Their ‘Big Adventure’ begins in Duluth

They found one for sale in Maryland four years ago that was leaky and needed some work, but it fulfilled their requirements.

“This one’s been around the world twice and we wanted one that knew its way,” Tom said at Spirit Lake Marina in Duluth, their restored Panoceanic 46 tied to the dock behind him earlier this week.

An idea that began six years ago to travel around the world in their retirement will become reality when the couple sail their boat, named “Big Adventure” by Judy, underneath the Aerial Lift Bridge on July 28 to begin a nearly two-year trek around the world.

“I thought it would be something to do, be interesting to do. It seems like every time you go on vacation … you try to pack so much into it that you don’t really get to spend any time there. Now if we want to spend two weeks in Tahiti, on one island, we can,” Tom said.

But Judy points out that the wheels have been turning in Tom’s head about the trip long before six years ago.

“Tom says six years, but it was actually before that. He and I got married in 2014 and we met in 2011 and when we met, all over his house were books about sailing and how to buy a used sailboat so … it was pre-2011 that he was already working on it,” she said.

Their restoration of the sailboat began four years ago in Maryland before they sailed it to Duluth, where they’ve continued to work on it for the past two years. They’ve made numerous treks between their home in Isanti, north of the Twin Cities, and Spirit Lake Marina.

Now, only a few details remain to be completed.

They were originally planning to leave Saturday, but decided to push the departure back a week after a couple remaining projects were delayed, Judy explained. Six years of planning has now come down to one final week. The boat is restored and newly painted. New electronics were installed. Dishes and bedding purchased. Recipes for boat meals tried and tested. But, Judy wondered, can you ever really be fully prepared for two years in a sailboat?

She says it’ll be difficult to not see grandchildren — Judy’s first grandchild was born last year and her second grandchild is due in September. But they want to do the trip while they still can. Tom retired from a job as a tool-and-die maker several years ago and Judy retired last year from a job in sales.

“We want to do it while we’re still able to do it, while we’re still agile enough, mobile enough to do it,” Judy said.

Tom concurs, “There’s going to come a time pretty quick when we’ll not be able to do it. I don’t want to sit around saying, ‘I wish I would have…’ It’ll be fun to meet a bunch of different people, different cultures.”

Global tour

The couple has an itinerary for their travels, but left some of the details more loosely planned.

Tom doesn’t have only one location he’s looking forward to visiting because there’s so much on the agenda. Judy said the first thing she’s looking forward to is spending time in the Caribbean without any schedule or plans.

“Then each step of the way, it’s going to be exciting to see what’s coming and do that next step each time,” Judy said. Tom adds, “We can’t think about Tahiti when we’re heading toward Tortola. … You don’t want to plan out every single day.”

They’ll sail on the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway after leaving Duluth, then down the U.S. coast to Portsmouth, Va. From there, they’ll head 300 miles into the Atlantic Ocean to catch the trade winds to the Caribbean as part of the Caribbean 1500 boat rally. It’ll take about two weeks to travel to the Caribbean, where they plan to spend six weeks before starting their global tour, Judy said.

Starting and ending at St. Lucia, they’ll be one of 40 boats circumnavigating the globe in the World Arc rally from January 2019 to April 2020. They haven’t met anyone else who will be on the trip yet but there’ll be six American boats, while the majority will be from Europe, Judy said.

People can follow along with the Nelsons’ journey on the website worldcruising.com, by finding their sailboat “Big Adventure” listed on the Caribbean 1500 beginning in November and the World Arc beginning in January.

During the rallies, the boats leave each location together, but then have a window of time to arrive at the next destination. They also have the option of dropping out of the World Arc rally twice and rejoining the following year if they decide to stay at a location for a year instead of traveling on.

They decided to travel with an organized boat rally because it makes entering and exiting countries easier, in addition to having a point person in each port they visit and a weather expert to help them make informed decisions to navigate weather and currents, Judy explained. They’ve also taken seminars on weather and navigation as part of their trip planning process.

The worldwide tour includes traveling through the Panama Canal, stopping at the Galapagos Island, a month of diving at the Great Barrier Reef and experiencing Carnivale. They’ll also visit a few islands rarely experienced by tourists and they’re bringing bartering items to use on two islands that don’t use money. Tom has visited a few Caribbean islands in his life, but he said he has never done anything like a trip around the world.

“It’s going to be fun,” he said. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime type of thing.”

The longest travel they’ll complete between locations is 2,980 miles between the Galapagos and Marquesas islands, which is slated to take 15 to 24 days. When asked if they’re nervous about being confined together on the 53-foot-long boat for the entire trip, Tom joked, “Well, we have two separate bedrooms, two separate bathrooms. I got a jackline so she can’t throw me overboard — that’s a line you hook onto in storms.”

Restoration

Both Tom and Judy have previous sailing experience, but they had a learning curve to restore a sailboat — and the search for a sailboat provided an interesting start to the journey, too. They traveled to Canada, Michigan and Florida to look at boats because there wasn’t an abundance of boats for sale with the specifics they wanted. They probably looked at three or four sailboats before finding the one that became their Big Adventure, Judy guessed.

“Are you counting the one that was full of water?” Tom interjected. “I’m looking at it and I go, there’s a big crack going down the center of it, right on the deck. Three steps down and I hit water — it’s four steps to the bottom. There’s water over the engine. It had been raining in it. The guy’s wife was trying to sell it, I don’t know what happened to the guy, but it had been sitting there for so long, there was a tree growing through it. And they advertised it as in great shape.”

They were hoping to fully restore the sailboat in Maryland and then leave from there for their world tour. But after two years of flying to Maryland to work on the boat for up to two weeks at a time, they decided to bring the boat home to Minnesota via a four-week sailing trip.

As they’ve worked on the boat at Spirit Lake Marina, Judy said they’ve gotten a lot of curious people asking them questions, including, “Are you really going around the world?”

While Judy tries to estimate how many hours Tom spent restoring the boat, Tom replies, “I don’t even want to know.” The work was mostly completed by Tom because she hadn’t yet retired, Judy explained, joking that she did “maybe one-fiftieth” of the restoration work. Asked if anything unexpected occurred during the restoration process, Judy and Tom started laughing.

The most physically demanding part of the restoration process was fixing the boat’s “leaky teaky” deck, Judy said. Tom removed the caulk, rebedded the teak wood and replaced 3,500 screws holding the deck down, with the end result of closing all of the boat’s leaks.

They’ve installed all new electronics and ensured that they’ll have good, strong communication during the trip that includes the purchase of a satellite phone. But Tom also purchased a new sextant that he’ll use to navigate along with their electronic navigation system. Tom points out that things can go wrong with electronic systems — a lightning strike could damage it, batteries could stop working.

“I’m going to do the paper charts and the sextant and the sun and the stars. I’m going to sail it by the stars. We got all new electronics, of course, but I figure by the time I get to the Indian Ocean, I should be pretty good,” he said with a laugh. “The stars aren’t going to short out.”

Although some people sell all their possessions to become “live aboards” on their sailboats, the Nelsons plan to return home to Minnesota after their global trip. That’s still nearly two years away — they first need to get on their way underneath Duluth’s landmark bridge.

Reflecting on the start of their journey, Judy said, “It’s going to be exciting, very much so. It’s going to be like, ‘I can’t believe we finally—'”

“— After six years of planning, we’re finally going,” Tom said, finishing her thought.