Sailing the world. It’s the adventure of a lifetime for Alison Gieschen, who has been sailing the high seas with her husband, Dan, since selling their New Jersey farm in 2017. Together they have traveled to 47 countries and four continents aboard their 43-foot sailboat, Equus.
Sailing the world. It’s the adventure of a lifetime for Alison Gieschen, who has been sailing the high seas with her husband, Dan, since selling their New Jersey farm in 2017. Together they have traveled to 47 countries and four continents aboard their 43-foot sailboat, Equus.
Alison Gieschen shares her journey from growing up in upstate New York and moving to North Carolina, to becoming an avid sailor inspired by early family vacations in the U.S. Virgin Islands. She recounts her serendipitous meeting with her husband, Dan, a three-time national sailing champion and Merchant Marine, and their decision to sail around the world.
Throughout the podcast, Alison details their blue water sailing adventures, including their unexpected but fortuitous stop at the Galapagos Islands and their many challenges at sea. She also touches upon her emotional struggles, such as overcoming PTSD from a severe storm during their early voyages, and the significant role that fate and mentorship played in her sailing journey.
Alison reflects on her sustained love for horses, drawing parallels between her past in competitive horseback riding and her current life aboard Equus. Alison recounts memorable destinations like the Azores—where a chance walk to town leads to a singular encounter with a cheesemonger—and Ireland, where she and Dan ended up housesitting in a Downton Abbey recreation on Bantry Bay during COVID. Throughout her travels, she is continually surprised and thrilled at the kindness of strangers.
Additionally, Alison discusses the environmental and humanitarian issues associated with Chinese fishing fleets, emphasizing the need for awareness and action regarding their harmful practices.
Places mentioned in this episode:
Rhinebeck, NY
Red Hook, NY
Boston
U.S. Virgin Islands
New Jersey
New Bern, NC
Charlotte, NC
Tahiti, French Polynesia
Hiva Oa, Marquises, French Polynesia
Azores
Panama
Galapagos Islands
The Pacific Ocean
The Atlantic Ocean
Ireland
Bantry Bay, Ireland
St. Martin
Bermuda
More about the Chinese fishing boats:
Chinese fishing boats and forced labor, report from Al Jazeera English, Jun 20, 2024
Books by Alison include Riding the Waves of Reality, the nonfiction chronicle of their first four years of blue water sailing aboard Equus.
Alison's other books can also be found on Amazon. These are not affiliate links, just so you know.
Connect with Alison and Dan:
Instagram: @sailmates_on_equus
Facebook: Alison Gieschen
Christi: [00:00:00] Moving up, moving out, moving along. Where are you headed next? I'm Christi Cassidy, your host and the creator of Moving Along a podcast about travel, relocation, and life transitions. Listen in to real life. Stories as we explore moving along and what it takes to make your life a positive new adventure.
Welcome to Moving Along. My guest today is Alison Gieschen checking in from French Polynesia aboard Equus her 43 foot sailboat. You see, Alison and her husband Dan sold their New Jersey farm in 2017 and have been sailing the high seas ever since.
[00:01:00] They visited 47 countries and four continents. Welcome Alison.
Alison: Thank you, Christi. Thank you for having me.
Christi: Well, it's really nice to see you. That boat is just beautiful. I can see all the beautiful wood and I mean, it's been home for seven years now, right.
Alison: Actually, we lived on it for a bit before we set sail so it's going on eight years. Eight years that this is our home.
Christi: Almost eight years. Wow. So tell me, you grew up in North Carolina, right? What part of North Carolina did you grow up?
Alison: Actually I moved there when in the ninth grade, the first half of my life I lived in Upstate New York on a big a hundred acre farm. we had raised all our own meat, vegetables, excuse me, fruits, everything. It was, it was an amazing childhood.
And then my dad got transferred to Charlotte, North Carolina through IBM. So I got transplanted from, you know, rural, upstate New York to Charlotte, which was quite an adjustment.
Christi: I [00:02:00] bet it was. What did travel and moving mean to you at that age?
Alison: It was devastating because. That's all I had ever known. And I went to such a tiny school with, you know, and I knew everybody in the town and, and they actually resented Northerners at that point because so many were getting moved down there. So the first words anybody ever spoke to me when I went to my new school was Go home, you damn Yankee.
So, and I got bullied and terrorized and it was a very traumatic time in my life.
Christi: That must have been pretty awful.
Alison: It was, it was terrible. It was, it was very difficult, thank goodness. A couple other families had been transplanted down there also. So I was able to, to have people I knew down there and we kind of, you know, banded together and did our own thing 'cause they kind of had similar experiences. We were kind of had our own group, our, Northern outcast group.[00:03:00]
Christi: Yeah, I, I was gonna say the Yankee expats.
So where did you learn to sail? Did you learn as a kid?
