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In my last life, I spent long hours inside the Beltway working for the Libertarian Party and Harry Browne’s presidential campaign. That was before I met John Pugsley who captured my heart and took me back to California with him. After just six months there, however, we left our relatively stable life behind and exchanged it for a life of adventure. 
First, we moved for several years to Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. Now we live in an even more magical place called Eris Island—a 50-foot sloop. As I write, we’re poised to set sail for the Bahamas, waiting for clear weather so we might embark on the Caribbean adventure we’ve been dreaming of—and planning for. We’ve been working up to this moment for some years, in fact. 

Unavoidable wanderlust
Though I didn’t leave my small hometown of Kailua, Hawaii for my first 18 years, I always dreamed of traveling the world. At the first opportunity, I took off. I’ve been a wanderer ever since, traveling all around the United States, as well as in Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. I’ve lived in five states and the District of Columbia, as well as in Canada, Germany, Switzerland, and South Africa. 
John has also traveled all over the world, and, as I am, he is enormously curious. He will tell you that we are both novelty seekers, drawn to the new and exciting. It wasn’t very difficult to talk him into leaving California and moving to a more exotic location outside the United States. We were both tired of the rat race and wanted a simpler lifestyle. 
Great idea. But where to go? We did some research and visited some of the places that sounded interesting to us, such as Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Chile. We tried to approach our move carefully and rationally. 

Warm, safe, friendly B.V.I.
In the end, however, our choice of “where to” was neither very scientific nor the result of extensive research and analysis. We chose the British Virgin Islands (B.V.I.) simply because it was a place we both liked. It had been the destination of our first trip together, and we fell in love with the balmy January weather; the verdant hills; the clear, warm, turquoise waters; the vibrant, colorful landscape, and the smiling, slow-moving people. One cannot help but slow down in a place like that.
We were excited by the idea of spending our free time sailing, snorkeling, scuba diving, and windsurfing. We imagined ourselves exhausted by all that healthy exercise in the salty fresh air, reclining on the beach sipping rum punch and piña coladas, watching golden sunsets. Yes, it seemed to us that the British Virgin Islands was a place where we could live the dream life.
And we wouldn’t even have to learn a new language. (That is, if you don’t count the Caribbean dialects, so foreign to our ears.) The official language is English and the currency the U.S. dollar. These islands have American banks, FedEx with overnight U.S. delivery, and an efficient phone system with Internet access. Add to that a very low crime rate, almost no racial tension (far less than anywhere in the United States), no real poverty, no street people or panhandlers, and no welfare system, and we had all the reasons we needed to give it a try. The B.V.I. beckoned, warm, safe, and friendly. 
So, in October of 1995 we packed up; put most of our belongings in storage; took my cat, our clothes, our computers and our books, and moved to Tortola. New adventures, new challenges. Lovely, yes. Safe, you bet. But life wasn’t exactly easy. Not quite the “dream life” we had hoped for. Vacationing in a place and living there are two very different experiences. Real life rarely resembles the fantasy. We had a lot of adapting to do. 

Priorities change
We in the United States are very spoiled. We have so much ease and affluence, so many conveniences we take for granted. Things run very efficiently most of the time. That certainly is not true in the Caribbean, where nothing seems to work smoothly or on time. Life is more primitive. People there do without much of the “stuff” to which we in the States are so attached. Many things simply aren’t available. There isn’t the same work ethic we have. Or the same set of priorities. Money and material things aren’t as important. And time is truly a relative thing. Everything moves slowly, time and schedules just aren’t taken very seriously. The sun rises and sets and tomorrow is another day—and most things seem to be continuously put off until tomorrow. 
The first few months on Tortola were very frustrating, and we often wondered if we hadn’t made a big mistake. It was a love/hate affair. 
Little everyday chores become big everyday chores when there is no dishwasher, garbage disposal, or clothes dryer. On Tortola, shopping for the week’s groceries often means stopping at three or four different shops and even then coming away with only half of what was on your list. Planning a menu is futile. It is easier to go see what there is in the stores that day and then to create meals around what is available. We learned to improvise and to make do. In the beginning it was very frustrating. 
But after a short period, it became relatively easy for us to trade in certain comforts and modern conveniences for the physical beauty; constant warm weather; balmy breezes; clean air; crystal turquoise seas; and magnificent sunsets which are a part of everyday life in the Caribbean. Priorities change. 

