One Year to Go!!

Welcome to The JMacks blog. I am “J” (Dr. J), and Bill is “Mack” (McCormack). We are creating our first post today because it is exactly one year to go!

One year from today we start our journey! We have been counting down for 10 years and now we are 365 days away! We are going to “cut the dock lines” and wander the world on a sailboat! I can hardly wait! I am a General Surgeon in Missoula, MT and my husband, Bill manages our apartment rentals. We have worked hard, saved, and studied. We have read books and magazines, watched You Tube videos, and taken classes including Diesel Maintenance, Electrical, Splicing, and Heavy Weather, along with a bunch of presentations about route itineraries for different regions. For the past ten years we have chartered different boats in different waters around the world each year to learn how to handle different conditions. Just over a year ago, we bought our boat, “Sacagawea”, a Caliber 47 LRC, and refit her to blue water specs. She is ready for us, waiting in Bellingham in a charter fleet for the year while Bill and I wind up business and retire.

Bill and I hope to both share and document not only our adventure but also how we came to be blue water live aboard sailors, starting from deciding a sail boat would be fun on the weekends. This page will allow our friends and family to follow along with us on our explorations, quite literally once we add a tracking feature next year. There are thousands of stories out there, all different, and this is ours. I have no idea if it is “right” or the “best” or even if we are half as prepared as we hope to be. Time will tell!