Formosa 51 · refitting now
Erik and Tara, two dogs and a betta fish, aboard a 51 foot fiberglass ketch called Exodus. We're on the Chesapeake right now — working, saving, and refitting her — and when she's ready we're letting go of the dock line and going as far as she'll take us.
The honest version
Not cruising yet. Refitting.
That means keeping the jobs, spending the weekends in the bilge, and putting money into the boat instead of anywhere fun. The Chesapeake isn't home, it's where the work is getting done. Every system we sort out now is one less thing to fail three thousand miles from a chandlery.
It isn't glamorous and we're not going to pretend it is. But it's ours, and every weekend she gets a little closer to ready.
Why we're doing all this
Quit the jobs. Sell what doesn't fit aboard. Leave next winter.
A circumnavigation if Exodus will carry us that far — and as far as we get if she won't. No fixed schedule, no route set in stone, and no plan to come back on any particular date. Just the two of us, the dogs, and a boat built heavy enough to cross oceans slowly.
Plenty of people talk about this from a dock for twenty years. We'd rather find out.
Come and learn with us
Almost everything we know, we learned from somebody who bothered to write it down.
So we're doing the same. Every project gets documented properly — what worked, what we got wrong first, and enough detail that you could follow it on your own boat. This isn't a showcase. It's a place to figure things out together.
If you know better than us on something, tell us. We'd much rather be corrected than confidently wrong.
Exodus