Craig and I met through an online dating site in 2012. What first attracted me to him was a sentence he had written where he said he was looking for a Dharma for his Greg. That got me interested as I absolutely loved the TV show and straight away could envision what our life together would look like, I contacted him and we organised to have a coffee date.
Within 15 minutes of meeting Craig started talking very passionately about how within the next 5 years he will be living on a boat with the goal of eventually sailing around the world. He had no idea on how this was going to happen but I was left with no doubt that it would. Up to that point in my life I had not really envisioned what my future would look like but I liked the picture he painted.
Fast forward 4 years and we had created a fun life together.
Both of us had great jobs and we ensured we traveled every year however the dream of living and sailing on a yacht was still that, a dream. When talking about it, it was always in the context of one day, we were no closer then than the initial conversation from that first date, then something changed.
Sometime around 2015 turning into 2016 the language changed from discussing sometime in the future to how do we make this happen now! How do we make this our last year in Christchurch? Suddenly we were certain that we will find a boat, we will make this dream our new reality and with the change in our language we had a change in focus. We started by taking a close look of where we were spending our money and paring it back to the bare basics with every spare dollar going into savings. This meant no more hairdressers, massages, going out for dinners, buying coffees, it all had to stop. To help boost the savings and for the mere fact we were leaving Christchurch with whatever would fit in the boot of the car I started decluttering which meant selling everything we weren’t going to take with us.
Towards the end of the year we both handed in our respective resignations and put the house on the market. On Sunday the 18th of December at 5.30am we left Christchurch.
We did various house/animal sitting around the top of the North Island for a couple of months while we searched online for our boat. We finally found REAO sitting in Tahiti and after having her surveyed and our offer accepted we flew over on Saturday the 4th of March 2017. On Tuesday the 7th of March we stepped aboard as her owners and have been living on her ever since.