Our lives as liveaboards
My daughters, Samantha and Sallyanne, were only six and seven when they gingerly stepped on board our 35ft Coronado ketch in Piraeus, Greece. Like me, they’d never set foot on a sailing boat before. With my husband, Roger, we were on an extended holiday, having driven from our home in Nottingham to Greece in a small campervan. Here we decided to charter a sailboat for a week to visit the Islands. “You won’t actually have to do anything,” we were told, “because a crew of two comes with the boat.” That was why we chose this charter, because none of us had any idea how to sail.
We had a marvellous time sailing between islands, dotted with pretty little villages, and dining late in waterfront tavernas. The water was so clear and blue and by the time we left the girls were swimming like fish. Roger was in his element, soaking up everything the two American crew could tell him.
It was during the long drive home that Roger first mentioned the idea: “You know all those boats we moored next to, and how many of them had Brits living on them?” He chose his words carefully, focussing on the road. “What would you think about us doing that for a bit?”
Our small business was doing well, and we employed four salesmen. We had a nice house in the country. The kids went to a private school, driven there by Roger in his Jaguar, or myself in my Mini Countryman, and we had a beautiful snow-white Samoyed called Dougal. So why would we put all that in jeopardy, to uproot and swan-off on a tiny boat to goodness knows where? I also had big concerns about the
