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Two empty-nesters quit their jobs, sell their house and take to the sea

 
The Sea Gypsy has been home for former Tampa Bay Times writer Kris Hundley and her husband since they quit their jobs and in January sold the house in which they raised their family for more than 25 years.
The Sea Gypsy has been home for former Tampa Bay Times writer Kris Hundley and her husband since they quit their jobs and in January sold the house in which they raised their family for more than 25 years.
Published Sept. 4, 2015

The ceilings were low. The carpet, yellow shag. The windows were outdated. But the house opened out to the water, and that was all that mattered.

We came to Florida in 1989 for the simplest of reasons: We were in search of the sun.

We raised a daughter in Massachusetts, where waterfront property was handed down from generation to generation. In Florida, even a middle-income couple could afford a house on a canal.

My husband wanted a dock for our sailboat. I wanted a pool. We found a mid-century ranch off the Intracoastal Waterway with both.

With our daughter away at college, we had an 11-year-old son and a baby on the way. Over the Christmas holidays, we packed everyone and everything into a blue Chevy station wagon and headed south to St. Petersburg, with its dead downtown and endless strip centers.

For a quarter-century we filled the home with memories and material goods.

Then several months ago, my husband and I decided to cast most of the stuff away.

We left our jobs.

Sold our home.

Moved aboard our boat and sailed 800 miles.

Endings have led to beginnings, have led to what-the-hell-am-I-doing moments.

Over the past year, we set ourselves adrift.

We still have no idea where we might land.

• • •

I worked at the Tampa Bay Times for 18 years, the last few as an investigative reporter. I had challenging projects, a great editor. I loved the work. But after witnessing rounds of buyouts and enduring two pay cuts, job satisfaction was no longer enough to keep me tied to a cubicle.

One veteran reporter spurned the buyouts, saying she couldn't imagine leaving the newsroom. It struck me that unless you want to die at your desk, that day will come sooner or later.

I didn't want to die at my desk.

I thought about the question my husband and I had tossed around for years:

What if we could just get on the boat and keep going?

Work had kept us on a tether of weekend sails in the gulf and occasional one-week cruises along the west coast of Florida.

She will never sell the house, my husband always said.

True, I had rejected a ridiculously high offer at the height of the real estate boom. Where would we go? I had asked my husband. He had been dumbfounded by my tunnel vision.

But that was when I still had a child at home.

Our adolescent son, who had seemed to vanish into his bedroom one day only to reappear as a full-grown man, had long since loaded a broken-down Dodge Dart and left for college.

Our younger daughter, whose toddler handprints still marked the living room wall at knee level, had also moved on. We celebrated her wedding by the pool where she had learned to swim.

Now the house was empty. No teenagers jumping off the patio roof into the pool, no bottomless piles of laundry, no chaos. Just a cat.

After years of carving ruts with my tires on familiar streets, pushing a vacuum around the same furniture, yanking weeds in the same eternally beleaguered front yard, I was ready.

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Leaving work had been the first domino.

Leaving the place where I'd lived the longest was the second.

• • •

The house sold in 10 days in January.

I negotiated the price while my son's wife was in labor. We became grandparents for the first time the same week we became homeless.

The transition meant moving from a 2,000-square-foot house to a sailboat with about 200 square feet of living space.

Something would have to go.

I cried as I packed up years of photos, watching my kids age before my eyes. I sweated as we packed our truck with cast-off furniture and strained to keep a king-sized mattress from dragging down a busy street.

Over three weeks I dismantled our home, shrouding pictures in bubble wrap, shoving trash bags full of clothes into Goodwill bins, wondering why I had kept my kids' middle school yearbooks and candle stubs.

I cleaned like a madwoman, as if I could erase any trace of our lives.

The only things left were glow-in-the-dark stars placed in perfect constellations on a bedroom ceiling. They'd been put there by a little boy who is now building rockets.

The final weekend in our home, my younger daughter came for one last visit. We swam and laughed and wept as we clung to each other in the drive.

Most of the furniture was gone. The walls were bare. The tile floors echoed. It was, in the end, just four walls and a roof that had served us well.

I had come to that house when I was pregnant with her. Now she stood beside me, pregnant with her own daughter.

It was a sign even I could not ignore.

• • •

My husband and I have been living aboard our boat, Sea Gypsy, for several months, having rounded Key West and sailed all the way up Florida's east coast. Every day has been a new adventure, at best blissfully uneventful, at worst shot full with drama.

We have navigated crab pots at night off Naples, survived a whiteout-like squall in the Miami ship channel and watched the moon rise over Rodriguez Key.

We've discovered that there are plenty of people like us, living on boats, sailing wherever their whims or the winds take them. There have been a few families, but most are older people, working odd jobs to fill the cruising kitty, just looking for a challenge and a change. Some have been on the move for years, their "dirt house" a distant memory.

I expect we'll get another dirt house someday. But first we intend to push farther up the coast, see places we've never seen from the water, experience more sunsets and undoubtedly more storms.

It's made us more reliant on each other; we have no other option.

And when we make it through a particularly treacherous blow or navigate a shoaled pass without running aground, we feel a jolt of gratitude just for being alive.