Left the 9-5 behind and just went sailing - What has happened so far

It's been a while since our story started and because we have a completely new approach to social media here, this story actually needs to be told in a new way - somehow. Well, a little more than 7 years ago we had the wild idea to sell all our belongings and live on a 45 feet sailing catamaran from now on. We, that was Joanna and her daughter Laura, Andy and the two dogs Basco and Marley as well as the tomcat Tulu. Sailing around the world free as the wind and living the dream was our goal. This blogpost however is not a real experience report like the upcoming ones will be. It rather fulfills a kind of "what has happened so far" to create an introduction somewhere.

Skipper Andy

Laura and Joanna

Marley and Basco

Tulu

When we set foot on Bamba Maru for the first time everything was still so unusual for us. Joanna had never been on a sailing boat before and everything Andy had sailed before was not nearly as big and with only one hull, like only half a boat. Nevertheless, the deal was made and there was no way back. Somehow we sailed Bamba Maru trough Hells Gate in the East River of New York to New London in the Long Island Sound to get her ready for the long trip. Unfortunately this took much longer than expected. It wasn't until the beginning of November that we were able to set sail and start an adventurous journey south to escape the merciless winter blizzards and the terrible Noreasters up there at this time. It was an extraordinary sailing adventure which Andy described in detail in his book BAMBA MARU – “Weniger ist Meer” ISBN-13: 9783744892995 and published in German in 2017. At that time we had no intention to write a blog or even produce videos on a regular basis. We just wanted to find a more exciting way to capture the memories for ourselves.

We put together the little footage we got and created our very first video. At this point we ask for your understanding - we only had the cell phone camera and no idea of video production. The clip specifically describes the part of the trip from Charleston to Cape Canaverall in Florida. On this leg of the journey we were overrun by a brutal gale that had dismasted a 2.5 million dollar luxury catamaran nearby. The crew had to be airlifted by the Coastguard and the boat “Rainmaker” was left abandoned.

This was probably the baptism of fire for us and we do not remember a worse storm than this one until today. But the adventure was just about to start. One of the most dangerous ocean currents in the world had to be crossed to finally reach the long awaited Caribbean Islands. The infamous Gulf stream between Florida and the Bahamas did not make it easy for us. With the greatest of effort and an average of 2,5 knots we finally made it and let the scenes, which are only known from the Bacardy commercials, take effect on us in reality. We also made a short video which unfortunately has not much better quality than the first one.

From that point on we took the video production a bit more serious as we got more and more followers and produced a bit better content. Soon we realized that less than 10% of our followers were German speaking and that most English speaking users stopped the videos early. So we decided to write and talk in English as much as possible to respect our audience. Another lesson we learned the hard way was that plans are always written in sand at low tide. But more about this in the next blog post.

Aloha, Cheers und Servus

Joanna & Andy