Before we begin you should know one thing, then do one thing. The first item is to set the stage, the second to-do item is important to you.
There was a recent post on FollowingSeas about Disruptive Innovation coming to cruising. Bill was alluding to what is already under way. A month ago, Bill was part of a 5 person – two day meeting where he was invited to join my former boat building partner, a naval architect and my wife and I to bring to life an innovative design concept I had been thinking about for years.
What YOU need to do before we proceed is to subscribe to Following Seas if you haven’t. Please do this now; this is for you, not for us.
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This is the first posting of a multi-year cruising adventure you will truly love. The postings will include text, photographs, and as we get farther along, drone video links included in the posting.
I’ll introduce ourselves then we’ll get into what this is all about. We are Scott and Mary Flanders, formerly of Nordhavn 46 Egret. We took delivery of Egret August 6th, 2001 and sold her July, 2015. During those years we chugged around a bit including a 5 Great Cape circumnavigation, first for a private powerboat. We chronicled most of those years with a popular cruising blog: Voyage of Egret, along with yearly articles in Passagemaker Magazine. If you are interested in traditional cruising, VofE is a great resource. What we reported was factual, slightly opinionated, including a few rants. I particularly enjoyed the rants. There are how-to portions of the blog we named ‘techno,’ photographs, at-sea conditions, customs, inland travel and boatloads of text. Google Voyage of Egret – Captains Log - if you are interested. It will keep you occupied for months.
A short introduction to Voyage of Egret may be found here:
www.pendanablog.com/.../Scott-and-Mary-Flanders...EGRET-N46
In the coming postings I will call my wife Mary, not my wife. You will get to know us and how we, actually I should say, I think. Mary is sweet and my thinking is a bit twisted a times. You may suffer a little if you are a sit at home couch potato gerbil but nevertheless it will be entertaining and informative. We will have fun together and together we will have a grand adventure.
Our focus is to give you the information you need to see if this lifestyle is for you. That is what Voyage of Egret was all about and what this new adventure is all about.
Before we get into the design concept we should give you a little of our background. We spent our married lives in Ft Lauderdale. Mary was a pediatric physical therapist and I spent my working life in the boat business. During the later years before an early retirement, I was co-owner of a small boat building business. During those years we took drums and boxes and turned them into someone’s dreamboat. We build 250 dreamboats and had a lot of fun. Along the way we learned the business of the business. Our first venture into boating was a Blackfin sportfish with twin inboards joined later by a shallow water flats boat. As we thought about early retirement an interim small trawler arrived to see if that lifestyle was for us. It was. Then came Egret’s 14-year stretch. More recently, a 28’ Maine built lobster boat with an extended hardtop entered our lives. Shipping the boat from Maine to my former boat-building partner’s shop (Jim Gardiner – www.compmillennia.com) in Washington, North Carolina, Jim’s crew turned her from a gentleman’s fair-weather day-boat into a self sufficient small coastal cruiser.
We had other non-boating land experiences as well, some during the Egret years and some after. During Egret’s time in New Zealand, we tent camped and spent additional months exploring in a friend’s campervan (motorhome). While berthed in Fremantle, Australia we hired a 4WD van similar to a Ford Econoline, and slept in the back living like hippies for a 10 week, 22,000 kilometer swing thru Australia. While Egret was in cold country the last two years we owned her, Mary and I toured out west in a bubba truck named Bubba, a giant Dodge truck with a pop-up camper in the bed. Bubba is gone and was replaced by a small class A motorhome which also added to the informational mix.
These diverse backgrounds and experiences are the building blocks of information Mary and I distilled into a single design concept for our next boat. The difference between want and need became very clear. As details morphed into funding, e-mails weren’t enough which brought us to the two-day meeting we described before.
The next posting will have extensive details of the cruising concept and the new design along with drawings.
Ciao
