In this article I will describe the steps we are taking in preparation for our project from the perspective of life change. I will try to share who we are, where we are as this turning point is approaching in our life and what steps we are putting in place to prepare for it.

We are somewhat of a classic family, our children are grown and our particularity is that we have lived abroad for many years. After an internship in California in 1996-97, Jérôme and I understood that we were going to start a life open to opportunities. We returned home to Brittany to finish our studies (teaching for me, computer/electronic engineering for Jérôme). Our plan was to go back to San Jose, California, to work there since the company where Jérôme had interned offered him a full time position. We lived there until 2000, when Mentor Graphics announced to Jérôme that he would have to relocate to Huntsville, Alabama, as a technical lead for a company they had just acquired. Our children, Jade and Octave, were born there in 2000 and 2003 and we stayed in Huntsville until 2008, after we ourselves obtained the American citizenship. In the summer of 2008, we sold our house and moved to Berlin, where our children were admitted into the John F. Kennedy School, a bilingual German-American public school that provides education from kindergarten to high school. Originally from Brittany, we had been missing the sea for a long time and since 2015, we have been scuba diving as a family, which gives us great opportunities to explore the underwater world during our travels. We enjoyed several liveaboard diving trips on ships and we got a taste for this life at sea, impossible as lon as we are raising our children, but which remains in a corner of our minds for later.

In 2020, our daughter is studying in France, our son has to take his HS Diploma in June 2021 and we have been mulling over the end of our stay in Berlin for a while. With the fast development of Covid-19 pandemic, as for many people, everything really started in March 2020. We had to self-isolate earlier than most people, because of my immunosuppression. I had a kidney transplant in 2018, thanks to my mother’s donation and I absolutely had to avoid being contaminated. We took our son out of High School, which closed shortly afterward. We started living between the house and the adjacent woods, which was a life saver day after day because we could walk, get some fresh air and reinvent the world in our discussions. As our son was having difficulty following online courses and living in isolation, we quickly see that he will have to do an extra year. On Jérôme’s side, things are complicated too. He has been a business owner with his friend and co-founder (JB), for about ten years and he is overloaded with work. He does not see it yet, but I feel that he is approaching burnout, that the number of work hours have been too high for too long and that stress is at its peak. The period of uncertainty due to Covid is not helping things for the well-being of the company either.

The highlights of our days are our walks in the beautiful forest of Heinrich Laehr Park in our Berlin neighborhood of Zehlendorf.

We compensate for the difficulties of confinement with our discussions on dream projects. When Jérôme talks to me again about this second-hand catamaran that he dreams about, a project to be realized after our departure from Berlin (so June 2022), I see the opportunity to remedy the heaviness that he feels between the health, economic, professional situation, etc. I enthusiastically throw myself into supporting the project of a hypothetical catamaran, seeing it as the possibility of dreaming during this time in parentheses, which will turn out to last weeks and months. For the choice of the catamaran and the development of the project, see this other post: The Search for the Ideal Boat for Refit to Electric Propulsion.

At that time, we were celebrating our 46th birthday, we are not super athletic (that’s the least we could say for me). We are contemplating, not only a large-scale renovation project, but also a new life where we could live on our hypothetical boat for part of the year, with the upcoming departure of our second child for grad school in September 2022. I could see Jérôme really light up and find a way out of his stress while browsing boat listing websites, researching electric propulsion and solar energy, etc. I can still see the moment when, under the big trees, he said to me: “Oh don’t worry, the coastal boating license is nothing at all and then we’ll get the offshore one!”.

In September 2020, I started fitness classes with Billy, my new sports coach (Happy Body Berlin), who has become a beautiful and important part of our life. At that moment, everything is closed everywhere and with the covid rules, we are only allowed to meet one person outside the household indoors at a time. Billy coaches me in the sports studio of his apartment, 3 to 4 times a week and I begin the gigantic work of regaining control of my body, working on flexibility and acquiring strength, with the aim of being able to sail by summer 2022. Jérôme has no time to come to these sessions with all the work in the business, but he still joins my other stretching class from time to time and realizes that he really needs to get back in shape too.

The confinement gives us time to focus on the maintenance and some repairs of our house, because we need to sell it as well as possible to fund our projects. The proceeds of the sale will go into the purchase of a small apartment for the two of us in Brittany, as well as the purchase, renovation and then the maintenance of the catamaran. We are lucky with the Berlin real estate market being in great shape for sellers.

On the business side, Jérôme is gradually working on getting the business “run without him”, with the goal of becoming part-time in the future. This is obviously very ambitious given how intrinsically linked he is to his business, founded with his friend JB from the ground up. The goal is to gradually ensure that they hire and train a new leadership team so they become “only” the owners. It is about moving away from daily business operations and finding time for their personal projects, after more than 10 years of exceptional dedication not counting their hours, their Sundays and even less the possibilities of real vacations. It’s happening slowly and we keep the goal that by summer 2022, things will hopefully be in place so that he is less in the day to day operations of the company and only plays his role of owner invested in the company’s strategy. From January 2021, Jérôme decides to join me for more regular sports training and starts his days with Billy and me from 8 to 9 a.m., before the work day. At that time, we acquired the wreck of our Dean Jag 530 and the project became serious. See this post about the purchase of our catamaran here.

In the evenings and weekends, we both work on learning the maritime code to pass the coastal boating license tests and the CRR (Restricted Radiotelephone Certificate, necessary license in France to operate the VHF radio). We are scheduled to take the written test in Vannes in May 2021 and to take the practice test on the Gulf of Morbihan. We feel our project is gradually coming to fruition, at least in terms of what we can do ourselves, because regarding the structural work to restore the wreck to a state where she safely floats, this is in the hands of the Alicante shipyard, 360a3. You can read several technical articles on the renovation work.