Alison: Again, back to IBM. While I was still in upstate New York, a family moved into town, a new IBM family, and the father was an avid sailor and my mom did grow up in Boston, so she was, loved the water and missed it. And so this family brought us on a sailing vacation in the Virgin Islands. We chartered a sailboat and sailed around the Virgin Islands for two weeks and we did that twice and that hooked me on sailing.
Like I just absolutely fell in love with it. Then when I moved to Charlotte that family also moved to Charlotte and he started racing on Lake Norman, which is an 80 mile manmade lake in Charlotte. And I crewed for him all the way up through college and just fell in love with the sport of sailing.
Christi: Oh wow, so before ninth grade you [00:04:00] had already been to the US Virgin
Islands on a sailing trip twice. That's quite something.
Alison: And I was the last of six kids, so there was a very big age difference between me. Everybody else were teenagers and older, and I was still, you know, pre-teen during all that.
Christi: You got to learn from all your older kids, all your brothers and sisters and your IBM family. Right. Where just outta curiosity, there's a lot of lakes, the Finger Lakes, the Great Lakes, upstate New York, and I'm actually in Hudson, on the Hudson River. So where were you?
Alison: My dad worked in Kingston, which is near Poughkeepsie and, but we lived across the river in a little tiny town called Red Hook.
Christi: Oh Red Hook, which is about 20 minutes south of where I am.
Alison: Oh my gosh.
Christi: Small world.
Alison: I was born in Rhinebeck. I was, I was born in the Rhinebeck Hospital.
Christi: So that makes a lot of [00:05:00] sense. And you are just like, you are always kind of a water person then it seems like,
Alison: Yes,
Christi: And is that how you met Dan?
Alison: absolutely is. My mom and dad when they retired, moved to New Bern, North Carolina, which is on the water, and my mom decided she was going to be the fastest woman skipper, competitive sailor in New Bern.
So she bought a racing boat. And the problem was there were no other women skippers in New Bern. So then she just decided, well, I'm just gonna be the fastest skipper in New Bern.
So she entered all these regattas and races and she took names and kicked butt and won trophies. So meanwhile, I'm in college back in Charlotte, but I would go on weekends and I would join my mom's races. Well, one weekend there was this really big regatta and my cousin who worked with Dan at the Philadelphia Naval shipyard knew that Dan was a three time national sailing champion.
And he says, Hey, come down to New Bern and sail with my aunt Jerry and I. Wink, wink. I have [00:06:00] a, a really cute cousin. She's, you know, eligible. So that weekend we sailed together, we scuba dive, we windsurf, we canoed. We played all weekend long. And right before he was getting ready to go back up north and me go back to Charlotte, we were sitting there having a drink and.
He said, you know, someday I wanna sail around the world. And I said, me too, let's get married. So a year later we were married.
Christi: What a wonderful story. Wow. I, I get the romance thing, but how, just serendipitous
Alison: And his, his father married us 'cause he's an Lutheran minister. So he came down and married us on the country club lawn where we met and then. Then he he was a, he was a sailor also. He, he got Dan into sailing on the Chesapeake Bay and they fell in love with New Bern so much. They bought the empty lot next to my parents and built a house and my in-laws and my parents were neighbors for 30 years.
Christi: did you [00:07:00] ever dream ever in your life that anything would turn out like
Alison: no. That's why I, I'm a firm believer that no matter what we're going through now, our difficulties, our trials, our tribulations, this has been pre-ordained by destiny or fate or the heavens above, and I just have, it's a really, a journey of faith at this point.
Christi: I wondered because recently when you were leaving, you left Panama, And You wanted to go to the Galapagos, but you didn't think you were going to be able to.
Alison: Financially it would've cost us $4,000 just to drop anchor in the Galapagos to all the permits and the fees and the, hoops you have to jump through are incredible. And we had just spent about $30,000 on boat repairs in Panama. So we're like, it's not in the budget, even though it was a dream location for both of us.
'cause we're avid scuba divers. We're like, it was heartbreaking, but we're like, we're gonna have to bypass it. And a lot of our friends made that similar decision. they didn't wanna spend the money either, so how fortuitous that you [00:08:00] know, eight days out our sail shredded because the part that we paid seven thousand dollars to put in, the guy didn't install it correctly and it tore our sail
And we were having engine problems. So we're like, we have to go to the Galapagos. Darn. We have to go to the Galapagos. So we did, and we got the sale repaired and our engine worked on, and we got to go scuba diving with hammerhead sharks and sea turtles. And it was absolutely incredible. And it was like a gift.
It was like God said, you're not gonna miss this. It is in your hearts to be here. You are gonna stop there whether you're planning on it or not.
Christi: Right. And it's not really like you w you know, sometimes you go places or you travel places and you think, oh, I'll come back. And no, you, that wasn't gonna be, that wasn't gonna be possible. So there you were, right? But you, you were turn, you had to go back to Panama
once, twice.
Alison: Well, when we, when we started. Making our attempt to cross the Pacific, you have to wait for a very [00:09:00] specific weather window and you have to, everything has to align and, and be perfect. And the wind directions, the occurrence, the weather patterns, and three times we set out and didn't get more than a day away before we had to turn back because we had some type of epic failure or crisis.
