BETTER THAN HOPE

Hope Town, Abacos, Bahamas 26º32.228N | 76º57.53W

Palms in Hopetown.

Before selling the wine shop we spirited away a bottle of Salon Champagne and tucked it into Cara Mia's bilge, a gift to ourselves to be opened in a place we dared to hope.

Three years and five months ago, Chip and I flew to Hopetown to fan the dream of a cruising life. At the time we were still deeply entrenched in land life, neither the house nor the wine shop were even on the market yet, and cruising for us was still years away but hope was not.

Every morning like a couple of pretenders, we tuned the VHF in our cottage to channel 68 to listen to the Abacos cruisers' net. From dry land, we spent hours watching the boats bobbing in the protective embrace of lovely Hopetown Harbor, hoping for the day we would arrive on our own boat.

But those wistful hopes were just a quick pencil sketch on a cocktail napkin compared to the stunning 3D color we rode in on today.

The sunrise over Lynyard Cay was a fitting preamble to a perfect day.

We raced beautiful Jessie Marie toward Hopetown on a come-and-go breeze under brilliant Bahamian skies. A group of dolphins cavorted around our bow, the water so clear I could watch them roll on their backs and dive under our bow.

Jessie Marie, cover girl.

And then we turned toward the Hopetown lighthouse. The water leading into the harbor is painfully shallow, and I inched in with white knuckles but not without feeling the full weight of emotion as we rounded the last turn of the channel and into that mooring field I had so often dreamed of.

Entrance to Hopetown Harbor.

It was smooth sailing that brought us here this morning, but our long plod across years to get here was not. It was strewn with the painstaking work of building and selling a business, building and selling a house, dispensing with a lifetime of belongings, searching for our perfect cruising boat then fitting her out for a new life.

Today, we celebrate the well-tended hope that breathed life into our 10-year plan, the gravity-defying hope that kept us focused while slogging step by step toward a vision that few around us shared or understood.

Cheers and a few tears.