The beginning (#1)

Hello everyone and welcome to our very first blog post!! Thank you so much for taking the time to follow us on our adventures.

I’ll try to keep you up-to-date on what we are doing regularly through this blog. And we’ll also be making YouTube videos about our sailing adventures. We hope you enjoy it…

When you are reading this post we’ll be on board of our new catamaran.

During the last weeks we have been preparing for one of the biggest adventures of our lives. About a year and a half ago we decided to buy a sailing boat and become full time world explorers.

This blog post is all about the moment we have been living toward for the past year, the delivery of our boat in Les Sables d’Olonne in France.

The move ...

Last month we started packing up all of our stuff to move to Les Sables d’Olonne. Which was quite a difficult task since we have never lived on a boat before. So I really had no idea of what things to take and what to leave behind. I think we’ll notice soon enough if we made the right decisions. We barely managed to fit everything in the camper, so we decided to rent a storage space when we arrived in Les Sables d’Olonne. After all we still had to wait for more than two weeks for the handover of our boat and in the meantime we wanted to live as comfortable as possible in the camper.

The name ...

We’ve had a long time to think about a boat name, and we’ve come up with a lot of different names, but none of them had been a hit so far. We wanted a name that gave us an instant happy feeling, a name that just felt right from the first moment. I had always been confident that that ‘aha’-moment would come one day but it just didn’t. The entire drive to France we have been shouting out names, and just when we decided to go for the next best thing (a name that had been on our list since the beginning and started sounding familiar by now), we finally came up with a name that got us excited! It was a butterfly-feeling-in-the-stomach kind of moment. Unfortunately one of the conditions that our boat name had to meet was originality, and as it turned out there were already too many boats with that name. So we were back to square one.

Until… there it was… a song named ‘for Nohma’. We immediately loved it! It was definitely original and we felt really good about it. After some further research we decided that this would be it: NOHMA.

The research showed that Nohma is used as a girl’s name, which is good because we wanted our boat to have a female name.

The only meaning for the word Nohma I could find goes back to Ancient Greek, where it means: ‘to intend, to perceive, to see, to understand’ which is a beautiful description of what we plan on doing: travel, explore and learn.

Another reason why we like the name is because it’s a hint to the word nomad. Which relates to us, we’ve always been wanderers, having trouble staying in one place for a long time.

So just as I predicted, suddenly there was the name, we loved it and it was perfect for us.

The first glimpse ...

We were told the boat would come out of the factory on the 26th of September. Originally the date was somewhere in June, but the Covid-19 crisis caused a delay. Anyway we were not going to miss getting a first glimpse of our boat so we camped outside the factory to be able to record everything.

The boat was going to be transported on a truck from the factory to the port about 30 km further. We had no clue at what time it was going to happen, so we had a hectic morning preparing everything, only to eventually have to wait until 3 p.m. But what a ride… wow!! A 14 meter long, 8 meter wide boat with exceptional transport, accompanied by 2 vans and 2 motorcycles driving through small roads, around corners, over roundabouts, under bridges (one of which they only just fit under) and over the highway. I was amazed of how talented and experienced these drivers were. What an experience!! And we managed to drive behind them all the way and recorded everything. You’ll be able to see it later in one of our YouTube episodes.

The waiting ...

In the port the boat was getting completely finished. A lot of things still had to be installed before she could get launched. Our camper was parked within walking distance so that we could check the progress every day. Meanwhile we kept ourselves busy with ordering the necessary sailing supplies, designing a logo and website, ordering stickers for the boat, getting to know some fellow sailors, reading up on sailing theory (for me that is), exploring the neighborhood, going to the beach when the weather allowed it. The kids also started doing more (home-)school hours again. And although we were busy the whole time, the waiting was aggravating. So we decided to take some time off and visit the theme park ‘Puy du Fou’. This theme park has been voted Best World Park several times. It’s a must-see when you are in France, the shows were truly amazing.

The launch ...

Just before we left for Puy du Fou we watched the boat get launched in the water, the highlight of that week and another step closer to the handover.

After the weekend we got the news that the handover would take place on the 9th of September, a day earlier than planned. Exciting!!

Stay tuned for our next blog post where I’ll tell you all about our first moments on our brand new catamaran.