Call me Ishmael

Call us Wild Millers. "Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world." Although Ishmael put to sea for his substitute to pistol and ball, we will be putting to sea for the adventure and the travles! Two years ago an old sailing vessel came into my life and with a lot of forsight i could see a dream at the end of a long tunnel of work. First came the work.

The Wanderer, as she is known, a Sea Bird Yawl, by the design of Thomas Fleming Day was loaded on a truck in late August 2006 bound from Newburyport, Ma. to my folks house in Derry, NH. She came from a man by the name of Aurthur Berube who owned her for the 37 years previous. For her long life she has only had 5 owners and I count myself the 5th. Built in 1939 in New Bedford, MA. She sailed the New England coast all her life and now we are planning on taking her to warmer waters!

So following about two years of work she is recently launched and about a week away from departure. She currently sits tied up to the docks at Great Bay Marine in Newington, NH on the Pisquataqua river. Now waiting for her main mast and new mizzen mast to be stepped and rigged, and the rest of her fitting out to finish up.

A lot of suprise last minute work, including an almost entirly new set of spars, has left us scrambling to make our departure date a reality, for all this summer we have been talking about leaving in the first week of November and, WOW, Thats next week!

We plan to cast our votes on Tuesday..election day, move ourselves and our faithful companion Nissa on board and head down river. With the first available window of weather we turn our bow south and keep on going. We have no intended destination per-se. We will be bringing our trades with us, Annalisa as a massage therapist with table on board, and I with my tools for any kind of odd job work that might come my way. A possible visit with my grandparents in St. John of the US Virgin Islands has us looking to the Carribean in the months of January, February but no plans are set in concrete as I know they are bound to change and whats the point of freeing yourselves only to be heckled by deadlines. No, our voyage is going to be day by day and hopefully warmer each day! One exciting possibility is the meeting of a friend on the way, also headed south on his newly built sailboat. Justin is a boat builder by trade from Ithaca, NY, he and Brenden, another friend of ours will be going through the locks in Ithaca on the 15th of November and heading down the Hudson River to hopefully join us in a caravan voyage!

So stick with us, I will try to keep the entries reasonably short and hopefully ull of pictures to fill in the gaps. Cheers! -Joel