So this was our, you know, our fourth attempt trying to cross. And we still didn't make it. We still had to stop at the Galapagos. But
to be fair, to be fair, it is not uncommon. I mean, I know at least four or five votes that turned around once, if not twice. So it, it happens, you know, it's not something you feel bad about because it's just the, it's just the nature of the game really.
Christi: Is this one of the things that. Surprised you as going from someone who sailed on the weekends to undertaking a huge multi-year trip around the world, sailing the high seas.
Alison: Yes, the number of difficulties breakages, crises I would've never imagined [00:10:00] in a million years. It probably would've deterred me from ever setting out if I knew about 'em.
Christi: And did you study before? You left before you set sail.
Alison: Not only did we study well, my husband was a Merchant Marine, so he had crossed many oceans and had extensive marine experience. So he was, you know, my safety net, my blanket. But while we were at a Miami boat show taking educational seminars on how to live on board, there was a man who was giving a seminar on sailing and storms.
'cause that was always my biggest fear.
We did a lot of boat show seminars to prepare us, but there was a particular individual named John Kremer who was giving a seminar on sailing and storms. And he had been in three hurricanes and two typhoons and was a delivery boat captain and had just amazing information about crossing oceans and boats.
And after his seminar, he said I do have one opening left in a sailing and heavy weather [00:11:00] training passage where we go out and do a thousand miles in the trade winds and you know, do a crossing and you'll get real life experience in heavy weather. And I looked at Dan I said, Dan, I have to do that.
Like I haven't been on the ocean. You have, I need to go. So I actually did a thousand mile training passage. With John Kretschmer, and at the last minute somebody dropped out and he let Dan come for half price. So we were both on board and there was just six, six of us. And we went from the Virgin Islands to Grenada, Grenadines and back again and did our a thousand miles. And, John said, you guys were gonna be fine. You're gonna be absolutely amazing. And he helped figure out what kind of boat we, we would be good for us. He questioned us, what do you want in a boat?
And he developed a, a list of the top 10 boats that would be good for us. So we did find boat number one on the list, and that's the Taswell, which is a boat that we have. But then the funny parts of this story is the first time we tried to cross the Atlantic, we got caught in a horrible storm and we [00:12:00] got 20 foot waves crashing on the.
Deck of our boat and it broke. Our dinghy ripped the life rails right out of the boat. We had $14,000 worth of damage.
Our dinghy was tied to the life rails to the rails on the, on the deck of our boat. And it ripped the dinghy, ripped the rails right out and it cast the dinghy through the lifeline. So our lifelines broke and now we're in danger of the, the dinghy slamming against the boat and taking out our mast.
'cause it was hitting the shrouds. Threatening to take our mast off. So Dan had to go up on deck in these 20 foot waves and cut it free and.
We lost a solar panel. We lost, like I said, we had $14,000 worth of damage and we had to turn around and go back to shore. So we did a 500 miles and ended up 20 miles from where we started back in North Carolina. So our very first ocean crossing was a failure. It was horrific. So fast forward to a couple years later, we finally successfully crossed we get to the Virgin [00:13:00] Islands, but I had PTSD so badly that every time the weather would start to get rough, I would just go into panic mode.
And we were getting, we were preparing to cross the Atlantic all the way to Ireland via Bermuda. And I said to Dan I don't know if I can do this. Like, you know, I, I get agita just thinking about it. so we pull into St. Martin in the Virgin Islands. And as we were going to bed, I kept thinking, tomorrow's gonna be the day where I wake up and I tell Dan, I can't do it this anymore.
I can't do it. I'm just, I, so we anchor our boat and this has, this harbor had a hundred boats in it. And guess who is three boats away?
Christi: Who? Oh no, your teacher,
your mentor and
Alison: He, we call him on the radio. We're like, Hey John, it's Dan Alison. We found our taswell. We're out sailing.
And he is like, okay, great. Come over for happy hour. So we go over there and he is got a couple other people on the boat. Everybody's sitting and we're drinking wine and eating cheese. and I was sitting next to him. He goes, so Alison, how's it going? And I'm like, John, it's really bad. We [00:14:00] got caught in this terrible storm and I'm so scared now and I just don't know what to do.
And, and I tell him the whole so sob story. And he, he looks at me and he starts laughing. I, I go, why? Why? Why are you laughing at me? He goes, do you know how lucky you are? I'm like, no, not really. He goes, do you know how many people get the crap kicked out of them? And the first thing they do is sell their boat and never sail again.
He goes, you're still out here. Your boat did great. Your husband did great. this will probably never, ever happen to you again. He goes, you have this, you've got this. And he was the only person in the world that could have looked me in the eyes and told me that. And I would've believed him. Because he had published five books.
I read every single one of his books. He was my idol. He was my mentor. And the chance that he was three boats away from us at a time when he was the only person in the world that could have talked me down out of the tree. Again, it's this whole fate and destiny theme that pops up all the time.
