All It Took Was An Idea
By Bill & Dannalie Saunders
“You can do that?” My wife, Dannalie, and I looked at each other with eyes wide, mouths open, and heads filled with so many questions. As soul-mates, we knew exactly what each other was thinking. Must. Learn. More. There was a cluster of about a half-dozen sailboats off to our right, anchored in a line behind the barrier island reef. There was no activity on them. No sails flying, no teams grinding winches, no one hiked out on the windward rails. They looked as quiet as a row of houses in a suburban subdivision on a workday.
“Yeah, they sail in and anchor behind the islands and live there for months at a time.” Our tour guide seemed nearly as fascinated by the idea as we were, but he had what we didn’t: knowledge. Until then, we didn’t even know that we didn’t know about this. In order to have questions, you must at least know what you don’t know, and now we had questions. Lots of them. We didn’t need the answers — yet. The very questions themselves were enough. For us, this was the inciting moment, the first spark of the conflagration, the exact pinpoint in time when a flurry of energy, blood, oxygen, and brain cells combined to conceive a living, breathing, idea. Not just an idea. THE idea. The one single idea that would change our lives.
It was the mid-1990’s and we were in our late 20’s, had two growing kids, and a shared passion for travel. The moment of conception occurred on one of many vacations — this one, a cruise of the western Caribbean. It happened in full view of others on a fast boat from Caye Caulker, Belize, out to snorkel with sharks and stingrays. It was our first time swimming with rays. It was amazing. We saw one lone shark that kept its distance. A great time was had, but as we climbed in for the ride back, we instinctively sat closer to our guide.
“Tell us more about those sailboats,” we asked. “People live on them? What do you mean live on them?”
We were no strangers to boats. We owned one, a 20-foot Sea Ray runabout. We lived in a town near Buffalo, New York, with a beach and boat launch on Lake Erie. The kids loved getting pulled on the tube and learning how to water ski. I worked at a marina in Buffalo as an eighteen and nineteen year old. At 21, I started my career as a New York State Trooper, and earned assignment to the SCUBA detail and marine patrol unit where I served for several years until I was promoted to sergeant. I knew a lot about boating. What I didn’t know a lot about was sailing.
Neither of us grew up sailing. In the years to come, I would hear countless stories about people who started out sailing dinghies when they were young and made a natural progression to liveaboard cruisers. They bought bigger sailboats, then faster sailboats, then bigger faster more comfortable sailboats. This was not us.
Most of my marine patrol work involved people doing stupid things on power boats, like water skiing without a spotter or playing drunken bumper boats after the Independence Day fireworks. Sure, I knew the concepts and the rules of the road, and all that, but I had never learned how to make a sailboat go. In my world at that time, a big sailboat was maybe 28-feet. I had seen bigger sailboats on TV, but they were usually racing boats with large crews and non-stop action. I knew about cabin cruisers and boats with sleeping areas and porta-potties. Of course you can stay overnight on a boat like that, heck, if you pack enough beer and ice and a sack of sandwiches, you could stay a whole long weekend! Virtually everyone I had seen do it were tied securely to the dock in their slip. I used to wonder: why bother, wouldn’t you be more comfortable just going home for the night? But I was young. I didn’t get it.
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