We wanted to try the improbable, a different life. Close to nature and at her whim. Living life. Simply living.
We want to imagine what the future will be like and we want to help shape it. How will we live in 20 years? Will we have found ways to sustain our thirst for energy, water and space? What will we reduce, drop or keep?
We have always worked satisfying jobs, sometimes we compromised but found a moral silver lining to live by. When we started feeling too comfortable, we’ve changed things up. In 2014 we decided to scale way back and to experience sustainable living first hand and not only talk about it. We wanted to live sustainably and bought a sailboat.
Talking about changing things up! Even for us adventurous souls, this has been a challenge but it has allowed us to experience life, nature and ourselves in a completely new way.
Radu was born and raised in Romania in the port city of Galati on the Danube River delta with the Black Sea. During the communist regime, Radu built electronic equipment for container ships and spent months at sea making sure they worked. After the Romanian revolution, he was free to follow his true love, music, and studied sound engineering in Germany. Shortly after, he and his brother opened the first privately owned recording studio in Romania. After a successful run for several years, he had the opportunity to immigrate to the US, where he added graphic design, video recording and editing to his arsenal, which eventually brought him to Los Angeles.
Katja grew up in Hamburg, Germany, also by a river and a large port. Her dad took her sailing when he came to visit and enrolled her as a child in his yacht club Rhe for sailing lessons. Rather than becoming a full time sailor, she went on to study Philosophy, History and Media at the University in Hamburg and later Photography and Fine Arts at CalArts in California. She became a landscape designer and was passionately involved in the green building movement and sustainable landscape design, designed gardens in the US and Romania, and lectured for European Green Building Councils on sustainable landscape design and installation.
Radu and Katja met online, incredible that nearly half the couples getting married these days have met online. We met in Los Angeles (thank you Craig’s List!), lived in Bucharest and Berlin for several years before moving back to the US to San Diego. Living near the ocean and marinas full of yachts, awakened in us a deeply buried dream to sail the oceans and see the world.
In January of 2014 we were lucky enough to be introduced to a sailor, a captain and circumnavigator, who encouraged us to believe that it could be possible. She made our dream reality by showing us boats, teaching us what we should look for in an ocean-going boat and how to asses our needs and tastes. Thank you, Leslie!
We hope that you enjoy our posts about our observations and thoughts on living on a boat, living sustainably, about experiences on our travels and sailing logs, our sailing tips and interviews around boats.
Come join us on our adventure in simply living and follow us on our journey of living simply on water and on land!
Katja & Radu
PS: Our dog Samba left us July 2016 in Santa Rosalia and we lost our companion sailor, salty girl and commentator. We kept her blog up for all dog lovers link.