Like I, I wrote a book about it. My first, you know, four years of sailing, Riding the Waves of Reality. And it just [00:15:00] points out all of the moments where it's just too much of a coincidence to be random. You know, there's some higher purpose pushing us, and I have to embrace that and accept that.
Christi: Well, you lived through it. I mean, that's a big deal too.
Alison: Absolutely.
And he has a book called Flirting with Mermaids that makes all of our stories seem tame. Everything that I've just told you, he is 10. His stories are just 10 times more traumatic and unbelievable. I mean, we are second class to his stories.
Christi: he sounds pretty interesting. I'll definitely put I'll put him in the show notes. Speaking of books, Riding the Waves of Reality now, when you, you call yourself the Nautical Novelist, and when you first started out, did you think that you were gonna be a travel blogger?
Do you think you would have the SailMates [00:16:00] Kids? I mean, I know you were a teacher,
Alison: I was a teacher, yes. I always envisioned that I would be a travel blogger that at, at the time we left, it was getting very popular to have a sailing blog and there were people that were making so much money doing it, but they were mostly producing videos and they were avid bloggers, you know, blogging every day.
And it was so difficult the first few years that I did update my blog, but I just, I couldn't focus on making it a profession and doing the work that needed to be done. We also didn't have the internet like we do now. We didn't have Starlink. So it was so expensive to get the type of data plan that we needed to produce regular videos and blogs that we couldn't afford it.
You know, I just, if you can't have a way to put it out, you can't do it. So it would have to be when we were in port and could find wifi somewhere, you know, sitting at a Starbucks or a restaurant or a marina that had wifi. So it's not, not until recently that I've really upped my [00:17:00] game with, you know, promotion and writing and publishing and all that kind of thing.
Christi: what did you do all day before you were really writing?
Alison: I read a lot of books. I mean, I went through so many books. I, and the funny part is when you go to a marina, every marina has a bookshelf for sailors. So you bring all of your books that you've read and you put 'em on the shelf and you take the ones that you wanna read. But it's not the day. It's a lot of work sailing.
So it's not like you're just sitting there doing nothing all day. You're always, I mean, preparing meals, especially when you're out on the water, is difficult. I mean, just getting a carrot to stay on a cutting board long enough to cut it up is like a major feat, you put something down and you get something else out and the thing you put down moves and you go get that.
And then the other thing leaves and you got things going in all different directions. 'cause the boat's moving in two different directions all the time and it's, it's exhausting. So just surviving, just, oh, I have to go use the bathroom, great. I gotta get down the stairs, I gotta get through [00:18:00] the hallway, I've gotta get to the bathroom, I gotta hold onto something.
It's just, it's, it's really exhausting. So you're never bored because there's just a whole world outside of your boat that's incredible. You've got daily tasks, just taking care of yourself and feeding and doing your normal routine. If you can fit in getting a book read or sitting down and you know, writing for a few minutes on a computer. 'Cause I was always able to still write. That took up my days.
Christi: Okay, so you're talking about your normal routine but I wanna ask, how long did it take you to get your sea legs? Isn't that what they call them?
Alison: Yes. I never really had a, a big problem with that because we sailed in the Chesapeake a lot and I raced with my mom and. So I, I didn't really have an issue with getting my sea legs. That was not never a problem for me.
Christi: You had to overcome that pt, you call it [00:19:00] PTSD,
Alison: The post-traumatic storm syndrome syndrome,
Christi: Think it took me a while. Yeah. Okay. And, and it was John's talking to you, port
Alison: in St. Martin.
Christi: and did you just immediately snap out of it when he talked to you?
Alison: I did. I went and I had a whole different mindset. I'm like, I can do this. He's right, you know, and him telling me that. I believed him. I just said, okay. In our first passage after that was only, I guess maybe a seven day passage to Bermuda. And we did have difficulties. We had a horrible lightning storm, so we had to get through.
And then we got to the entrance of the harbor and our engine died and you had to sail into the harbor. You couldn't, it was a very small passageway and the wind was coming through it, so you can't sail where the wind is coming from. So we actually had to get towed into Bermuda. They were like an emergency tow.
[00:20:00] So that was a little traumatic, but still I was okay with that. And then our next jump was to the Azores and that was a couple week passage. And I did fine. I did great.
Yep. we arrived there on our anniversary. I'm trying to remember which one. I think it was our what is it, Dan? 30? Yeah. 30 something. 30 something anniversary. So
Christi: Well, what a nice anniversary present. Yeah.
Alison: Yes.
Christi: Had you been to the Azores before?
Alison: All of the countries we've sailed to is pretty, except the Virgin Islands are pretty much a, a first for us. Bermuda is a first and the Azores and the Azores are still our number one favorite place on the planet.
Christi: Oh, really? Oh, that's so nice. What makes it special for you, besides the fact that your first visit was on your anniversary?
