That's not going to happen

Yes, our plan was remarkably ambitious, and yes, things went wrong along the way, but in the end, we made the trans-Atlantic journey work.

- Tor Johnson

No ONE LIKES TO BE TOLD THEIR PLAN WON’T WORK. PLL ADMIT THAT MINE WAS FAR-FETCHED: I COULDN’T FIND A GOOD BOAT HERE ON THE US WEST COAST IN 2020, SO I DECIDED TO BUY ONE IN EUROPE, SAIL IT ACROSS THE ATLANTIC AND CARIBBEAN, AND THEN SHIP IT TO THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST. ONLY 5,000 MILES AT SEA. ON A BOAT I HADN’T SEEN. DURING THE HEIGHT OF THE PANDEMIC LOCKDOWNS.

Aclose friend said, simply, Thats not going to happen.”

I found the boat online, so the internet is at least partially to blame. Yes, I neglected to filter the search results for West Coast boats only.” The reasonably priced, barely used 2012 Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 509 caught my eye, lying lonely in a Spanish marina in Gibraltar Bay.

I can also blame my wanderlust on the pandemic isolation. I yearned for a long ocean voyage any adventure over the horizon. And, I’d done this before: My wife, Kyoko, and I had bought Keala, a Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 44i, in France, sailed it across the Atlantic and Caribbean, and shipped it from Panama up to Vancouver. It was nearly all downwind. It would be easy to do it again. Of course, that was three years ago, when the world was open to visitors....

Perhaps we'd been a bit hasty to list Keala for sale in Seattle during the pandemic. It was snapped right up in the booming seller’s market. We wanted a family boat that was a bit larger, with a bit more space, and with gentle inclines for my father, now 96 years old. He’d taken our family cruising all over the world; it was now my turn to take my dad sailing. And a boat does make a great place to isolate, while cruising in calm and pristine areas like the San Juan Islands.

But for that, we needed a new boat. I contacted the sellers, learned how the boat had been used not much), decided it was our boat, and made an offer.