We’re Amy and David. We’re about to retire. We’re going sailing. If you’d like to follow along on our journey, you’re in the right place. And welcome.

The year 2021 was not our favorite. It started out not so bad. We had just purchased a Beneteau 235 sailboat, in December of 2020, and were excited to get back to sailing after many years without a boat. By June we were ready to launch and we watched July 4 fireworks from the deck of our new pride and joy.

But in the fall, my Mom had a massive stroke and Amy’s younger brother had a terrible motorcycle crash. They died within days of each other. Later, in the winter, Amy lost a younger cousin to complications from COVID. The previous year Amy’s stepdad had passed away with Alzheimer’s. Too much loss.

Having the Beneteau gave us some comfort during those times. But as we began to face our own mortality, Amy decided to retire early, in 2023. I didn’t have to ask why. Then she followed that with “I think we should go sailing… for a couple of years”. We had talked and joked about doing something like that for years - but she wasn't joking. And when she said, “I think we need a bigger boat”, well you gotta do what you gotta do, right? Boat shopping!

We’ve looked at boats off and on for several years. We bought the Beneteau thinking we’d sail the local lakes for a few years, maybe trailer it to Florida sometime, and eventually trade up, maybe. But now, it was for real. We needed a boat ready to leave on July 1, 2023. Which led us to Lake Lanier outside of Atlanta.

A broker there had a boat that was interesting, but out of our price range. Every few weeks I’d check their listings, along with other listings not too far away, and it was still there. But then the price dropped. Still out of our budget though. But it dropped again, and again. It was now well within our budget. So I made the trip to Atlanta to see it. You can read about my first impressions in our blog.

My grandfather was a very good wood worker, he taught me some of that craft. Amy’s stepdad and brother were both excellent woodworkers. When I got to the boat, the broker opened the companionway and then had to take a phone call, so I was left alone for a bit. I called Amy to describe the boat and the best way I could put it was “the topsides are fine, everything that was on my checklist is there. Below, well, imagine if Ray, Jim, and Granddaddy got together to build a boat”. She asked if I had made an offer yet. We did.

The boat survey was the classic good news / bad news situation. The good news is the boat has only a couple real issues and none of them made us want to walk away. The bad news is the first episode of our YouTube channel will have to be called: “We just bought a beautiful, mostly well-maintained boat at a fair price.”

On the drive back, Amy commented how “it felt like home”. Yeah, it did. I suspected she thought that when she whispered to me, during the sea trial, “When can we get these two guys (surveyor and broker) off our boat?” But, to call a place “home” has always been weird for us. “Home” has usually been associated with where we grew up, not where we currently live. We’ve lived in eight different places in our 30 years together.

Amy is retiring from the ministry at the end of June 2023. She’s been a pastor in the United Methodist Church since 1996. Since then a bishop has decided where she serves and for how long. A benefit of being a pastor is that the church you’re serving provides housing. A drawback is that it’s not really your house. You can’t make changes on a whim or sometimes even at all. So it’s hard to call it “home”. It’s just where you are living.

We’ve named the boat: Kotona. It’s Finnish for “at home”.