Alison: Well, there's a group of islands, I think there's like seven major islands, and they're all different, even though they're very close proximity, you can get to each island for, you know, a [00:21:00] couple hours by boat. But geographically they all formed a couple thousand years apart. So they have kind of a different feel to each island.
And each island has its own little niche, niche subculture on it. And I don't know if it's government subsidized or whatever, but everything is so inexpensive there.
Our first night there, we wanted to go eat out for our anniversary dinner, and apparently there's only one restaurant on the little island that we landed on.
So it was really very unique and. Absolutely adorable. So the bill comes and I'm like, oh, Dan, I don't even wanna look at this. Like I, you know, we had several bottles of wine. We had the ente to appetizers dessert, and just, just just read it to me. And he says, $20. I'm like, what? Yeah. $20 per person?
Christi: Wow, that is astounding.
Alison: Yeah. You can imagine our shock obviously on a positive, a good shock. But that is
the theme [00:22:00] of all of our trips to the Azores is people were so friendly and kind and generous. Another island. We went into a new harbor and my, my boat buddy, Marian and I walked up to a local place that sold fruit and cheeses and stuff.
Just local people, few, few little shops. And we go in and I see this giant wheel of cheese and I'm, cheese is my favorite food on the planet. And it hadn't even been opened yet. It still had the wax on it. It was like, you know, 12 inches in diameter. And I'm looking at this cheese, I'm like, oh my gosh. And the guy points to it and I'm like, yeah, cut me off a, a slice. I'm trying to, you know, motion for him to give me a wedge of that. So he cuts it and then he starts cutting off. The cheese and putting it on a plate. And then he goes around and he starts collecting fruit. And he had made us taste the cheese with a different fruit. So we tasted it with melon and we tasted it with banana and he's just feeding us this cheese.
And then he gets a bottle of wine down from the shelf and he pours us a glass of wine. So my friend and I are just like dying. We're laughing and he is feeding us all the cheese and fruit we can [00:23:00] eat. And I'm like, wow, this is gonna be pricey. 'cause you know, I felt like it maybe was a scam or something.
And we collected all the fruit that we wanted to to buy and my little wedge of cheese and it came out to like $10 for everything. And he didn't charge us a dime for everything that he fed us. So fast forward, fast forward to a couple nights later, we decided we wanted to go watch their tradition, which is running with the bulls or bull fighting or something.
And it's not fighting the bulls, it's, I think. Kind of like a running with the Bulls. They pick a town and the matador's bring a trailer with a bull in it, and they're all dressed up in the traditional costumes and they tie a rope and they all hold onto the rope. And the bull runs angrily through the streets and people dive out of the way and they watch from their balconies and it's a huge party.
so this bull fight
they make him angry and they lose control of when sometimes they drop the rope. And the bull now is just, you know, running full speed towards the people on the sidelines and they're all diving out of the way.
And it just, it was just something you just can't make up. And. The thing [00:24:00] was we had walked like four miles to get there. We didn't realize how far the walk was and now it's the bull fight's over. We ate from all the local food vendors and it was just magical. And we're like, oh my gosh, we've gotta walk home in the dark.
This is terrible. When all of a sudden a familiar face taps me on the shoulder, it's the fruit guy. So he loads us into his van and he drives us all the way back into town, but we don't just go home. He takes us into the shop and he opens up the shop and he starts feeding us again and he gets the cheese out and the wine and the fruit.
Now our husbands are getting to experience this, this wonderful man's. So I ended up inviting him back to my boat for dinner for one night. So we actually, you know, could pay him back for all of his kindness and, but I can just, I can give you four or five different, very similar stories. Of the people's generosity, the kindness and the cultures are amazing and everything is so inexpensive and it's absolutely beautiful.
And it used to be the whaling capital of the world. So people came as far [00:25:00] as New England and their whaling boats. So the whole harbors. So now that whaling is illegal, but whales and dolphins and sea life surround these islands because the islands are all volcanic and they drop down at a very steep level so that the sea life comes right up to the shores.
And they still to this day have people whose jobs are to sit on the mountains with spy glasses and look for whale spouts so that when the people in the tourist boats want to see the whales, they can say, oh, they're near this island in this place. And you can be guaranteed that you're gonna see a different species of whale.
'cause they can tell by the spout what the species is.
And they have museums and whalebone art and just sardine festivals. ' And they have hot springs and waterfalls and just hiking and horseback riding and everything you can imagine.
Christi: The horses, I'm so glad you brought up the horses. when you encounter horses in your travels, do you just gravitate toward them? Do you ask to ride them? Do you
pet them as you've been [00:26:00] doing lately in French Polynesia?
Alison: yeah. So I, I, I'm fascinated by the ones in French Polynesia because I just wrote a fictional novel called The Seven, but they're based on, real places. Some of are even real people. And all of the facts about the history, the culture, and their current situation are all heavily researched. And so one of my characters was a sailor and he got shipwrecked in the French Polynesians.
And of course there's a horse associated with each character. So I go into the whole backstory of how horses arrived here on the French Polynesian Islands. And I know this story so well. And it, it just, I don't know, it just touched me on such a deep level that when I saw my first hoard of horses here, as we were driving around the island, I was just, I melted.
I'm like, oh my gosh, I know your ancestors. And you know, and they came right up and stuck their heads in the car window and, you know, let us pet them. And so I definitely gravitate towards them, but every place we go is so [00:27:00] vastly different. You don't normally find horses wandering around an island loose.
Christi: that's the way it is where you are now.
Alison: Yes, all the horses, there's very few in pastures. They're either tied with one rope around their neck to a stake on the ground, or they're just wandering free.
Christi: what's the name of the island you're on
Alison: Hiva Oa,
Christi: Hiva Oa. You were a school teacher and you also ran an equestrian program,
right? In new, this was in New Jersey.
Alison: correct.
Christi: That's definitely horse territory
Alison: Yes. Yeah, the United States Equestrian Team is located in New Jersey.
Christi: and you had horse farm.
Alison: We did. I was a competitive horseback rider. All the way through college, and I actually qualified for the Junior Olympic screening trials, and I
had a really good thank you. I had a really good shot at making the top 10 to get drafted to the Junior Olympic team, and my stirrup leather broke going over the cross country course, and it ended all of my [00:28:00] hopes and dreams.
But had that stirrup leather not broken, I would've had a totally different life. I would've never done sailing. I would've never met Dan, and I would not be here today.
Christi: So what happened when the stirrup leather broke?
Alison: Well, if you know anything about cross country courses, they're a several mile long course, and you take 'em at a full Gallup and you go over these horrendous jumps, they're jumps over bushes and fences. And the one that I, where my stir leather broke, we had a, I had to jump going down a hill. A fence and the horse actually goes over the fence and down the steep incline On the other side.
At the bottom was a cement drainage ditch. What I had to jump over, go up the hill on the other side and jump a fence to get back out. And my horse was amazing The reason why I did so well is because I got perfect scores on anything to do with jumps. My horse would go over anything I pointed him towards.
So just as we went over the, the jump to go down the hill, my stirrup leather broke. And had [00:29:00] he not stopped, I probably would've fallen into that cement ditch and died. And he had never refused a fence ever, but he felt me unbalanced and he saved me and he slowed himself down. And here we were stopped right at the verge of this cement square, two feet deep, three foot wide ditch.
And now I'm, I'm in trouble because the only way to get out is to jump. To get back out and I was missing a stirrup, so I had to get him to walk back up the hill a few feet, turn around and leap over the ditch, go up the hill, and then jump out the other side and, and, you know, stay on him, which I did. And then once I got out, I just started crying.
I'm like, I, we can't do this. We can't do this, this, this is it. We're, I got to, you know, finish this course. So I just rode him through to the end and gave my parents a sob story. But, you know, it was a wonderful journey getting there. And horses kind of saved me because of my traumatic time down in North Carolina.
I still always had my [00:30:00] horses and that was what I poured myself into, my heart and my soul. And I am really happy that I did what I did because it gave me direction and then something to aspire to. But there was a different course for me, and it was sailing, and that's where I was led.
Christi: that's when you started working as on the boat in the summers
Alison: Well, I started, I was sailing, I was sailing and riding at the same time. 'cause that was my high school years and early college years. But then my parents moved to New Bern, North Carolina and they sold the little farm that they had. So I actually had to take my horse to college with me and find a farm near my college that would let me keep the horse in return for giving riding lessons.
So I never went without having my horse somewhere close to me. I always had to have that. I was like my security blanket.
Christi: What was your horse's name?
Alison: His name was Demitasse, it's a French word, D-E-M-I-T-A-S-S-E. And he was Jet Black and he was a thoroughbred and my mom rescued him. I bought him for [00:31:00] $50 at an auction when I was a small child, and he was a demon and he bucked everybody off.
And when I got to be about nine or 10 years old and I told my mother I wanna ride Demitasse she goes, oh no, he he'll kill, he'll kill, he'll kill you. You'll, you'll get hurt. I'm like, no, I wanna ride Demitasse And I couldn't even reach the stirrup. I had to, you know, get on a fence or a mounting block just to get on him.
And he never, ever did anything wrong with me. Never bucked, he never tried to get me off. We just had this, this soulmate relationship and, you know, he carried me all the way as far as we could go. So he just, he was my little horse angel.
Christi: so you were a horse girl and on your way to the Junior Olympics, and then your whole life changed.
Alison: Yes.
Christi: Wow. I love stories like that. Thank you.
Where do we go from here?
Alison: I told you it was gonna be hard, hard to keep me on a straight course 'cause my life goes in. So I I, I warned you, I [00:32:00] said your di most difficult task is gonna be keeping me focused and, you know, in one direction because Yeah.
Christi: No, that's okay. I like stories that go round and about and over here and over there, and sometimes I get way too. I, I get, I get too distracted down the rabbit holes myself. But okay. So when you sold the farm in New Jersey to go sailing, you kind of gave up the horses.
Alison: Well, except I named my boat Equus and now I'm on my sea pony.
Christi: Yes.
Alison: She is, she is my sea
pony. I talk to her. I love her. I groom her. I mean, yeah, it's just, you know. Where I put my horse energy now.
Christi: Where you put your horse energy. Okay. Describe the boat for me. What's it look like?
Alison: It's teak. 'cause teak is resilient to the weather and the abuse that a boat takes being in saltwater. So, [00:33:00] and our boat is kind of unique. It's an old boat. She's 30 years old and she was built in Taiwan at a very renowned ship building factory for producing really well-built boats.
Which is why John Kretschmer recommended the Taswell. And my one requirement that I gave to Dan looking at boats is I needed a large, comfortable bed. Because if I'm gonna live on a boat, when I go to bed every night, I wanna be in a queen-sized bed. And we have what's called a center cockpit. So the aft of our boat is our bedroom, and it's got a nice walk-in bathroom and shower, and a queen size bed and a beautiful little vanity with a nice mirror.
And that's just my comfy place. And then the center of the boat inside is the galley and our satee and our table and our living room area and our nav station, which I'm sitting at talking to you. And then you walk through a little doorway and there's a guest bedroom. So a little double bed, and then a little bath, a little bathroom all the way up front for, the spare bedroom.
Christi: How [00:34:00] nice have your children come to visit you on the
Alison: They have. And we sailed with my grandson when he was only three years old. We had him for a couple months and he sailed all the way up to New England. we anchored at the Statue of Liberty Base and he got to look up at the Statue of Liberty, but he didn't know what it was at that time. All our grandchildren called us Boat Grandma and Boat Grandpa.
And the cool thing that I did is I gave them all world maps that they have on a wall in their house and they put a stick pin in every country that we're in so they can learn geography and see where we are in the world.
Christi: Was that part of the impetus for Sail Mates Kids?
Alison: Yes. plus I've started getting into school visits, author visits. I wanted to be able to give something to them at their age level. So if I go in and I'm talking to a group of elementary schools, you know, I can say to them, if you wanna see where we are or what we're doing, or what countries you can go to Sail Mates Kids.
for instance, I highlighted the Galapagos Islands and I talked about why [00:35:00] they're so unique and all the different animals that live there, the and, and why it's different than any place in the world.
So when I find something really unique like that, I scale it down to a kid version.
Christi: I saw those pictures on your blog. They were like, amazing. Just amazing.
What are some of the favorite places that you've been besides the Azores
Alison: Well, we love Ireland a lot because we got stuck there for two years because of COVID,
Christi: Oh, you were in Ireland for COVID. I wondered where
Alison: We weren't allowed to, if we left the harbor, we would not be allowed to go anywhere. They told us like, you'll, you'll just be out at sea with, you know, you have to sail back to the U.S. which is, we didn't wanna cross the ocean back to the US so we just had to kind of hang there.
And we did fly home once and our kids did fly out to see us. So one of my sons and my daughter flew out and we rented a car and drove all the way around the whole
country of Ireland. and got to see all the amazing sites with no tourists. It was amazing.
And this is the cool part, being [00:36:00] part of the sailing community. There was a sailor who had a house in southern Ireland in Bantry Bay he worked in Australia and then came half the time back to Ireland. And when COVID hit, he couldn't leave Australia. So he had, his father was the governor of the Falkland Islands and his father recreated Downton Abbey on 200 acres on Bantry Bay.
And they needed a house sitter and. Somebody knew we were there trapped and they're like, Hey sailors, you wanna go house? Sit. So we rented a car, drove down to southern Ireland, and we basically had Downton Abbey to ourselves. And it was like a museum because the governors get gifts when they go from different, you know, Africa, they had a big elephant, but, and this mansion had like a servant's quarters with the winding back staircase and, you know, all these bedrooms to choose from.
But they all were decorated in different themes from different countries. And there was no heat. We had to make this big fire in the fireplace each night. And [00:37:00] our only job was to walk the dog twice a day and feed the cat.
Christi: No problem.
Alison: was gorgeous. So we took two mile walks every day along the shoreline and So it's the mussel capital of the world. And we would gather fresh mussels from the rocky shoreline and go down and have barbecues on the beach and cook right there on the beach or the gigantic kitchen with, you know, eight burner stove. And it was just, it was absolutely magical.
Christi: where's your next stop? Do you know?
Alison: We've had a lot of difficulties with. The boat part's breaking that we're still resolving. And we were intending on staying in Tahiti to fly home for the holidays, but there's no room for us in Tahiti. Nobody will take us. So we now have to pull the boat here on Hiva Oa, which means we can't go explore a lot of the different island groups that we were planning on right away.
So it's an kind of a nebulous ever changing process. And I'm sure when our friends get here in two weeks, they're gonna want us to hang here longer to stay [00:38:00] with them rather than go off to someplace new. So we're just staying flexible. But we do have a plane ticket out of Tahiti, so we'll have to get to that island.
