The Raven Logs: The Price of Admission

January 1, 2005

For my husband Mike and me the price of admission to the cruising lifestyle was the cost of a pair of tickets to watch the University of Arizona basketball team play a home game in Tucson. At half-time we visited in the bleachers with our friends and fellow Wildcat fans Steve and Linda Dashew, legendary designers of cruising yachts. They informed us that one of their designs, a Sundeer 64 sloop christened RAVEN, had just become available for sale in New Zealand.

Mike and Steve are good friends from their mutual flying hobby, having met as members of the Tucson Soaring Club. Over the years we have had plenty of opportunity to learn about Steve’s philosophy of boat design, and we had enjoyed a weekend cruising with them aboard their 78 foot sailboat Beowulf. The hook was already set and we were an easy catch!

A few days later we were winging our way to New Zealand. It was only a couple of weeks before Christmas, and here we were headed across the Pacific to a country where spring was just turning into summer.

We spent our pre-Christmas holidays putting Raven through her paces and, as Mike phrased it, we could find no reason not be buy her. She had been beautifully loved and maintained by her previous owners and by her professional crew Rod Bradley and Anouk Reijerts. She was situated in the world’s best cruising grounds and she was ready to go adventuring.  So were we – and so The Raven Logs begin!