Dave and I got a phone call in November from our good friend Ian. “Hey guys I’m about to change the next year and a half of your lives.”

Ian wasn’t wrong. Ian and his lovely better half Cindy were in negotiations to purchase a new to them boat. Not just any sailboat, but a dream come true Oyster 54 named Oyster Reach. If the boat sale goes through they invited us to come to New Zealand and sail with them for a few months. We thought that would be amazing. That wasn’t the big news however. Cindy and Ian joined the Oyster World Rally in January 2017 which started in Antigua and headed west. They had volunteered to crew on two boats and had been on the boat Sea Avenue for the last six months sailing from the Marquesas Islands to New Zealand. They really liked sailing with Don, the owner of Sea Avenue but, now that they were purchasing Oyster Reach they would not be continuing in the rally. Cindy and Ian recommended to Don that Dave and I take their position as crew and sail the rest of the way around the world.

There was one catch. If the sale of Oyster Reach did not happen, they would continue as Don’s crew. Ian was 90% sure it would happen. Two weeks later, Ian was 50% sure. Two weeks later he was 90%. This continued into January when finally, after the first week of January the sale was final. Dave and I were going sailing.

We now had less than a month to figure out how to arrange our world so we could be away until at least April 2019. I won’t bore you all with the details. I will only say thank you to both friends and family for making this possible. I will try to post paintings on this blog when we have wifi.

If you’d like to follow along on our trip you can look at: oysterworldrally.com

Dave will also be blogging on: sailordave.blogspot.com