About Us

I’m Scott

Just in case you are reading this and you don’t know who I am, here is a little bit about me.  I am (counting on fingers…) 53 years old.  I have been sailing on and off for about 30 years now, having got my start on my good buddy Dean’s little 14ft catamaran up at Emma Lake at their family cabin.  After that, I crewed on another friends Hughes 32 on Diefenbaker Lake for a couple of summers.  Sailing also helped me get together with my wife, as on our first date she mentioned that she has always wanted to live on a sailboat, and I was able to say, hey – I know how to sail!

After we got married we decided to get a bit more serious about it, and we took a Basic Cruising course through CYA (Canadian Yachting Association).  This was a 4 day liveaboard course on Vancouver Island, and after getting a passing grade we were off and chartering sailboats, with just the two of us island hopping on the West coast of Canada, the BVI, St Martin, Antigua, and Greece.  We have both come to really enjoy the cruising lifestyle, and always talked about eventually moving onto a boat when we retire (or sooner).  Of course, tomorrow never comes, and it was always aspirational, and some unspecified time in the future.

But last year I started noticing that people my age around me were getting cancer, and getting sick or dying.  This provided a pretty good kick in the ass, and over a few months Maggie an I eventually agreed that if we are going to do this, now is the time.  We have our health, and with some creative structuring of our businesses we should be able to pull this off.  And so the boat shopping changed from occasionally looking at yachtworld.com and saying “this one looks kind of nice”, to contacting a broker and saying “we need to get on some boats”.  We found Mark Thompson, a nice broker in Florida who went out of his way to help us, and arranged for us to see as many boats as we could cram in on a 4 day visit to Ft Lauderdale.  We saw about 12 boats in some detail, and came to better understand what we wanted.  We eventually settled on one of three boats (none of which were actually available in Florida when we were looking) – A Leopard 43, Fountaine Pajot 42, or a Lagoon 410.  So now that we knew what we wanted, our search got more focused.  Also, we were looking for an owners version (see the section ‘our boat’ for info on this).  We found an owners version Lagoon 410 in France, and made arrangements to see it in person in July.  I flew over to inspect it, and liked what I saw – and so we purchased Adiona.