HOW WE GOT TO WHERE WE ARE TODAY..
As I start writing this, it is not just a story of how we came to buy the yacht we are currently living aboard, but also why we named her huntress. How dean and I met, and all the strange commonalities we share.
So as a woman and the writer for me this is not just a jumble of words and thoughts, but a collection of emotions and for the reader sometimes it’s hard to understand all those little thoughts you don’t get to hear or know. So, I will try to endeavor to organize my thoughts to some sort of coherency and factual basis. Which is pretty hard for me I’m an emotional Muppet.
Our story comes first.
This is our collision of west country minds, our joint love of laughter. Passion for all manner of floaty things. Our mutual desire for yacht life and of how we both want to live now and, in our salt, encrusted future together.
Neither of us expected to find another person the same. But be careful what you wish for. Apparently, the universe does listen sometimes. I think it just plays with us all a bit first.
Before I sailed into the Marina where I met Dean. I had a really tumultuous couple of years emotionally, in a bad relationship and physically after having some lumps removed from my right breast. I had quit a job I loathed whilst recovering from my surgery and was really lost as to what life was really meant to mean.
Everything seemed irrelevant if I was going to struggle with health issues in the future. The only thing I knew was that I was happy everyday living on my yacht out in the bay on a swing mooring. Money was tight, emotionally I was drained, I was physically tired. Even though, I was just happy to drop out in my little liveaboard yacht bubble I was geographically still too close to my old life. Hence the move to the Marina for some respite to plan where I would anchor next and try to kick start some sort of “normal” life. (Please note a “normal life ” as defined by me “do anything that gives you fulfillment and joy and nothing else”.
Dean at the time had been living aboard in the Marina restoring his yacht from the hull up. (I’ll post a video of her later, she was amazing, you would expect that from a boat builder).
He was burnt out from work. Emotionally drained from relationships that didn’t work. Recovering from his father’s passing and also just a little lost like me. His plan was to finish her and take off overseas solo on her.
My first couple of weeks in the Marina were bliss because I had running water, power a plenty and I kept hearing another voice with the same West country accent as mine. His voice was like home. Eventually I mustered up the courage to walk up to him one day. Dean was out talking to another yacht neighbour and I said, “excuse me, I’ve been hearing an accent, were are you from”. We are both pretty much as awkward as each other and that first conversation didn’t exactly flow and wasn’t riveting but just felt so familiar. We were from the same part of the world.
Slowly our conversations grew from “hello, how are you”, to actually learning some small facts about each other and general chit chat.
As the months passed, I was still in the Marina on a yacht that needed expensive repairs, like they all do, and I was starting to run out of money. I was not ready to go back to a nursing job and caring about other people, I was just trying to care for myself and figure life out. I was still slightly adrift.
During this time period the Covid pandemic had hit, boat prices had rocketed. Even though I loved my yacht I decided just to test the market and put my yacht on the market. What happened was completely unexpected and I sold my yacht to the first person that looked at her in the first week she was up for sale. I had to quickly rent an apartment to figure out what I was going to do next. Was it going to be another boat project or just sometime to really rest???
During this time Dean and I had actually started to date properly and since then, to this day we’ve only spent 4 days apart from each other. Without sounding incestuous he’s, my twin. My sailing soul mate. Now my husband.
We had fallen into the pattern of spending weekdays at the apartment and then weekends on his yacht the Georgia Rose working on her and sailing.
She is a 36-foot Swanson, she had been beautifully and almost finished by Dean, she was essentially a new boat with every part of her new aside from her hull. Perfect for Bluewater cruising overseas. But we quickly realized that as a couple she would be too small for living aboard full time or extended overseas cruising. Neither of us could see ourselves long-term living on land again. We talked nearly every day about leaving it all behind and travelling overseas and finding a way to make that work.
On these trips down to the marina on the weekends to Georgia Rose we walked past the boat that we now own a 2007 Beneteau Oceanis on the same pontoon only 2 boats away. She had been owned by for 5 years without any maintenance carried out or leaving her berth. By this time, she had been left for 18 months during covid alone, unloved, and uncared for, as her owners rushed back home overseas. She was covered in mould with numerous leaks through her skylights and hatches and birds nesting in her Sails.
No!!! I hear you all scream especially from all you salty sea dogs. She’s not a good blue water cruiser choice. But, BUT we craved to go back to living on a boat full-time.
