Ahoy Maties, a Dolce Vitaville blog post blowin' your way.

We are getting a sailboat for Lake Travis so we can join our friends Jim and Nancy, Will, and Allen who have boats there. This way we can sail more often than once every summer in the islands and take more friends sailing. It will be a Maine Cat 30 and look much like the boat shown in the header when complete. These days it looks like this:

It is being built in Bremen, Maine. When finished in late April we, with the help of a delivery skipper and his wife, plan to sail it from Maine to Galveston. That will take 4 to 6 weeks, depending on the weather. The google earth shot below is an approximation of the route we will take. We may hug the coast more and perhaps motor in the icw if the weather is bad.

In the mean time we have chartered a Maine Cat 30 in the Abacos in the Bahamas for 6 days to get an early feel for it. We leave for the Bahamas Jan. 21st and the blog will really begin there. We will try to post something about our adventures there and a photo or two every day or so. This will be Stephen's second salt water boat.

It was a one of a kind thing made of cypress plank and fiberglass over. The fiberglass was probably added later after the hull started to leek. It was 21' on deck and 27' over all due to the bow sprit and boomkin, a sprit on the stern. The jib was set on a club foot and was self trimming. It had a cuddy cabin below with only 4 feer of head clearance and could sleep two people or 3 hippies. He kept it a Watergate Marina on Galvston Bay from 1976 to 1978. It cost $1400, requiring a $700 loan against his car and the rest owner financed. What a deal. The Dolce Vitaville, the name for our new one, will cost substantially more.

So this is the first blog. We hope the next one will have pictures of the Bahamas. By the time the big trip comes around in May we hope to be slicker at this posting business. We will have internet in the Bahamas so feel free to email us at stephenandfranci@gmail.com.

That's all for now. Let us know what you think. And you are invited to go sailing this July when we getting in the lake!

Stehen and Franci

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