Tim always dreamed of traveling on a sailboat to the South Pacific. He even had a boat name already picked out, “Chasing Summer.” In my cynical way, I pointed out that you don’t actually want to chase summer since that’s when the hurricanes come.
I always wanted to travel but was never quite convinced sailing was my kind of thing. I took a sailing class with Andrew in San Diego Harbor and surprisingly, I thought it was fun (even if Andrew didn’t). I enjoyed it when we chartered from Long Beach to Catalina Island, but that was for long weekends, not days on end in the middle of the ocean.
Then it happened. In early 2012, I had finally had enough of work and in a fit of desperation I walked into Tim’s home office and said, “Let’s do it.” I’m sure it wasn’t as dramatic or as final as I remember, but after that our plans progressed at a crazy pace. Maybe Tim was afraid I would change my mind, because admittedly, I was clearly motivated by wanting a change but not necessarily motivated by wanting this exact change. We put our house on the market and started shedding things via Craigs List and Garage Sales. We couldn’t buy a boat until we had sold the house, and that took a few months. Our timing wasn’t exactly perfect, so we were lucky to get basically what we had paid for it. We moved into a small apartment near the middle school and kept on with the preparations.
I did a lot of reading on destinations, routes, and weather, and we had a tentative plan mapped out. Basically, we would leave in the winter and cruise quickly down the coast of Mexico to Central America. We were really drawn by the idea of visiting Costa Rica, which is where Tim and I went for our honeymoon. Then we’d do a late Pacific Puddle Jump stopping at the Galapagos on the way to French Polynesia. We’d visit as many places in the South Pacific as we could (mapping out the exact route along the way), probably stopping our westward progress in Tonga before eventually ending up in New Zealand for cyclone season. Then after it was safe to return back up to the tropics we’d pick up where we left off and hit the island between Fiji and Australia, ending the journey and selling the boat in Australia. Of course, that’s not exactly how it ended up happening.
We looked for a boat. We knew we wanted a catamaran, because we wanted the space. We had chartered Lagoon 380s so Tim looked hard for a larger Lagoon, preferably a Lagoon 400. He spent time on the Lagoon owners’ message boards and got a response from an owner who was willing to take us out for a sail on his Lagoon 400 just for us to see what we thought of that model. They weren’t planning to sell, in fact, they were planning to take the boat, called Exodus, to Mexico in the fall to do some cruising. After joking with our friends that I would call them if these people turned out to be swingers or serial killers, we met John and Sherry at their yacht club and had a great day on Exodus out on the water in San Diego Harbor. I was confronted with the fact that I had no idea how to sail that boat. Sure, I had taken lessons on a small 22 foot sailboat that required little strength and was steered by a tiller, but sailing Exodus was a lot more work. I stayed calm. I would learn.
Exodus was well equipped as a cruising sailboat with a large battery bank, large solar array, and a water maker. Starting with a boat already in that condition would mean we wouldn’t have much work to do outfitting it to be ready to leave. Tim stayed in touch with John and kept joking with him about selling Exodus to us, and then suddenly one day he bit. And all of a sudden we had negotiated a price and were close to being new owners of the Lagoon 400 catamaran that we wanted. The catch was they were already entered in the Baja Ha-Ha rally, and they still wanted to do it, so they didn’t want to sell before then.
Then someone had an idea, why don’t we do the Baja Ha-Ha with them?
Why yes, I think we will…
Gresham Family Exodus 