The call of the sea
Feeling safe in an unsafe world gained a high place on our priority list. It is difficult to match the value of that wonderful feeling of safety and security we found in the B.V.I. In a world where crime is rampant, and locked doors, barred windows, security gates, and guards have become the norm, it was nice to live someplace where we felt comfortable leaving the car unlocked and the windows and doors of our house wide open. It is good to have no fear of walking alone, even at night. For this, we gladly traded a great number of “civilized” comforts. 
Yet although we love Tortola and the British Virgins, we became restless after a couple of years there.
We met many people on Tortola who were from other Caribbean nations, and we became more and more curious about what those places were like. We visited a few other islands by plane and enjoyed our visits. But spending a few days in a resort as tourists was nothing like our experience of living on Tortola, where we were able to get to know the community and learn about the culture. We wanted to be able to spend enough time in many of those places to get an idea of what it would be like to live there.
From our house on Luck Hill, we spent countless hours watching boats sail by, tucking into secluded bays that could be reached in no other way. We began to fantasize about buying a boat and sailing from island to island, taking our home with us, traveling with no real schedule or deadlines, able to stay as long as we liked & leave whenever the urge struck us.
We walked the docks at the marinas looking at other people’s boats and dreaming, talking to sailors, many of them couples who lived on their boats while cruising the Caribbean or the world. Finally, we decided we had to get a boat of our own and become full-time live-aboard cruisers. The gypsy in me was delighted; the adventurer in me was thrilled. And the researcher in me got busy. I didn't know how to sail, and knew very little about boats, but I became obsessed with the idea.

A whole new language
John had sailed on and off for much of his life—a year-long trip from California to Mexico and Central America and shorter jaunts in Greece, the Bahamas, and the Virgin Islands. But most of his experience has been in chartered boats or the boats of friends. Buying, equipping, and maintaining a boat was to be a new experience for both of us. 
I read a couple of dozen books on how to buy a boat, how to recognize good qualities in a cruising boat, boating safety, etc., as well as a number of books and articles about other people’s sailing adventures and misadventures. 
I read about how to “provision” a boat and how to properly store things in small, damp, always shifting spaces. I learned what “chafing” meant, how it could spell disaster, and various methods employed to prevent it. I read how to shower and do laundry using saltwater pre-washes and freshwater rinses to conserve precious freshwater supplies, how to do laundry in the dinghy and take “bucket baths,” and how to catch and store rainwater. 
I read about different types of anchor windlasses, which ease hauling heavy anchors aboard, and about solar panels, wind generators, and 12-volt battery systems, as well as about wind-vane self-steering mechanisms and auto pilots. I learned a whole new vocabulary. I learned how to look at a boat and what to look for. All this, and I had still never had a sailing lesson and couldn’t tie a proper knot. 

Is there a perfect boat?
During this period of paper research, I searched the Internet for boats, and started contacting boat brokers and studying the “spec sheets” they sent me on boats for sale. And we started looking at as many boats as we could. After a few physical boat inspections, the spec sheets began to make sense. I studied the specs of the boats that sounded interesting to us, and I memorized the sheets of the boats we had seen and liked. 
We spent the better part of a year and a half looking at boats and learning. I took about three dozen rolls of boat photos. It was almost a full-time job. We looked at boats on Tortola, Virgin Gorda, and St. Thomas, as well as in the Bahamas, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, and Daytona Beach. We looked in San Diego, in Los Angeles, and in Newport, Rhode Island. It was an often frustrating and confusing search, exhausting, but also a really good education. 
We learned that there is no such thing as a perfect boat. Buying a boat is about learning to prioritize and to compromise. And everyone has different ideas about what is good. The books don’t agree, and neither do the “experts” you talk to. We learned we had to just take it all in and then decide for ourselves. We had to decide how we wanted to use the boat and where we might want to take it. Then we had to list our needs and desires and prioritize them.  I’ll give you all the details next month—and the story of how we settled, finally, on Eris Island. But right now, I’ve got to make one last run to the store. The forecast calls for clear skies, and we should be out on the open seas in the next few hours. 

Kiana Delamare and John Pugsley live on Eris Island, a 50-foot sloop aboard which they plan to spend the beginning of the next century sailing the Caribbean. Look in these pages for regular dispatches from them as they explore destinations off-the-beaten track.