We have some catching up to do. My last post was in 2017 and a few things have gone down since then.

We called our dream to sail away on a catamaran “Gilman2020.” We actually borrowed the name from Turner Broadcasting’s restructuring plan “Turner2020.” In 2015, we took a week-long American Sailing Association class in the Virgin Islands to become certified captains. And from then on, the goal was to leave corporate America and live on a sailboat.

Dreams don’t become reality overnight and there were many steps to climb the mast to our catamaran. I left CNN in 2016 and Ryan left Delta in 2017, we sold in the condo in downtown Atlanta and moved full-time to our home on Lake Lanier, all with our eyes on the prize: a life on a sailboat by 2020. But our Uffda Sailboat didn’t get the love we wanted to give it!

We bought a travel trailer in 2018 we called “Landshark” and started spending more time sailing the highways between Minnesota and Florida. We got sidetracked by injuries. Ryan tore his bicep tendon and didn’t even start driving the travel trailer the first few thousand miles we towed it. I dislocated my shoulder and broke my humerus in 2019 and turned the driving over to him. Then, Gilman2020 turned into Covid2020 and the world closed down.

We mourned the events of January 6, 2021 and starting living again when the vaccines came out. We sold the house on Lake Lanier and made Florida our home. We sold Uffda to our neighbor Levi and our little project boat enjoyed Bloody Mary weekends and adventures on Lake Lanier.

Like fierce Viking warriors… we tried to continue on the path to Valhalla, our forever sailboat. We bought a concrete pad in an RV Resort across the street from the ocean in Juno Beach, Florida, just 15 minutes away from my favorite place to barefoot water ski in the world: The PGA Canal. We loved our little piece of property in South Florida and we surfed and water skied and bought a pontoon to explore the Intracoastal Waterway. A great life in the Florida sun.

We lost so many people we loved to Covid and Cancer including Pam and Dale, Mike and Mandy, and Diane. And time starting ticking away. In January of 2024, Ryan knew it was time to plan our exit before we missed our shot. Before we got too old or too injured to make it happen. The gales of November came early and we watched “the republic die in the empty eyes of an empty man.” We knew it was time to go.

In December of 2024 we found Valhalla at the City Marina in St. Petersburg, Florida. It was the second catamaran we looked at… out of our price range but with a motivated seller. We made it work and we closed on the boat a month later. We left Juno Beach and took Landshark across the state to get our new home ready for our new adventure. We lived in my cousin Alfred’s driveway and in cheap motels and funky airbnb’s. The next few months were a beautiful blur of getting stuck in the bilge, learning about sailboat systems and making upgrades.

The story and this blog picks up where Valhalla begins… in the shadow of a Saint.