The Crew
We are Captain Juan, First Mate Kathy and House Cat Oliver. Juan is a retired software engineer. Kathy was a medical doctor in a former life of her, before we moved to the United States (legally, in case Donald is following this blog). Oliver is just himself: he has no degree and no skills, but has a very strong opinion.
Kathy and I have shared many adventures in the three decades we’ve been together, including an eight-month trip from Montreal to Quito when we were half as old. Most of it was along secondary (and even tertiary) roads in an old and beaten-up Jeep Cherokee we christened El Caleuche.
Ñandú is our latest adventure and it will be our home for the next year or ten. While we have experience sailing and had chartered boats before, we had never been on a boat for more than ten days in a row. We knew that making a boat our home was going to be a challenge. We knew that at times we were going to be cold, tired and scared. And we were right, but we went many times through all that same kind of misery aboard El Caleuche, yet it was a profound experience for us.
Acknowledgements
We both learned to sail keelboats with Pacific Sailing in Santa Cruz, California. Latitude 38 magazine helped keeping the dream alive. And we mastered many practical tricks from Captains Steven Phillips, Leslie Waters and Ralph Drahos.
[Latitute 38 wrote a piece on Ñandú based on this blog: direct link here, pdf here.]
Updates to the above
Sadly, our dear Oliver is not with us anymore. We are no longer cruising on Ñandú, but on our new four-wheeled vessel Ñu.