Living aboard a sailboat… What a great life!

Living aboard a sailboat was, and still is, our favorite frugal retirement living lifestyle.  For eight wonderful years we lived the life that Jimmy Buffett sings about.

We will show you that we had very little experience when we started this adventure in 1994.

We found the sailboat lifestyle to be healthy, safe, fun and a very inexpensive way of life… if we did it so can you.

By little experience we mean we had never been aboard a sailboat in our lives… when we took a four hour cruise ship shore excursion on a sailboat in Charlotte Amalie,  St. Thomas United States Virgin Islands, in 1990.

The timeline of this major lifestyle change

Here is a brief outline of the steps that we took to go from zero boat experience to actually living on a sailboat four years later.

• We took group sailing lessons near our home in Houston
• We read everything about sailing we can get her hands on
• We started chartering sailboats in the British Virgin Islands
• The first three charters were with a Capt. the last three by ourselves (bareboating)
• We started looking for our own boat in January 1994,  we purchased Shadowtime in May 1994
• Our boat left Galveston in November 1994 for the BVI  and never looked back

For more detail we recommend our e-book “Live the dream… live on a sailboat in the Caribbean”

Living aboard a sailboat in the Caribbean

For those next eight years, we spent 6 to 9 months a year on our boat,  leaving it out of the water during summertime which is hurricane season…sounds like a dirty job…yeah right.

In those eight years of living aboard a sailboat we met some great friends,  stayed healthy,  never encountered bad weather at sea (we were patient), never encountered an unsafe situation ashore…we had the time of our lives.

We were pleasantly surprised at how frugal sailboat living was. We discovered that sailboat cruisers in general loved the lifestyle so much that they would do anything to avoid returning to work.

It did not take us long to adjust to the pace of life in the Caribbean,   we found our floating home to be comfortable,  quickly forgot our former life,  and congratulated ourselves on a daily basis of our wisdom for exchanging the rat race for a laid-back lifestyle.

Thank you Jimmy and the Coral Reefers!!!