About us
Not many boats are owned and run by two women. Even more scarce would be two women drawn to classic boats. And then two women who like each other...like really like each other.
Anne-Louise (Lou) and I have been sailing pretty much our whole lives. Lou, a country kid, grew up sailing on Nova Scotia's southshore while I, a city kid, learned to sail in the lakes of Ontario. Despite the geographic and aquatic differences, we somehow both found ourselves helplessly drawn to, and enslaved by, the elegance and capabilities of classic wooden boats.
Over the years, Lou has owned several sailings vessels, plying the waters of Atlantic Canada, the Eastern Seaboard and the Caribbean and I, upon moving to Nova Scotia for school, discovered schooners, crewing wherever I could with a winter in the Caribbean and one transatlantic passage.
But our paths crossed before all of this sailing had happened. Our life together unfolding in chapters.
Chapter 1 was in the late 80s when we first met at a house party, and I climbed a tree. Eventually we had a house and two dogs on the road to Peggys Cove. After unsuccessfully trying to domesticate, we went our separate ways acquiring other houses, boats, more dogs, and one baby, all with new partners.
These relationships in turn ran their course, and either through a grevious lack of imagination, or the realization of the wonderful gift of a second chance with your first true love, we found ourselves back together, 20 some years later.
At the beginning of Chapter 2, Lou was one of four owners of the beautiful 57' Murray Stevens schooner "Sorca". The vessel participated around the maritimes in the Tall Ship circuit, as a "small tall". Unfortunately the partnership imploded spectacularly and Sorca was sold.
After the sale, we began to search for another boat, but not just any boat. For Lou it had to be a Cherubini...with it's sleek sexy Ticonderoga lines. Finding this particular boat would take some time so in the interim to keep us on the water, we purchased the Gooseberry, a sweet little Eastern 19 with a 60hp evinrude. (of course it had to be that particular boat which was only available in the states and involved a trip to Cape Cod, on their July 4 weekend, sleeping in the truck in a MacDonald’s parking lot, drinking fine wine.).
Enter Meteor.
She had been on the market for a while and we watched not so very patiently as the price slowly crept down to something close enough to our budget to be palatable. Much to the annoyance of the broker, we crawled all over her for two days, finally purchasing her. This was the spring of 2015. We quickly changed her name to Meteor (derived from her original name Meteor of Lune) as her name at the time - Silent Knights of Lonsdale - felt a bit too Monty Phython-ish for us. We couldn't un-hear the clopping of coconut shells and the cries of “ni”...
So began the adventure.
By 2021 we were both retired and within a week of my last day of work, we had let the lines go to sail across the Atlantic.
Meteor, a fast and capable vessel presented a bazillion possibilities with regards to where we could go with her. To help us organize our thoughts, and finances, we did a sticky note planning session, looking to cruise with Meteor for 10 years, sailing to Europe at the top of the list. One of the steps that needed to be taken was to sell our beautiful old house as we wanted to rent to help subsidize our travels, and renting an unheatable, squirrel-infested house would have been problematic. So we sold and then built a duplex with our friends, and have been renting our flat every season.
