Early Days

Just in time for Christmas, we're starting our new Blog for JD. So first a bit of history.

In 2005 we visited the Strictly Sail Boat Show in Miami Florida. On the way there, we discussed, amongst many other things, how we were not going to buy a boat, nope, not us! We already had a Laser Sailing Dinghy in the back yard and we had trailed that to both sides of the Florida.

While at the show we visited the Hunter exhibit. I took a look at their smaller 25' and 27' boats. The 25 was a bottle and the 27 was gorgeous but way up there in price. Then onto the Catalina exhibit. Some really nice, really big boats, really out of our price range so not even worth looking at. The Girl at the Catalina booth asked what we were looking for. I asked what was the largest boat we could trailer in Florida. "That would be the Catalina 250", so I stepped aboard. Wow! Nice features for such a small boat.

At this point, Peggy had not stepped aboard any of the boats, but I asked here to step on the C250, she did, sat in the cabin and almost instantly suggested "Let's write a contact on this one!"

What was I going to say! Duh!

A couple of months later we were at the dealership in Cocoa Beach taking a test sail and confirmed the purchase. It would take a few months for the boat to be built and shipped.

Of course, we're now reading up on sail boat ownership every minute we can. We found the Catalina-Capri-25s.org website and read even more. The bug had bit, we couldn't wait for the boat to arrive.

Almost daily we discussed the name of the boat. NotALot, NotBig, Notting Doing, that kind of idea, but we could not agree, you know how that goes. Finally I suggested that I really didn't care what the boat name was as long as it was a joint decision. And that was it "Joint Decision" got her name.

Since then we have put a lot of miles on 'JD', trailed her from her 'dock' (at the side of our house) to as far west  as Pensacola , north as far as Orlando, and south as far as Long Key, and sailed her for several nights most months. JD has had many upgrades, from the install of an AC unit to make the summer Florida nights bearable to important things like GPS, VHF, Storm Riding sail, and many many more.

JD at Black Point Marina - very quiet day!

But most important of all is that sailing! Boy, were we novices when we first sailed her. There were several bouts of hair pulling as we learnt to sail and enjoy doing so. Now that we have learned each others limitations, we are getting much more pleasure from our 'cruises' and so it's time to start to record them in our blog.

My greatest challenge is to keep it up, the blog that is! So I'm hoping that both of us will write and post pics of our adventures on JD.

Paul.