Hi! I’m Dori, and this handsome guy next to me is Nick. We are chronicling our travel pursuits as we edge closer and closer to untying the lines and sailing away to discover what is beyond the shore. This seed of an idea sprouted when we stumbled across a Sailing for Dummies book in a thrift store. As a kid, my family had a sailboat and we’d sail on lakes in Tennessee and later on Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana, but that was a long time ago. I hadn’t thought much about it over the years. But stumbling across that book triggered the conversation of “what if…”
From there, we joined our local sailing club in Missouri on a tiny 150-acre lake. We purchased a 19′ Flying Scott and learned the basics. Boy was that boat fun! You could feel everything! We trailered that boat to a few other lakes in the area and learned that being without a motor and a cabin has some limitations. Our aspirations grew and we upsized to a 26′ Erickson which we kept docked at Stockton Lake. We were in love! We’d still be on that boat if my job didn’t relocate us to the East Coast.
The great part about my new job location was that we were close to the Chesapeake Bay. We could really put our interests to the test and upgrade our skills. We shopped around and decided on a 35′ Jeanneau Sun Odessey which we keep docked in Solomons Island, Maryland. Going from land locked lakes in Missouri to sailing on the Bay has been transformative. Learning the charts, the channel markers, the boat traffic, and the rules of the road has been an escalation in our education that we just couldn’t have received in Missouri.
We have three years to explore this area and learn all we can before we are free to explore beyond our borders. We are excited to learn and to share what we discover. We hope you’ll come along with us on this adventure, this ND Life Adventure!
ND Life Adventures 