The first time I met Alan he was in a kayak and so was I. He was the big duck taking us little beginner ducks along to keep us safe. It was nice to have people who knew what they were doing.

But I really met him at the Trailhead, which was the outdoor store where he was working. I ordered a pair of Rollerblades from him. After that I started doing some telemark skiing. Back in North Dakota we would try to do some telemark turns on our cross-country skis by sliding down little gullies.

Within the first three months of my arrival in Missoula I took a class from the University of Montana to learn how to telemark. Later on I started to do some rock climbing when I discovered I had the fear of heights. It turned out to be not so much a fear of Heights as a fear of ladders. One of my good friends was into rock climbing and I asked him to teach me. He kept exposing me more and more, pushing me further and further, and I climbed with him for about four years. I never did lead but he was gearing me up for that by giving me small pitches.

I started thinking after rock climbing. On July and August afternoons it was just too hot to be out on those big exposed rock faces. I started with kayaking and now I’m into Whitewater canoeing. It’s a blast!

Alan also has a love for sail boats. Our first sailing expedition was in the San Juan Islands in Washington. He was wise enough to get a woman skipper to come out there with us and do a daylong familiarization sail.

Then we went and chartered a boat for a week and sailed the San Juan Islands. It doesn’t take long for that to seep into yourself especially when you are a deal of the water, and you love to camp.

That grew and grew with more and more sailing vacations, and we started to try to figure out how to get sailing more into our life.


A Classified Ad in Cruising World Magazine
Changes Our Lives

I was reading a Cruising World Magazine while going up to Flathead Lake. I love to read the classifieds. We were trying to figure out how much money we would have if we sold absolutely everything we owned. We were trying to figure out if we could buy a piece-of-shit boat in Florida and go sailing for a couple of years.

So I saw a “crew wanted” and in the back of this magazine. The deal was to use the boat in exchange for services. I told Alan: “this is it!”

Alan called them, went in, interviewed with them in Milwaukee, and all of a sudden we were sailing. We were their crew for nine months. We sailed all around the Caribbean. We would sail the owners around and then they would leave and our friends would come. Then those friends would leave a new friends would fly in. We were gypsies in the palace. We had no money but it was great.

We had $20.00 a day for us both to live on. A lot of that went to fuel and water; we lived frugally. We took a really good care of the boat too. We stripped all the varnish off of the teak. The whole upstairs of the boat just looked great.


How (and Why) I Changed my Name from Rebecca to Bequia

At one point we got weathered in on the island of Bequia (pronounced “Beck way”) during Christmas. We were there with our friend Kurt who is another very good sailor. We spent a lot of time applying teak oil and varnish. We had to stay home third down; even the small cruise ships were pulling into port. It was big winds and big waves.

We needed to get Kurt up-island out of Saint Vincent and into Saint Lucia so he could fly home. We thought we had left ourselves plenty of time with ten days, but we had to hunker down for five or six of those. We started to get very antsy. A small cruise ship tried to get out but came limping back in with their helicopter hanging off the side of their boat. I think we all look to one another and said: “let’s just keep varnishing the teak.”

We had a great new year’s though. There were many people from many different countries, Ireland, Scotland, Australia and us. All of us were supposedly speaking English. There we were sitting in the cockpit of this boat and it was whole areas that we were all supposedly speaking the same language. It wasn’t! But it was a lot of fun.

Some of those people were heading out towards Antarctica. They had a cement boat.

But we had to stay in Bequia for quite a long time. Finally we just decided we needed to make a run for it. We headed out towards the Bequia channel and hit some pretty big waves as we crossed the channel. We had everything very well battened down, but one of the lines on the foredeck was beginning to unfurl.

So we brought out the sailing harnesses because we didn’t want to have anyone on the foredeck without a harness. There were three of us on board: Alan, Kurt, and myself. We decided ever harnessed came out of the bank first would have to go on the foredeck. I pulled out my own damned harness!

I put my harness on and went and took care of the line. As I came back towards the cockpit I notice that one of the zippers on the dodger was beginning to come loose. I asked Kurt to go down and get a safety pin; I told him exactly where it was.

So now I’m looking towards the stern of the boat, and Alan is at the helm. He’s looking forward.

He looks at me and says “Bequia, hang on!

I gave him this look along the lines of: “what in the hell do you think I’m doing up here? I’m all harnessed in!”

He told me again to hang on but there was nothing to grab except the hatch to the companionway. Meanwhile the boat was going up, up, up this gigantic wave. It took so damned long!

Finally the boat slammed the top of the wave and came flying down the backside. Our friend Kurt who was down below actually spent some hang-time on the ceiling during this that the sued.

After that my name just kind of transitioned. It went from Becky to Bequia. That was our Bequia channel crossing. We were surfing in a 42ft. boat.

I like being named after a rough day at sea. It’s fine with me. It’s just another chapter. We are given all of these chapters in life and I felt that Becky was given to me by my parents. It was OK to move on to a name that was more for me. I’ve totally adopted this name.

My mother and my sister and my cousins and others have known me for a long time still call me Becky.

Alan proposed to me on the one year anniversary of our first cruise aboard Doubloon, the boat we lived aboard for nine months. That was in October and we were married about a year or a year and a half later. We got married on the back of a sailboat. It was one of the best days of my life. I found the right guy.

After we hired ourselves out as crew, we figured that we could purchase a boat. We had a partial ownership in a boat for a while, a45ft. sloop. We ran a sailing business for three or four years and we had a lot of fun. The Caribbean is a wonderful spot.

Sometimes we would be a little concerned about how people from different backgrounds would mix and mingle, But the Caribbean always does its magic. We would get people out snorkeling and everything would be fine. It was a great way to meet people and we made some lifelong friends.