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Boat Porn II part 2

June 2008

By: Scott & Jennifer Stillman

Holly CRAP! We've made a change.

Let me start at the beginning. It was a dark and stormy night. Jennifer went in for her annual review at her previous employer and asked for one thing, an extra week of vacation. Jennifer was the go to person at the firm and after almost a decade, it was time for three weeks of vacation. It had nothing to do with the fact that we already planned on the trips. I won a trip to Punta Cana, DR and we are planning on doing the Harvest Moon regatta in October.

The four partners, the only decision makers, told her it was against company policy. WTF?

After tax season was over, Jennifer posted her resume. Immediately, like within a week, she had two impressive interviews one on the 9th of May, with a large 100+ firm on the west side of Houston. The next was on the 16th of May, with Ernst and Young. As kind of an after thought she accepted another interview for the 16th at a smaller regional firm in Clearlake with about 40 employees.

Yea Jennifer!!! The first offer was 50% more that her current package. The second was about 75% more. The last was almost double if she started immediately, June 9th. OOPS. They also gave a starting bonus, extra time off, and it is 10 miles from the boat. The best of all it was Jennifer's favorite place.

So it's time to panic. We put the house on Craigslist for rent. Literally, with in a half an hour we had three e-mails. We rented it the next day.

We're moving onto the Mothership.

We went to pick up the VII C's on June 6th. Both the truck and car were packed with almost everything we owned. She was finally ready at 8pm.

We had a pretty uneventful motorsail up the Houston ship channel arriving in Kemah around 1 am. The only thing of note was we listened to a search and rescue taking place on the radio. We found out later it was the Texas A&M Galveston sailing club that lost their keel killing one and left the rest in the water for 30 hours. (We're working on our emergency plan.)

The new AC works like a champ. We are in the process of adding insulation above all the panels in the ceiling. I estimate it will take about a year. Like everything new it took us a little while to work out the quirks but, so far, we're happy.

This is what happens when you put everything you own on a 42' catamaran. I guess we'll spend the next few years playing clean sweep.

This is Jennifer's New office. Nice view. Lots of room. She is very happy with her new job. She keeps telling me stories of her over hearing other people talking about how efficient and quickly she works.

Our first Race 6/14/2008

First let me say we are not racers, but we figure what better way to get more efficient with our sailing than to force ourselves to sail around a course. We joined TOMA. Texas Offshore Multihull Association

So for our first race we, um, sorta, showed up and floundered around the course. We didn't hit anything and we went from A to B to C and back to A.

One of our dock mates took these cool pictures of us getting started. This was the first race after the A&M Galveston ship went down. So the Mult-hulls and hull deficient vessels were out there, all sporting A&M flags in honor of the man that died. It was chaotic out there near the start line, so we immediately got our sails up and started the course. I think that was the best part of the race. We didn't make it around the other two markers, we got close, but we didn't go around. We had a wonderful time, and afterwards we met up with other TOMA members and had a great evening making new friends.

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Boat Porn II Punta Cana, DR / 2nd Race

Revised: September 21, 2008