Our 51st Wedding Anniversary
Jane and I were married December 20th, 1969. It wasn't the shortest day of the year but the longest night.
The very best years of my life have been spent with my very best friend and my sweet loving wife, Jane. We have actually been together for more than fifty five years and have lived our dreams to the fullest.
We began with canoeing, fishing, and camping and trips around Lake Superior to Niagara Falls, Florida, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Hawaii...never a dull moment.
Next I had an over-powering inspiration to to sail away, I knew this was going to be doable. The kind of boat I wanted was simply beyond our financial limits, so we would just build a boat. Easier said than done. Jane and I researched the subject and came up with a realizable five year plan. We were going where the wind blew, when the spirit moved us, and the price was right. I became keenly aware of the fact that youth only comes to you one time.
This intense life altering episode of our lives ultimately generated the Travel of Dursmirg series of books available in paper and digital editions, Sailing Beyond Lake Superior, Sailing the Sea Islands, Sailing the Florida Keys, and Sailing to St. Augustine.
I was laughed at behind my back and nicknamed Noah. My good friend Skip Koloski said to me, “Anybody that criticizes you has never had an original thought in their entire lives.” My dear old dad gave this useful bit of philosophy; “Friends are happy for your success, your enemies are jealous.”
Amazingly we encountered people who would say; “You are so lucky to have that 46-foot yacht, how did you get it?” My response was “We just didn't watch TV for five years.”
We lived aboard our dream boat for fifteen glorious years, the best years of our lives.
As the years advanced we had to change our game plan because of 22% runaway inflation devouring our hard fought savings.
We bought a handy man special apartment complex on four acres of park-like land adjacent to the tourist attraction, The Fountain of Youth, in Saint Augustine, Florida, with owner financing. Jane and I bought ourselves a huge job that paid about a nickel an hour with no vacation days. The first two years we owned the business every cent that came in went directly back into upgrades that we did ourselves. We only increased rents when we had a turn over and had renovated that apartment...there were 26 units. Our first year we had 26 turnovers, and the second year none. The Arab oil embargo gave us a real financial jolt. Heating oil was 16 cents a gallon when we bought the apartments. It then shot up to $1.30 a gallon. Our boiler burned 22 gallons an hour. This could have put us out of business. Our good friend Ed Weber was an instructor of heating and cooling systems and came to our rescue. With his ingenious innovations and adjustments we were able to cut the fuel consumption by two thirds, and he saved our business.
We needed a convenient place to dock our boat that was also our home. Each day we rowed ashore and then had a long bicycle trip to our new apartment business to start work before six a.m., not returning until after dark exhausted. We did extensive research on the subject and amazingly found what we were looking for across the street from our apartments. One glitch was that we would need to build a 540 foot long pier through the marsh. The land we would buy was contingent on our procurement of a dock building permit. We did our own soundings of the ground strata, and hired Harbor Engineering Company for the permits. I had done all of my own surveying, designing, and materials lists. Each pressure treated piling would need to be jetted down with water pressure to solid strata. The decking would be of prestressed concrete that was actually springy like our ferrous cement sailboat.
Three months of dock building while at the same time managing our apartment business, and we had our own private dock for or 46 foot sailboat that was also our home. Amazingly from our new dock we could sail out into the ocean in twenty minutes without having to go through any bridges.
Another interesting thing was that this creek was the same one that Ponce de Leon had sailed up looking for the Fountain of Youth more than four hundred years earlier.
Read about this amazing story in our book Sailing to St. Augustine.
The dock building project soon opened up even more adventures for us. We became commercial fishermen with our own shrimp trawler, Secotan, purchased a go-fast 26 foot Colombia sailboat El Barco, and we enjoyed several years more of fabulous boating adventures.
The tuning point in our lives came with another handy man special. We bought a VW camper van.
Traveling across the US, Canada, and Mexico plus extensively in Europe where we would keep one of our three camper vans and spend three to five months each year mostly bicycling using the van as our home base. From Norway and Sweden to Spain and Portugal and the British Isles to the East block countries. We biked, hiked, climbed the mountains, and sampled the beer, wine, and fabulous foods.
Living in Mexico has also been a part of the over half-century of our lives together.
Read more about our Yucatán adventures in our books, Yucatan’s Magic and Yucatan for Travelers.
Then click to take a tour of our house.
Now the corona virus has taken the lives of more that 3,000 American lives in a single day, that is more casualties than the entire terrorist attack on New York 9/11. These numbers continue to escalate each day and are expected to quadruple after the Christmas/New year festivities….thank you Donald!
Jane and I continue to enjoy our lives together appreciating every precious minute in our lovely tropical sanctuary in Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico.
Photos from our two-week honeymoon trip to Mexico City and Acapulco. We flew from Minneapolis/St. Paul to Dallas, Texas, and then to Mexico City.
1 comment:
Fantastic story. Thank you for sharing. I had no idea you had all those adventures. (am a bit jealous).
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