How It All Began

Nine years ago, in an airport in Miami, Jim and I were talking about all the places we wanted to go scuba diving. We had just been diving in the Florida Keys and were trying to plan our next trip. The list of places was getting pretty long and I jokingly said we should learn to sail and take a trip around the world. That way we could hit all of the best dive sites on our own schedule.
A few weeks later, Jim told me that he’d booked us a three week, learn to sail, dive vacation in the British Virgin Islands. We spent a few years honing our sailing skills and logging hundreds and hundreds of dives until we felt confident enough to take the next step, finding our own boat.
We had a lead on a 50 foot Privilege that was lying in Florida so we hoped on a plane and went down to take a look. That boat was a behemoth! She slept 14, had 9 fuel tanks, a hydraulic winch system and even an infrared night vision camera mounted on the bow. I took one look at all that stuff and said, “That too much stuff to fix.” We didn’t even take that boat out for a test sail. Since we’d flown all the way down to Florida, the boat broker, Staley, offered to take us to a few other boats.
A few years before that trip, Jim and I went to the Annapolis boat show and went aboard a Lagoon 410 and loved it. At that time, we weren’t ready to buy a boat so we quickly forgot about the Lagoon 410. Can you see where this is going? Staley said that he thought he had the perfect boat for us but wanted to show us a few others first. We went along, liking most of the boats he showed us. Everything changed when we stepped foot onto LEO. She was a customized Lagoon 410 built in 2000 with 4 previous owners. Each previous owner had taken her out for a year sail, brought her back and then sold her. She was in excellent shape with just enough add-ons to make her a “sweet ride”. Needless to say, we walked on, looked at each other and both said, “This is our boat.”
We flew down to Bimini on December 28, 2005, bought her and sailed her 1250 miles, with the immense help of our Stepmom/mother-in-law, Sam and put her into charter with our friends, Sidney and Mike Fallis, the owners of Barecat Charters.
We spent the next 18 months preparing to leave our home, businesses, friends and family (sniff, sniff…tissue please) and periodically flying down to the BVI to practice sailing on the newly named “Eyes of the World.”
So we're finally on the sailing trip that started as a conversation in an airport magazine store. We’ll leave the British Virgin Islands in a few weeks and head toward St. Maarteen. Our plan is to sail down the Leeward Islands, across the top of South America, through the Panama Canal and to the Galapagos Islands. If all goes well, we’ll turn around in 6 months and head back to Tortola. Stay tuned for more updates.