Live Aboard - The Decision.

At the end of January this year we left the house we were renting and moved aboard our 27 foot (9 metre) Jaguar yacht. We had purchased her in November the year before and she is the first yacht that we have owned. In fact neither of us have a huge amount of sailing experience but this did not deter us from making the choice to become yachtie liveaboards!

The decision to give up the house and to live aboard a yacht was made many months before we actually bought the boat. It was an organic decision. Over time we had many conversations about our desire to live differently and we explored the various options that we could choose from. For many years I had fantasised about buying a smallholding and creating a yurt encampment with self sufficent power and heating sources. This idea was considered to be one step too far down the alternative living path. However, the seeds for a fundamental change in how we lived had been sown.

Driac sailing up the Sound of Jura

I had some sail cruising experience having crewed a friend's classic yacht on several long journeys. From this experience I knew at first hand what kind of confined space a yacht would present for living aboard. Karen did not have any experience and so could only conceptualise what this may be like. In May last year we entered the Scottish Island Peak Race with Charles, his wife Catherine, and a mutual friend, Vernon. We would sail and compete in the race aboard Driac, Charles' 1930 classic yacht. She is a gorgeous boat with the wonderful lines that one expects from a small ship of her age. Her wooden features ensure that she turns peoples' heads when they see her. She is over 30' long and she certainly feels spacious when moving around on her deck. However, down below she does feel a trifle cramped. The for'ard quarters are pretty basic with pipe cots and the caulking in the deck above doesn't quite keep the surging seas from draining onto any slumbering crew. The heads (the toilet) is an old fashioned affair within the tight confines of a space just big enough to sit down. When using the heads on Driac, it is often best to leave the door open for ease of movement. The main saloon is lovely with a redolent air of antiquity. However this too can feel confined with more than three people trying to move around. All in all, I was not confident that Driac as an example of yacht life, would be the best for Karen to encounter for her first time.

Race day arrived and all five of us found ourselves aboard. I need not have had any concerns because from this first moment, Karen fell in love with Driac and the whole concept of yacht cruising. From then on our conversations about which choice to make about downsizing centred on buying a yacht and moving aboard it.

There were other important aspects to the decision making process that we pondered over in our discussions. The primary one was our motivation for doing this. Both of us have lived fairly alternative lives - by this I mean, neither of us followed the conventional route of entering a career based lifestyle on leaving education. We had both travelled extensively and we had both worked and lived in jobs and in places that had suited us. We met in 2001 and married in 2002. During the following years we have searched for a place where we felt we could settle and call home. We ended up in the small town of Cromarty and for five years we believed that we had found the place we had been searching for; a friendly community, beautiful setting, and fairly remote at the far tip of the Black Isle. We lived in a lovely rented house with a quaint walled garden. We grew vegetables, kept chickens, and enjoyed sharing our lives with many good friends that we had made in the community.

However, deep within us we felt a growing disconnection with this way of life. Despite the pleasure of living in such a wonderful setting, we realised that we desired an element of adventure in our lives - it felt too safe and ordinary. We also found ourselves becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the expense of living a conventional lifestyle - our annual heating oil bill alone was enough to buy ourselves a small yacht! We rented our home with no hope of being able to afford to buy a house in Cromarty and truthfully, we did not want to buy a property. Although old and quaint, the house we were living in was too big for us. We only used three rooms out of the seven to actually live in - the rest were full of boxes that in turn were full of stuff. And this was another thing. We were unhappy about owning so much stuff - belongings that we had carted around with us all our adult lives. Furniture, art work, books, stuffed toys, clothes, children's stuff, stuff from our own child hoods, stuff that we had been given from our families, thousands of photos, unwanted gifts, clothes by the suitcase full, curtains, towels, compact discs and tapes, video tapes, puzzles, board games, kitchenware till it was bulging out of the cupboards, bits of tat from holidays long past, and the general miscellanea of life in the 21st Century. Paperwork! Piles and piles of hoarded paperwork. No, we wanted rid of all of this - every last item. We sought simplicity.

We gave a considerable amount of time to talking about about the impact our downsizing might have for our families and my children. We considered the consequences of not having a home large enough to accommodate them for visits, or heaven forbid, if they needed us to do so in the event of serious illness or incapacitation of any sort. We came to the conclusion that we could not live a life where we held out for these possibilities. If a misfortune was to befall either of our families and we had to step in to provide support, we decided we would be able to do this no matter where or how we were living.

We also paid considerable attention to the enormity of decluttering our lives. We recognised that getting rid of all our valuable and generally well loved possessions was in all probability an irreversible decision. Once they were gone out of our lives they were gone. We would not get them back again. Were we willing to take the chance that sometime down the line we would regret our decision and seek a return life in a house and have to begin furnishing and making a home from scratch? We both came to the conclusion that we were deeply committed to taking this step, and if we were to change our minds, we would accept the consequence of doing so.

What too of our treasured belongings - those items in our lives that are essentially irreplaceable? Things that were gifts from important people in our lives, precious photos, lovely artwork, letters, family heirlooms, and possibly expensive pieces of furniture. This we realised, was going to be tough. We agreed that if we made the choice to downsize then we were to do this with no half measures. We were not going to rent a large container where we would keep all our belongings - just in case. We knew that if we rented storage then deep down we would continue to feel just as cluttered as we had been when we were in the house. We decided that we would allow ourselves to have irreplaceable precious items kept by various family members but we would not burden them with any more than these.

In reality, the decision to declutter and downsize was an extremely easy one for us. After our successful time aboard Driac (though we were not successful in the race), we set our minds to finding the yacht we wanted - in effect our new home. Karen was certain that living on a yacht was what she wanted to do - and so did I. We set ourselves the target of getting rid of our belongings by the end of the year with the aim of leaving the house as soon after the Christmas holiday period as we could. Once we had committed ourselves to this life changing course of action, things seemed to flow very smoothly. We searched on the Internet for yachts within our range of affordability. By September we had viewed a few boats and then in October we came across Strandbo - we fell in love with her the moment we went aboard. We had been told by friends who knew about such things, that we would know the boat we wanted to buy the moment we went aboard - and this was certainly true for us.

'Strandbo' - Jaguar 27

Roughly a month later with all the purchasing formalities completed, we were the proud owners of our very first yacht - our future home. Now came the task of emptying our lives with all the physical paraphernalia that we had each accrued over thirty odd years. I think deep down we knew that this was going to be a massive task, but for the moments and immediate days after acquiring our wee yacht - we both felt a level of excitement and joy that we had not experienced for many years. We could see and feel the eventual liberation from a way of life that we both felt bound by. We felt confident and proud of the decision that we had made - to totally declutter, downsize, and to live aboard a yacht.