Welcome to the Sailing sophie blog.

Our family has packed our bags and set off on a multi-year adventure that will hopefully take us around the world on our catamaran Sophie. We’ve had a wonderful time with our boat for almost five years now, cruising and racing her with family and friends throughout the waters of the Pacific Northwest. But we have always wanted to do that one big family adventure together, so we have stepped away from our jobs, our house, and our schools to go off and see the world. On a big beautiful sailboat.

Our trip actually started back in September when Jenna and I sailed Sophie from Seattle to San Francisco with the help of our friends Dan Rogers, Karl Riebeling and Becky Hoppins. We did the trip in 3 days, 23 hours and our only stop was at Bonita Bay for fuel during the last day.  During this leg we had sustained northerlies of 25-35 knots for over 24 hours, and Sophie proved to be a very stable platform on a reach. We also caught a tuna. We have a lot of confidence in this boat.

After the delivery to San Francisco, we all returned to Seattle where Jenna and I proceeded to settle our affairs and get ready for the big trip. We drove back down to the Bay Area with our children Leo and Hazel in the beginning of November and have lived on the boat for over a month now. The overall experience continues to be a little scary and a lot of fun for all of us.

From San Francisco we have made our way down the California coast, with stops in Half Moon Bay, Monterey, Morro Bay, Cojo Anchorage, Santa Barbara, and Long Beach. We’ve had either no air or sustained southerlies and have motored the entire way south from San Francisco. Our goal is to get the boat to San Diego in a couple of weeks and then drive east to spend the holidays with family in Michigan and New England. We then plan to return to San Diego to prepare Sophie for an early March departure for the Marquesas and the South Pacific.

We’ve traveled over a thousand miles so far, and Jenna has taken well over two thousand photographs! We already have so many stories from our trip that we want to share with all of you, but we’ve been spending so much time ramping up our home schooling program and transitioning Sophie from a boat that regularly hosted 40 people for the Thursday night Downtown Sailing Series races and parties to a boat that is a suitable long-term home for a family, we simply haven’t had enough time to start this blog. Until today.

So we hope you enjoy what we share with you on these pages. We plan to circle back and publish a lot more detail about the legs of our trip to date, including the best of our photographs. Leo plans to set up a Kids Corner so he can share his perspective on the trip. And we plan to go into a lot more detail on how the boat is holding up to the combined rigors of long distance sailing and daily family life.

So please sit back, enjoy the ride, and wish us luck.

Jamie, Jenna and family.