Snow was falling in Eastern England. When the wind blew from the North there was nothing much between our cottage and the North Pole. Margaret Thatcher was the new broom voted in to clean up the country from the grip of trade unions. One of her ideas to raise money was to increase Value Added Tax, the UK version of sales tax, by hiking it from 7.5% to 25% on luxury goods. My husband was a sail maker working from a custom-made wooden workshop at the bottom of our half acre garden. Sails were considered to be luxury goods. Suddenly his customers found the extra demands too taxing.

With work drying up we wondered how we would manage. I had given up working in television to look after our son and help Jon in the sail loft. I handled the paperwork, quotes, invoices and VAT as well as some canvas work. It was time to think carefully about our options for the future.

Having recently completed the restoration of our sixteenth century cottage we had a small mortgage and the house was worth much more than it had cost us. One option was to sell up and move away. It would be two or three years before our little son, Jethro, needed to start school. We began to think we could buy a boat big enough to live on and do some serous sailing .

Jon was a keen dinghy sailor. He had qualified to sail for the UK in many international racing competitions in a Fireball. He was second in Switzerland in the World championships in the late 1960’s. Then he had been in the top ten in Sweden, Ireland, Thailand, Australia and had won the Canadian Nationals in Halifax Nova Scotia in 1976. He had already qualified for the forthcoming Worlds to be held in Durban in May.

There was not much Jon did not know about dinghy sailing. Since childhood he had sailed on his fathers old gaff-rigged Norfolk Broads cruiser. Occasionally he had crewed on a friend’s yacht in Cowes and the Fastnet Race, but otherwise he had less experience of proper yachting. My own sailing experience was limited to watching from the clubhouse at Fireball events, or accompanying his family on weekend sails on the Norfolk Broads and rivers.

Nevertheless, the dreams began to unfold. We looked at boats for sale in Great Britain then bought some US yachting magazines. That was a revelation. With the favourable dollar/pound exchange rate we could buy a 40 foot yacht over there for about half the price in Europe. And of course that would save an Atlantic crossing for beginners.

Freddy Laker had recently started up no-frills Transatlantic flights from London to Miami. We could go over there and have a look at what was available in Fort Lauderdale. If we sold both our house and the sail making business we should go to Florida on a reconnaissance trip. Our plans were were shaping up. We put the house on the market and sold it within weeks. Jeckells of Wrexham bought the business. We packed our home contents into a friend’s barn in the village and set off for Heathrow on 6th March 1980.