And so it began...

Last year at this time (June 2009, in this case) John and I had passed a small sailboat being sold on the side of Rt. 44 close to our home. We stopped, spoke to the seller and found the price of the boat to be a very cheap $400. At the time, we had no trailer hitch on the back of the car and all I could think of was spending more and more money to get this little boat going and maybe it wasn't worth it, maybe we needed to save money in such a bad economy and so on and so on....

So we decided to mull it about for a few days and in that short few days the boat was gone. I was disappointed, we should have jumped when we had the chance. And I thought the whole incident over until John had begun looking up sailboats online and came across something called a "Puddle Duck"

It looked like a small bathtub with sails, and it could easily be built from a few sheets of plywood - and under $100. So he thought it a good idea and before I knew it John was sawing away on the plywood and by August, we were on LaDue Reservoir cruising about. (We got scant "ooohhs and aahhs" from onlookers, but more laughs than anything)

But it wasn't to be enough when we came across the Stevenson Weekender II. Designed to be a boat that the beginner could build, and coming with an inexpensive set of plans, I purchased them for John over Christmas. And so the journey began to acquire one 20-foot gaff rigged sailboat, building it in our driveway in one short summer of 2010.

But for the sake of amusement, here is the picture of the PuddleDuck: