Photo credit ©Ivor Wilkins
For Mike and myself the price of admission to the cruising lifestyle was the cost of a pair of tickets to watch the U of A basketball team play a home game in Tucson. At half time we visited in the bleachers with our friends and fellow Wildcat fans Steve and Linda Dashew, renowned designers of cruising yachts, and they informed us that one of their designs, a Sundeer 64 christened Raven, had just become available for sale in New Zealand.
Mike and Steve are good friends from their flying hobby, having met in the Tucson Soaring Club. Over the years we have had plenty of opportunity to learn about Steve’s philosophy of boat design, and we had enjoyed a weekend cruising with them aboard their 85 foot sailboat Beowulf. The hook was already set and we were an easy catch!
A few days later we were winging our way to New Zealand. It was only a couple of weeks before Christmas, and here we were headed across the Pacific to a country where spring was just turning into summer.
We spent our pre-Christmas holidays putting Raven through her paces, and as Mike phrased it, we could find no reason not be buy her. She had been beautifully loved and maintained by her previous owners, Jan and Signe Twardowski, and by her professional crew Rod Bradley and Anouk Reijerts. She was situated in the world’s best cruising grounds and she was ready to go adventuring. So were we – and so the Raven Logs begin!