Yes, She needed some LOVE
Dean had met the owners over the last 3 years of being at the Marina and knew they had previously advertised the boat for sale for around AU$110,000 which also included a charter license. The owners had been stuck in Japan for over 18 months by this time. We spent many weekends walking past her and looking at her only 2 boats away saying what a shame it was and that this wet season we thought maybe she would actually go under from the lack of maintenance. A shame to see such a pretty boat going to ruin. We really wanted to save her. We also knew the layout and clever design with the use of volume these production boats provide. They have a large King size aft cabin and huge head with separate shower. Small compact galley, a small saloon that feels almost Tardis like and a forward double berth cabin. Perfect for a couple to liveaboard. We contacted a friend of the overseas owners and asked them if we could board her and have a look with the possibility of making them an offer which they let us do as they wanted the vessel to be loved again and saved.
Here comes the bit when we say like most people, we just didn’t have the funds to go out and buy another vessel. Especially as we (that’s a royal we, I mean Dean) had not yet completed the refit on Georgia Rose. So, we sat on it for another couple of weeks just trying to figure what to do but she just kept being their looking sad on her berth, crying at us everything we walked past.
We needed a plan!!!
Deans the type of person that loves a spreadsheet so we went again back onto the vessel and checked as much as we could and wrote a list of all the things that needed fixing to make her seaworthy then the cosmetic things, they knew needed fixing. We guessed a lot. We didn’t haul out for an inspection of the hull. There was an awful lot of best- and worst-case scenarios cost wise. Would she have osmosis? Was the keel / rudder damaged? so on and so forth. The owners knew Dean was actually a boat builder, they liked and trusted him, knew we would love her silly and they knew that they would probably not be able to sell her to anyone else in her current condition. We made an offer with a 30-day settlement clause. It was a low offer but a fair one and they accepted it straight away.
Then came ‘that’ panic moment. We were so excited. We had done it. Our first little floating home together. We just didn’t have the cash. We went the personal loan route, instantly pilling on the financial pressure. From that point panic absolutely set in!!!! I sold anything I owned of value to put towards the deposit and Dean got a loan. Settlement was in 30 days, so the pressure was on to get the Rose finished and sold. So, we max’d out credit cards to buy the things necessary to complete Georgia Rose enough to be able to put her on the market to sale her to pay off as much debit as the sale allowed afterword’s.
A really dodgy financial plan, but a plan.
Dean basically worked 24 hours A-day for what turned out to be 2 months, to his Job, then to Georgia Rose, then to the apartment to eat, sleep to endlessly repeat day in day out to get the Georgia Rose finished and on the market. It was so stressful. The things we do to ourselves. To the point I was questioning, was it worth it!!!.
Well, 4 months on and Georgia Rose sold last month to a lovely new custodian of her. It was bittersweet for Dean to step aboard on hand over. She was his mental escape for a few years and just his, all to himself, a boat made new. I say with a smirk on my face. He did it to trade up to another boat that needs a lot of work and that maybe another stepping stone to another yacht that’s more suited to blue water cruising.
So we have been living blissfully aboard trying not to do so many projects as we suffered burn-out from our little flourish with stress .
When I say no projects we have hauled Huntress out to do emergency repairs, such as all through hull fittings, a new rudder bearing, new shaft seal, a well-deserved new antifoul after not being done for 5 years, an old broken top mount fridge came out and a new swish Italian front opening one went in. A new toilet with all new hoses, new hatches, all new sheets, and lines.
The bare minimum !! But at least we can sail her now. I will share lots of videos later of work done so far
Why call her Huntress ?????
It’s the six degrees of separation Dean and I have lived our whole life. We had worked out that through most of our lives we have been within spitting distance from each other. From the U.K. then in Australia. Same small towns at the same times even in a country neither of us grew up in.
Our strangest moment was when we discovered whilst telling our stories of why we are addicted to the ocean early on in our relationship. My passion comes from staying with my grandparents on their boat the “Gay Huntress” how my grandfather had other boats but got the chance to buy “THE boat to own” in the Marina at Weymouth in the U.K., how it was my first proper memories of the beginning of my boat life obsession. She was truly beautiful. He gets me to repeat the name. We are amazed. He phones his mum in England and brother also a boat builder here in Queensland with a “you won’t believe this” gusto. It turns out the huntress was the first boat he went on as a child as his father, who was an engineer, project managed her refit when it belonged to the previous owner of whom he was employed as works engineer.
My Husbands father built me (my family) the memories from which my dreams are made .
I know it is said, it may be a huge ocean out there , but it’s a very small world!!!!!
THE PLAN
Our future plans are to take the next year to get her feeling like home and do all the necessary jobs to be able to travel up the East coast of Australia then across to Noumea, Vanuatu, Fiji and beyond.
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