Raffaellesco - Bill and Suzette's Sailing Adventure

 Delivery date confirmed     Our broker advised that the x-factory date was 6/30/22, the date that the boat will leave the factory and make the 50 km trip by truck to the commissioning yard in Les Sables d'Olonne. "But don't buy plane tickets just yet!?" Our final confirmation came on about June 23, leaving little time for final payments, insurance and paperwork. The hand over date was set for 7/27/22 based on the commissioning yards schedule. Lots to do to set travel plans and finalize purchases. We managed to get decent plane flights and reserved an AirBnB right next to the quay where the boat will be. I figured that while we do the handover and get moved into the boat that it would be more convenient to not stay on the boat. Reserving a car was another matter, but I finally found one big enough to haul our stuff. It has been a year and 3 months since we ordered the boat. With things being what they are; COVID, supply chain issues and travel disruptions, we needed t...

 A trip to France     We flew to France in March of '22 from LA to Nantes where we rented a car and drove south to Les Sables where the boat would be commissioned. This turned into an excellent opportunity to haul our new cockpit cushions and some other equipment  to the yard. We packed up 4 rolling duffels and a box with a towel warmer to go to the yard. While in Les Sables we were able to pick up our electric bikes and deliver them to the yard as well. The yard had us load up a pallet so they could shrink wrap it and put it in their warehouse.  While in Les Sables we did some shopping to determine where we will provision and where we will buy housewares for the boat. When we went to the supermarket we were sure that we died and went to cheese heaven. This is the regular grocery store! You got to love France. In Les Sables we discovered that the Oceanis store had closed and the closest place to receive items from the Uship catalog was La Rochelle. Fortunat...

Planning Having returned from France with lots of new information, sources and questions we set about the tasks at hand. Friends that set out on their JY51 in the Med had horror stories of equipment not showing up in time and scrambling to find the required and desired equipment to outfit the boat. I was determined to not have this happen to us, so I set about the task of ordering the big items; dinghy (Seago from UK), Self tacking jib (Technique Voile from France), Electric folding bikes (Brompton from London) and Linens (Beltrami from Italy). All these items had long  lead times and the commissioning yard was happy to store them for us until our arrival. My efforts paid off as all the items arrived in time. The one item that was vexing was an outboard for the dinghy. We have a propane outboard on our current boat, but propane was not an option in Europe. I do not care for having gasoline on the boat so that left electric. There are more and more options for electric available tod...

 Planning Waiting a year for the new boat to arrive seemed daunting, but as it turns out it has been very productive and a lot of fun. In September of 21 we flew to Cannes, FR for the Cannes Yacht Festival. We had hoped to see a JY51 at the show, but all the Jeanneau at the show were larger versions. It was a great opportunity to review the Jeanneau finishes and fabric samples as we were in full decorator mode. We concluded that we did not want to go with any of  their options for cockpit cushions or the bimini and dodger; the color options were not great, the bimini and dodger quality was not great and we wanted our boat to be unique. 101' Solaris The Festival                              Cockpit Cushions                                               ...

 Plan C      With COVID 19 raging all we could do is comb the boat adds and enjoy our own boat in Southern California.  We talked to Ian at South Coast Yachts about a Jeanneau 490, a design award winning boat we really liked, but it did not perform well for us under sail. In the fall of  2020 South Coast Yachts hosted a Jeanneau show in San Diego. As the search continued, we made plans with Ian to attend, hoping to see a Jeanneau Yacht 51, and went even after learning the Yacht 51 would not be at the show. Raft up in Goleta Bay with Shoreline Yacht Club Rascal docked at San Diego Yacht Club There was confusion about where the show was, which broker was hosting, and who we were meeting with that day. Simply say we eventually found the show and met Dan Krier of Marine Service Center, the new authorized Jeanneau dealer in San Diego. Dan very patiently walked us through a great presentation of the Jeanneau Yacht 51 (JY51) and answered all of our questions....

 Plan B With our sights on the Caribbean and a new boat we began shopping and planning. We really liked the Catalina 445 and felt that this might be the right boat for us. It was spacious and very similar to our current boat, a Catalina 375. However, eventually we would want to cross the Atlantic to the Med; would this be an ocean worthy boat  I reached out to my most boat knowledgeable friend Zuzanna (Host of Talk of the Dock and author of many boating and equipment reviews). She felt that if the boat were properly outfitted she would be comfortable crossing the Atlantic. The biggest concern in the Caribbean is the hurricanes, so we did a recon trip to find a suitable place to store the boat in hurricane season. This took us to Curacao, an island south of the hurricane belt off the coast of Venezuela. We rented a flat over the 2020 New Years holiday and explored the Island and did some scuba diving. Most importantly, we found a great Marina. The Marina was located inland a bi...

 Raffaellesco is the name of our new Jeanneau Yacht 51 that at this moment is being commissioned in Les Sables d'Olonne, France. We, my wife Suzette and I, have been working toward this moment for nearly 10 years, not that we new precisely that this was the moment we were working toward. In 2013 we decided that we would retire when I turned 60, end of 2020. I am not certain, but it may have been while we were enjoying the Arenui, a live aboard dive boat in Indonesia, pictured here.. Having enjoyed diving, sailing and skiing for years, from our home in California, we started dreaming about what retirement would look like; travel, living abroad, cruising; With our heads down working toward this dream the next few years travel vacations were motivated by our inner engineers need for analysis of our many options, so sometimes analysis paralysis is our worst enemy. In 2018, with our retirement date looming we decided that maybe buying an island in some tropical place would be an interes...