After years of planning, and months of organizing we set off from our home port of Mattapoisett, MA the day after Labor Day 2025.
The real planning for this trip started in 2022 when Roseann and I went to the Annapolis Sailboat show for the first time to see what sailing catamarans were like. We had contemplated doing a long trip in a trawler or something similar, but having grown up sailing I wanted to see if we could do this on a cat. After the boat show we took a week-long “Fast Track to Catamaran Cruising” course from Offshore Sailing at thier BVI location. We had been boat owners for over 10 years by that point, including two boats we spent weeks on at a time. We didn’t need the cruising part of the training, so we opted to do a private catamaran sail training course. Two months later we returned to the BVI, this time with Jenna, on another cat. Upon our return from the family trip we decided this was what we wanted to do and put our power boat up for sale, half hoping it would take a while, but not too long! Unfortunately for me, it sold fast and we spent the summer of 2023 boatless!
From mid-2023 all through 2024 we scoured the brokerage listings for the elusive “right boat”. Things weren’t exactly in our favor as the pandemic sent sailing catamaran (and all boat) demand through the roof. We originally wanted to buy new, but 2+ year waitlists and rapidly rising costs foiled that plan. Still boatless we booked another charter in the BVI in February 2024, this time on a slightly faster catamaran and from then on decided we wanted a “performance cat”. Having seen an Outremer 51 the previous November in Newport, RI, the broker from that boat let us know of Helia’s listing as soon as he could. We flew home from the BVI on a Saturday, spent Sunday talking amongst ourselves if Helia was “the right boat”. By noon on Tuesday we had an accepted offer on Helia, and booked flights for Friday (6 days after returning from the BVI) to the Bahama’s to see her before the owners brought her to the Florida for us to complete surveys.
We took ownership in late March 2024 and kept Helia in Hilton Head, SC until June when Roseann and I, plus a captain delivered her to Mattapoisett. We spent the summer getting to know her before she headed back to Charleston, SC for the winter.
Over the course of the winter, and throughout this spring we spent hours upon hours doing all the rest of the planning, from puttting together a home school plan for Jenna, to finding insurance, to all the million details it takes to prepare for this trip!