How it all began

OK, here goes! I’ve been tasked by my beloved to start our blog. Now all must realise that once he gets home and has a read of what I’ve written it will be considerably changed, but never the less this is my account of how it all happened …………………..

Andy and I (Kate) have been together for 8 years. We’re both now 44 years old (although I obviously look a lot younger than him!). To all intents and purposes he’s a ‘Devonian’ and I’m still very much a ‘Northerner’ now living in Devon.  For the first 5 years of our relationship Andy commuted on a weekly basis from Derby (well, I think of it as north!) to Devon as I worked in Derby. We enjoyed wonderful holidays to some very exotic places and generally enjoyed a very hard working but very social existence – no children! (Now I say ‘no children’ but obviously that doesn’t include our wonderful rescue dog, Dillon who is very much part of the family). Ok, ok, I’ll get on with it; bear with me it’s the first time I’ve done this.Now, whilst enjoying these wonderful holidays there was always one consistent factor – we both loved our time spent on boats. Big boats, small boats, sailing boats, motor boats, pedalo’s!! You name it we loved being on the sea. Andy had always talked about one day buying a large motorboat or “gin palace” but I suppose it was always a bit of a pipe dream as we have only ever done short hops and day sails. Now you can imagine, the ‘gin’ side of this had always appealed to me but I just allowed him to dream and life continued. Things then took quite a turn. Andy decided he’d had enough of commuting from Derby to Devon and I decided I’d had enough of working!! The conversation went a bit like this:-

A.            Lets move to Devon

K.            OK, but only if we have a house overlooking water

A.            OK, let’s see what we can find

K.            Don’t suppose it will happen quickly as we’ve got to sell the house

A.            Let’s put it on the market and see

K.            Bugger, we’ve sold it (5 weeks later)

We moved to North Devon in November 2005 to a house that overlooks the Torridge estuary.It’s really at this point that the pipe dream started to take on reality but in saying that he took a 180 degree turn. ‘Let's buy a sailing catamaran and have lots of adventures’.Now this sounded like a lovely idea with just one small hitch – neither of us had ever sailed a catamaran and didn’t have a clue where to start. Thank goodness for the internet and boat shows!! For the last 2 years I haven’t seen much of Andy’s face as it’s stuck in a laptop when he’s not at work and any holidays he’s taken me on since have seemed to remarkably coincide with some boat show, charter or boat theme!Next came the courses – a week in Turkey taking our competent crew qualification, hours of theory on the dining room table (even missed Corro on occasions) doing a correspondence course for Day Skipper theory followed by a wonderful week in Cornwall doing the practical side of the qualification.Right, so now we’re really confident! Let’s charter a boat. Where shall we go? Well, they do say the British Virgin Islands are very nice. I know, why don’t we charter two different boats for a week each then we can see what we like. Let’s also invite some friends along to show off our new found sailing skills. So off we went with two other couples for two fantastic weeks in the BVI. In fairness, we learnt a hell of a lot including looks aren’t everything where catamarans are concerned, you really do need to live on one to experience how ‘comfortable and practical’ they really are. This is where we decided the Leopard 46 was the boat for us (even though our week had its fair share of problems!)After all this research and millions of spread sheets later we ordered a Leopard 46 catamaran which is currently being built in Cape Town as I write this tale and which we hope to go and see hit the water early September.

Kate, August 2008.

 Added Sept 2009