Together Again

Balearic Island, Spain

During the 1990’s, we lived in a nice little suburb in Simi Valley, California. One night, we had our next-door neighbors over for pizza and realized that we all had a love of sailing and the desire to cruise the world on a sailboat one day. During the seven years that we lived next-door to Mike and Linda, we spent many evenings making plans to buy boats and sail to the South Pacific together. Twenty years later, we are cruising on our boats (Berkeley East and Aquila), as planned. Coincidentally, both our boats are made by Hylas, bought at different times and completely different boats.

They started a bit earlier than we did, so we aren’t cruising together, and we haven’t made it to the South Pacific, but we did meet up with Mike and Linda, some 7,000 miles from where we first met, to sail together in the Balearic Islands of Spain.

We have explored many anchorages in Mallorca, Ibiza, Formentera and Espomador. We’ve taken buses and rented cars, shared meals, enjoyed numerous liters of Sangria, reminisced, laughed, told stories of our travels and made new memories to share in the future. We are always fine cruising around on our own, but buddy boating with good friends is a lot of fun. While we keep trying to convince them to go to Greece with us next year, Mike and Linda have been in the Med for more than two years and they are ready to sail Aquila back to the Caribbean.

So we will continue to cruise the Balearics with them for a few more days, anchoring side-by-side…next-door neighbors once again.