We'll have to fly from Hiva OA to Tahiti, and then take the plane to the US and then come back and resume our journey in January.
Christi: Do you like swap out your clothes when you go home,
Alison: I try.
Christi: do, you go
Alison: I do. In fact, I just ordered a, a whole shorts bathing suits, tops and sundresses
Christi: Well, Alison, I could ask you really about a hundred more questions, but tell me if there's something a story or something you wanna say that I haven't asked you or I haven't touched on.
Alison: Oh, that's a tough one. I, I do wanna mention one thing. It's kind of traumatizing, but I think it's something that, something that I didn't know about until we crossed the Pacific. There are fleets of Chinese fishing vessels and they put [00:39:00] out these nets that are 60 miles long and they just ravage the ocean because the whales, the dolphins, the sea turtles everybody gets caught in their net and they kill everything that they get in their nets.
And they were caught illegally fishing around the Galapagos and they had like 190 shark fins. They pulled the sharks out and killed them and just took their, Fins off and had them in their freezers. So there's this fleet of boats and they're like, you know, a hundred to 200 feet long. Some of 'em are fishing boats, some of 'em are the processing boats.
Some of them have the freezers. And wherever they go, they just decimate the marine life. we encountered this fleet twice, two different fleets crossing the Pacific. And one time we're a sailboat, so we have a right of way. And we went through the pack and one of the boats aimed right at us and didn't change course
We had to turn our engine on to avoid being hit by this 200 foot boat. And I tried calling 'em on the radio. They won't have any radio contact with boats and they've been known to, [00:40:00] you know, steer towards people and harass them.
So that was the first fishing fleet. And then the second one popped up in front of us when we were hove to and Dan was trying to repair our boat. And we woke up the next morning and they had put the net between us and where we needed to go. So we had to sail around them when they get parts of the net like that are bad or get tangled, they cut 'em up and leave them drifting in the ocean.
And we, one of them caught our rudder, which was what took out our autopilot and loosened our steering cable. And It caught us in the dark and stopped our motion and that's when everything broke. And we woke up the next morning and it had already left. It didn't get, you know, permanently attached to our boat, which is good because it would've been treacherous for Dan to have to go under the boat in nine, 10 foot seas in the middle of the ocean.
But we could have lost our boat and a lot of people. Sailing around these fishing fleets have gotten tangled in the nets that they're discarded nets. So and, you know, and who's going to police them? They're in international waters, so they're kind [00:41:00] of just doing their thing. And I never even heard of them before crossing the Pacific.
I didn't even know they were a thing.
Christi: does Greenpeace police them at all? Or, or chase them?
Alison: I haven't researched that part of it. I've just researched who they are and what they're doing and, you know, where they're fishing and where they're located. And not, not some of our other people, our other friends, boat friends who across Pacific didn't run into them. So we were just unfortunate to have run into them twice.
Christi: And so you wanna bring awareness to, well, it's a terrible thing if, if they're just catching up everything and killing it.
Alison: Yes,
Christi: It's against the the international, right, the maritime
laws.
Alison: I'm sure, they're breaking all kinds of rules, but who's gonna go take on a, a fleet of, you know, 200 foot vessels, who's gonna start a war with China to stop them?
Christi: how many were in these fleets that you encountered?
Alison: a dozen boats [00:42:00] maybe?
Christi: That's a lot.
Alison: Yeah.
Christi: So you wanna bring awareness to this, and then the question is, what can anyone
do and
You did write
Alison: I, it was, it wasn't a blog post, it was just one of my regular posts and I actually showed our, radar image of the fleet around us, our sailboat and how one of the boat. Like, it looks like it's touching us on the radar. That's how close it is. But it was still several hundred feet away.
But you know, you can see our little tiny sailboat has a little triangle and the big triangle coming right up to us. And how we had to turn our engine on to evade him.
Christi: were you scared?
Alison: was screaming at him on the, at the, you know, I had a ship's name and I, I can see him on the radar. I, I called him and I like asked him, are you aware of us? Are you changing course? What's your intention? And he didn't answer. So I tried another boat and, and then I started researching it and they're like, yeah, they, they, they won't talk to you.
They won't answer the calls on the radio. [00:43:00] They have been known to harass people. oh. And then they have like slaves on board. Like there's all kinds of to. Information about them getting people on board and then taking their passports away and kind of holding them hostage and not paying them and treating them poorly.
So it, there's a lot of nefarious layers to this issue.
Christi: They sound like pirates.
Alison: they're, they're modern day pirates and they, they force these people to work like excruciating long hours and don't treat them well and don't pay them and hold them hostage. So it's not a good situation.
Christi: Well, like I say, I look forward to reading more about what you find out in your research and thank you for sharing that and yeah, bringing awareness. Awareness is really important because if people don't know anything about it, then they can't do anything about it either.
Alison: Well, it's been really fun chatting with you and telling my stories. I love telling stories.
Christi: It's really been a pleasure. Bye-Bye./
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