an AIS receiver and a Raymarine e7 chartplotter. The AIS from the radio has been fed into the plotter so we can see our position relative to other AIS targets all in one place. We have a bimini, no dodger or all round canvas, and our engine is a Yanmar 2QM20, a 2 cylinder 20HP diesel workhorse. For an 18000lb boat this is a small engine, so even when motoring we usually have one or more sails up to help us catch any help we can from the wind.