MEET THE CREW!

Co-Captains Andrew Peterson and Lance Lindsay 1st met in the dorms in college at the University of North Dakota in the fall of 2002. Individual bios below.

Lance: I grew up out west in Oregon outside Salem in a town called Monmouth. After high school I moved to North Dakota to attend the University of North Dakota to study aviation. After graduating in 2006, I found my 1st job as a flight instructor in Tucson. I lived and worked there for about a year. As soon as I gathered enough experience I got a job flying regional jets out of New York for Continental Express. Continental decided to lay off 350 of its most junior pilots and I was still one of the junior guys. Continental was nice enough to extend my flight benefits for a year, so I took advantage. For about 6 months I was "looking" for work, but not that hard. Mainly traveling. Once the unemployment ran out I had to get serious about finding work. Thanks to Andy (who I had kind of lost touch with over the previous couple years), he had heard of my travels and asked if needed work. He put in the good word for me with his employer and before I knew it, I had a new job and a new place to live in Minnesota.

Andrew: My mother gave birth to me underwater which started me on a lifetime love affair with H2O.  I was on the swimming team from the ages of 8-18, spent five summers lifeguarding, and spent every moment possible at the beach or on a boat.  I grew up in Red Wing, MN where boats are more common than cars.
Experience:  Sailing Lake Pepin on "Simple Pleasures" a friends hunter 31 for many summers, two Olympic course sailing races, chartering a sailboat in the BVI for a day, an entire summer in the Apostle islands learning more about sailing from the old salts at our marina than I could have from taking lessons anywhere else.  Oh yeah, and flying airplanes for 8 years, which I will eventually have to do again to finance more sailing!

Within a week of moving into one of Andy's open rooms in his house, the plan to cruise had started taking shape. I remember the night well. Each of us were in bed shouting through the wall at each other about how much we would rather be traveling than working. Although we did a lot of traveling for work, often to pretty cool places, it was never on our own schedule. The brainstorm-shouting continued for over an hour and we narrowed down our conversation to living aboard a sailboat sailing to distant tropical lands. The next morning I did some preliminary boat shopping online and put together a projected budget for the two of us to see how much we could save and for how long to afford what... Doing this, I discovered that in 18 months we could save enough to pay cash for an old (but seaworthy) 30-35' sailboat, supply ourselves with 6 months of spending, a healthy "murphy fund" (or a "$#!+ hits the fan" fund) between the two of us, and a "return home" fund of a couple thousand each  for us to use to get on feet again once (if) we return.

Throughout the rest of the summer of 2009 and the following winter months, we read and read and read, for we still needed to learn how to sail. We shopped for boats, looking online almost every day trying to find the right boat in the right place at the right price. We had ultimately narrowed our search to boats on the great lakes. The end result to our lengthy shopping experience was a 1978 Bristol 29.9 located in Bayfield, Wisconsin at the beautiful Pikes Bay Marina purchased in May 2010. Our dream boat, at (haggled down to) the dream price, in the dream location. The next step was to put our book knowledge into practice all summer on Lake Superior. On september 26th 2010, we set our course east from Bayfield beginning the adventure of a lifetime. Go ahead and read about the rest in the blog!